God: An Anatomy - Francesca Stavrakopoulou torrent

Category: Adults, Spiritual & Religious
Language: English
Keywords: Culture Perception Of The Divine

Written by Francesca Stavrakopoulou
Read by Francesca Stavrakopoulou
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date: January 25, 2022
Duration: 15:56:52

An astonishing and revelatory history that re-presents God as he was originally envisioned by ancient worshippers—with a distinctly male body, and with superhuman powers, earthly passions, and a penchant for the fantastic and monstrous.

“[A] rollicking journey through every aspect of Yahweh’s body, from top to bottom (yes, that too) and from inside out … Ms. Stavrakopoulou has almost too much fun.”—The Economist

The scholarship of theology and religion teaches us that the God of the Bible was without a body, only revealing himself in the Old Testament in words mysteriously uttered through his prophets, and in the New Testament in the body of Christ. The portrayal of God as corporeal and masculine is seen as merely metaphorical, figurative, or poetic. But, in this revelatory study, Francesca Stavrakopoulou presents a vividly corporeal image of God: a human-shaped deity who walks and talks and weeps and laughs, who eats, sleeps, feels, and breathes, and who is undeniably male.

Here is a portrait—arrived at through the author’s close examination of and research into the Bible—of a god in ancient myths and rituals who was a product of a particular society, at a particular time, made in the image of the people who lived then, shaped by their own circumstances and experience of the world. From head to toe—and every part of the body in between—this is a god of stunning surprise and complexity, one we have never encountered before.

Stavrakopoulou provides a refreshing look at ancient Scripture and the people behind it, reminding readers that the concept of “God” in the 21st century is a world away from that of the earliest people of Israel. A challenging, engaging work of scholarship that sheds new light on ancient Hebrew conceptions of the divine.—Kirkus Reviews