Consciousness and qualia

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Dennis J. Billy, James Keating

"Conscience and Prayer takes the new conversation between Christian spirituality and moral theology to a deeper level of precision and focus. The authors argue that the relationship between moral theology and spirituality can best be explored by looking at how conscience is related to prayer. In exploring this relationship, both historically and theologically, Billy and Keating open new ways to approach the fundamental aspects of Catholic moral theology."--Jacket.

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Thomas Merton

"This book is not a systematic treatise, but only a collection of personal notes on the Psalter. They are the notes of a monk, written in the monastic tradition, and one supposes that they might appeal above all to monks. But in this mysterious age, there is no telling whom the book may reach--although no one expects it to reach everybody. As for those readers who can only regard the Psalms as "literature" ... this book will at least offer them some of the reasons why the Psalter seems to be more than literature to those of us who have made it our bread in the wilderness." [Prologue].

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Douglas R. Hofstadter

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of "maps" or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. Gödel, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more.

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Deeanne Westbrook

Speaking of Gods analyzes the figurative-narrative creation of gods, their heavenly abodes, and behaviors, reaching back to the beginning of history in Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Persia and Greece, and continuing through the figures and narratives of a biblical tradition that includes the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur'an.