The Oregon Faith Report - Faith News from Oregon

June 30, 2009

Los Angeles (June 25, 2009) — Sociologists, historians, and economists have been diligently mining the mounting evidence for how and why religion, especially Christianity, is flourishing globally and succeeding in the U.S. despite secularist predictions.  “Reasons abound for how and why ‘God is back.’ But there appears to be an evident theme,” says J.P. Moreland, Biola University’s Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and one of the most distinguished philosophers of religion in North America. “Religion, and especially the Judeo-Christian worldview, stubbornly resists explanation by the worldview of naturalism and her elites, which empowers secularism. Consequently, genuine religious phenomena are helping to falsify secularism and the process of secularization.”  Moreland, an award-winning author and seasoned cultural observer, expands upon his vast corpus of philosophical writing and research in a recent book about how naturalism fails to give us satisfying explanations concerning basic human facts.

The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism, already being heralded by scholarly influencers worldwide, is a compelling indictment of the worldview of naturalism concerning its failure to successfully account for the meaning and significance of human persons. Among its benefits, it gets at the heart of the existential and moral “crisis” that naturalism has especially spawned in the West.

Moreland harnesses the past twenty-five years of his scholarly work to bear upon the tenuous character of naturalism’s incapacity to account for the basics of human existence and life, including the indispensable fact of human consciousness, libertarian freedom, rationality, a unified/simple self, equal and intrinsic value, and moral action.

In six well-researched chapters, Moreland shows that these facts falsify and do not support the worldview of naturalism, which has sown a devastating crisis in Western cultures. Theism, specifically Christian theism, argues Moreland, is a more compelling, truthful and explanatorily enriching vision about the human person.

The Recalcitrant Imago Dei
ISBN-13: 978-0334042150; paperback; 224 pages; $60
SCM Press (May, 2009)
Distributed in the U.S. by Westminster John Knox

To order e-mail orders@wjkbooks.com or phone 800-523-1631

To receive an electronic media kit, a gratis review copy, or to connect with the author please contact BT@BobToddPublicity.com

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