Bøger af Brad A. Lancaster

Cull: Epitomes offers its reader, in a single volume, the essence of seventy-seven core philosophical and religious works. Each presents a thinker without knowledge of which one can scarcely begin to mull ethical and political questions. These vignettes span religious thought from pious wondering in the Indus valley to Buber's slippery mysticism. They measure politics from the olive groves of Athens to Harvard's intellectual ferment. These epitomes examine morality from the sacral smokes of the Sinai desert to E. O. Wilson's eusocial ants. These little works capture the texture, if not the entire fabric, of some of history's finest minds, and some painfully coarse ones as well. If time were abundant, you might read the originals yourself. Time, for most of us, is anything but abundant.

How does one make good decisions? What shape of life emerges from choosing well? In this careful book, Brad Lancaster gathers ideas about human meaning to frame "kithdom," a political theory that encourages meaningful life together in interwoven circles of friends. Cull offers insight about peace, humility, friendship, family, and consensus. Lancaster helps one get clear about depopulation, shared meaning, and pot holes in human thinking. Cull suggests simple rules for living that satisfy our hunger for deliberated togetherness. Cull asks all to dwell on unborn generations and the legacy we are fashioning. Cull encourages a communications Commons, freely available to all, which contains the sum of human knowledge and skills. Ultimately, the author asks us to keep experimenting with forms of life until we find ourselves, with our friends, flourishing in meaningful shared existence. Co-housing groups, ecovillages, kibbutzim, intentional communities, urban non-residential fellowships, and communes of every sensibility will find in Lancaster's book thoughtful help for living in deliberated togetherness. For those of us mired in the urban crush, Cull is a godsend of blunt analysis.

What did Jesus teach? How did Jesus understand himself and his mission as the Son of man? How did the early church adjust Jesus' message to meet the churches' needs? Which specific sayings of Jesus did the first Christians understand and remember from among their rabbi's words? Which specific sayings did the first and second century churches distort or insert into the mouth of Jesus? Gethsemane Soliloquy analyzes, then sorts, the Synoptic sayings of Yeshua (Jesus' Aramaic name) for those on which people who care about Yeshua's message can rely. The book sets aside those sayings that are implausible as teachings of Yeshua. Critically, Gethsemane Soliloquy summarizes Yeshua's teaching in an imaginary hour of instruction in Yeshua's Jerusalem retreat, the garden of Gethsemane, on Yeshua's last day of freedom in his short life. In the soliloquy at Gethsemane, Yeshua speaks to us.