I Hear Voices And That S A Good Thing

Everyone is guided by the voices of people in our lives--grandparents, parents, teachers, pastors, friends. Their words are woven into our life's fabric and influence how we live and the choices we make. As Christians, we are blessed also to hear the amazing voices of those who lived centuries ago--the voices found in Scripture. Author James W. Moore says, "When faced with choices and decisions, when trying to sort out priorities, when my heart is sad or glad, when challenges and problems thrust themselves into my life, when I need a word of assurance, or when faced with a new opportunity, I hear the voice of Jesus, I hear the voice of Mary, I hear the voices of Abraham and Micah and Esther and the apostle Paul and many other biblical voices whispering (or shouting!) to me powerful words that shape and direct my life." I Hear Voices...and That's a Good Thing! celebrates the voices of the Bible who continue, every day, to strengthen and encourage us when we not only hear but listen to them.

In this insightful book, accounts of voice hearers are presented, evaluated and interpreted by a Christian theologian and psychiatrist. By listening to the first-hand experiences of voice hearers and evaluating them in the light of Christian theology, the book enables the reader to understand the experiences of voice hearers as a part of Christian experience and to engage with the theological issues raised by them, including the nature of revelation. This engaging and thought-provoking collection looks at a range of stories - ranging from comforting to complex to simply conversational - to encourage debate and search for meaning and also show how the reader can adapt clinical and pastoral practice to better aid people in this situation.

A New York Times Notable Book A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012 A bold approach to understanding the American evangelical experience from an anthropological and psychological perspective by one of the country's most prominent anthropologists. Through a series of intimate, illuminating interviews with various members of the Vineyard, an evangelical church with hundreds of congregations across the country, Tanya Luhrmann leaps into the heart of evangelical faith. Combined with scientific research that studies the effect that intensely practiced prayer can have on the mind, When God Talks Back examines how normal, sensible people—from college students to accountants to housewives, all functioning perfectly well within our society—can attest to having the signs and wonders of the supernatural become as quotidian and as ordinary as laundry. Astute, sensitive, and extraordinarily measured in its approach to the interface between science and religion, Luhrmann's book is sure to generate as much conversation as it will praise.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781472453983, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative 4.0 license. Experiences of hearing the voice of God (or angels, demons, or other spiritual beings) have generally been understood either as religious experiences or else as a feature of mental illness. Some critics of traditional religious faith have dismissed the visions and voices attributed to biblical characters and saints as evidence of mental disorder. However, it is now known that many ordinary people, with no other evidence of mental disorder, also hear voices and that these voices not infrequently include spiritual or religious content. Psychological and interdisciplinary research has shed a revealing light on these experiences in recent years, so that we now know much more about the phenomenon of "hearing voices" than ever before. The present work considers biblical, historical, and scientific accounts of spiritual and mystical experiences of voice hearing in the Christian tradition in order to explore how some voices may be understood theologically as revelatory. It is proposed that in the incarnation, Christian faith finds both an understanding of what it is to be fully human (a theological anthropology), and God’s perfect self-disclosure (revelation). Within such an understanding, revelatory voices represent a key point of interpersonal encounter between human beings and God.

We live immersed in thought. But do we actually know what a thought is? To answer this question, psychology professor Charles Fernyhough draws on everything from neuroscience to literary history to grasp the true nature of this most inscrutable of acts: thinking. Whether a medieval saint who hears voices or a writer absorbed in an imagined world, a daydreamer riding the subway or a captivated reader, we experience thought as a creative inner dialogue featuring multiple voices. Fernyhough uses this conception to demystify mental illness, showing that imagining voices is intimately linked to the feeling of artistic production. Drawing on literature, film, and psychology, as well as cognitive science, The Voices Within is a poetic venture into the depths of our mind. It will revolutionize the way we hear and understand the voices in our heads.

An eerie horror debut about a little boy who recovers from a mysterious illness and inherits an imaginary friend who makes him do violent things... Kids have imaginary friends. Rachel knows this. So when her young son, Billy, miraculously recovers from a horrible flu that has proven fatal for many, she thinks nothing of Delfy, his new invisible friend. After all, her family is healthy and that's all that matters. But soon Delfy is telling Billy what to do, and the boy is acting up and lashing out in ways he never has before. As Delfy's influence is growing stranger and more sinister by the day, and rising tensions threaten to tear Rachel's family apart, she clings to one purpose: to protect her children at any cost—even from themselves. We Hear Voices is a gripping near-future horror novel that tests the fragility of family and the terrifying gray area between fear and love.

In the #1 New York Times bestselling tradition of Communion, Whitely Strieber returns with a terrifying novel of alien occupation We are not alone. Millions of people are confronting aliens that authorities say do not exist. Meet the Three Thieves, a group of Grays assigned to duty in a small Kentucky town. They have been preparing a child for generations. Innocent Conner Callaghan will face the ultimate terror as he struggles to understand who he has been bred to be, and what he must do to save humanity. Colonel Michael Morax strives to keep the secret of the Grays from the public for reasons so sinister, yet believable, that they read like truth. And Lauren Glass, government "empath" to the last surviving captive Gray, known only as B for Bob, has a unique ability to communicate with this captive Gray. But when B for Bob suddenly escapes the highly secure underground Air Force facility that he's been captive in for years, a frantic race begins, as the government must outmaneuver the Grays to keep the secret of their presence intact. The Grays is a mind-bending journey behind the curtain of secrecy that surrounds the subject of aliens, written by the field's great master, Whitley Strieber. If you've never so much as thought about the subject before, this book will make you think deeply, not only about the mystery of who the Grays are, but who exactly we are. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The experience of 'hearing voices', once associated with lofty prophetic communications, has fallen low. Today, the experience is typically portrayed as an unambiguous harbinger of madness caused by a broken brain, an unbalanced mind, biology gone wild. Yet an alternative account, forged predominantly by people who hear voices themselves, argues that hearing voices is an understandable response to traumatic life-events. There is an urgent need to overcome the tensions between these two ways of understanding 'voice hearing'. Simon McCarthy-Jones considers neuroscience, genetics, religion, history, politics and not least the experiences of many voice hearers themselves. This enables him to challenge established and seemingly contradictory understandings and to create a joined-up explanation of voice hearing that is based on evidence rather than ideology.