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Religion as We Know It
- An Origin Story
- Narrated by: David Cochran Heath
- Length: 3 hrs and 23 mins
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Religion as We Know It
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Publisher's summary
A brief, beautiful invitation to the study of religion from a Pulitzer Prize winner
How did our forebears begin to think about religion as a distinct domain, separate from other activities that were once inseparable from it? Starting at the birth of Christianity - a religion inextricably bound to Western thought - Jack Miles reveals how the West's "common sense" understanding of religion emerged and then changed as insular Europe discovered the rest of the world. Finally, in a moving postscript, he shows how this very story continues today in the minds and hearts of individual religious or irreligious men and women.
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-
The Case for God
- By: Karen Armstrong
- Narrated by: Karen Armstrong
- Length: 16 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 436
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 322
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 325
Moving from the Paleolithic age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it called by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. Focusing especially on Christianity but including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese spiritualities, Armstrong examines the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time, when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith. Why has God become unbelievable?
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great recasting of how God should be interpreted
- By John Doyle on 02-18-11
By: Karen Armstrong
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What Are We Doing Here?
- By: Marilynne Robinson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 36
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 27
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 25
Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Alexis de Tocqueville, inform our political consciousness or discussing how beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Unpersuasive and a bit repetitive
- By Adam Shields on 03-07-18
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In Defense of History
- By: Richard J. Evans
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 32
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Story5 out of 5 stars 31
Richard J. Evans shows us how historians manage to extract meaning from the recalcitrant past. To materials that are frustratingly meager, or overwhelmingly profuse, they bring an array of tools that range from agreed-upon rules of documentation to the critical application of social and economic theory, all employed with the aim of reconstructing a verifiable, usable past. Evans defends this commitment to historical knowledge from the attacks of postmodernist critics who deny the possibility of achieving any kind of certain knowledge about the past.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Enlightening
- By David A on 07-03-18
By: Richard J. Evans
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The Hedgehog and the Fox (Second Edition)
- An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History
- By: Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy - editor, Michael Ignatieff - foreword
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 2 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 29
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 25
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 25
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The Fox Who Tried To Be A Hedgehog
- By Rich S. on 12-14-21
By: Isaiah Berlin, and others
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The History of Philosophy
- By: A. C. Grayling
- Narrated by: Neil Gardner
- Length: 28 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 117
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 96
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 95
The story of philosophy is an epic tale, spanning civilizations and continents. It explores some of the most creative minds in history. But not since the long-popular classic by Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, published in 1945, has there been a comprehensive and entertaining single-volume history of this great, intellectual, world-shaping journey.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A much needed update to Bertrand Russell's classic
- By Michael on 06-27-20
By: A. C. Grayling
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Seven Types of Atheism
- By: John Gray
- Narrated by: James Langton
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 71
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 61
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 58
For a generation now, public debate has been corroded by a shrill, narrow derision of religion in the name of an often vaguely understood “science.” John Gray’s stimulating and enjoyable new book, Seven Types of Atheism, describes the complex, dynamic world of older atheisms, a tradition that is, he writes, in many ways intertwined with and as rich as religion itself.
By: John Gray
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The Givenness of Things
- Essays
- By: Marilynne Robinson
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 52
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 48
The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency. As a culture we have become less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, and more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield material well-being. But while cultural pessimism is always fashionable, there is still much to give us hope.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Mostly thoughts on religious things
- By Adam Shields on 01-26-16
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Battling the Gods
- Atheism in the Ancient World
- By: Tim Whitmarsh
- Narrated by: James Langton
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 97
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 90
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 88
Long before the European Enlightenment and the Darwinian revolution, which we often take to mark the birth of the modern revolt against religious explanations of the world, brave people doubted the power of the gods. Religion provoked skepticism in ancient Greece, and heretics argued that history must be understood as a result of human action rather than divine intervention. They devised theories of the cosmos based on matter and notions of matter based on atoms.
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5 out of 5 stars
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We have a history as long and as rich as any relig
- By Glencannnon on 08-13-19
By: Tim Whitmarsh
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How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
- By: Thomas E. Woods Jr.
- Narrated by: Barrett Whitener
- Length: 7 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,265
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,012
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,009
Western civilization has given us modern science, the wealth of free-market economics, the security of law, a sense of human rights and freedom, charity as a virtue, splendid art and music, philosophy grounded in reason, and innumerable other gifts we take for granted.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating and informative
- By Michael Kellogg on 09-29-05
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The Twilight of the American Enlightenment
- The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief
- By: George M. Marsden
- Narrated by: William Hughes
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 114
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 91
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 91
In the aftermath of World War II, the United States stood at a precipice. The forces of modernity unleashed by the war had led to astonishing advances in daily life, but technology and mass culture also threatened to erode the country's traditional moral character. As award-winning historian George M. Marsden explains in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, postwar Americans looked to the country's secular liberalelites for guidance in this precarious time, but these intellectuals proved unable to articulate a coherent common cause by which America could chart its course.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Such a relevant book to our current world
- By Adam Shields on 09-14-16
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The Closing of the Western Mind
- The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason
- By: Charles Freeman
- Narrated by: Nigel Patterson
- Length: 16 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 43
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 35
When the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 368 AD, he changed the course of European history in ways that continue to have repercussions to the present day. Adopting those aspects of the religion that suited his purposes, he turned Rome on a course from the relatively open, tolerant, and pluralistic civilization of the Hellenistic world, towards a culture that was based on the rule of fixed authority, whether that of the Bible, or the writings of Ptolemy in astronomy and of Galen and Hippocrates in medicine.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Not proven
- By Jeffrey D on 04-30-21
By: Charles Freeman
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Irrationality
- A History of the Dark Side of Reason
- By: Justin E. H. Smith
- Narrated by: Jeff Harding
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 36
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Story4 out of 5 stars 32
Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal”. But is this flattering story itself rational? In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today - from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for revealing the existence of irrational numbers to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump - Justin Smith says the evidence suggests the opposite.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A good brain workout
- By ThomasC on 04-09-19
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The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali
- A Biography
- By: David Gordon White
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 101
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 88
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Story4 out of 5 stars 87
Consisting of fewer than 200 verses written in an obscure if not impenetrable language and style, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra is today extolled by the yoga establishment as a perennial classic and guide to yoga practice. As David Gordon White demonstrates in this groundbreaking study, both of these assumptions are incorrect. Virtually forgotten in India for hundreds of years and maligned when it was first discovered in the West, the Yoga Sutra has been elevated to its present iconic status.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Academic Hubris
- By John on 10-31-14
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