Stephen Prothero has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is God Is Not One.
God Is Not One
Summary
At the dawn of the 21st century, dizzying scientific and technological advancements, interconnected globalized economies, and even the so-called New Atheists have done nothing to change one thing: our world remains furiously religious. For good and for evil, religion is the single greatest influence in the world. We accept as self-evident that competing economic systems (capitalist or communist) or clashing political parties (Republican or Democratic) propose very different solutions to our planet's problems. So why do we pretend that the world's religious traditions are different paths to the same God? We blur the sharp distinctions between religions at our own peril, argues religion scholar Stephen Prothero, and it is time to replace naive hopes of interreligious unity with deeper knowledge of religious differences. In Religious Literacy, Prothero demonstrated how little Americans know about their own religious traditions and why the world's religions should be taught in public schools. Now, in God Is Not One, Prothero provides listeners with this much-needed content about each of the eight great religions. To claim that all religions are the same is to misunderstand that each attempts to solve a different human problem. For example: Islam: the problem is pride / the solution is submission Christianity: the problem is sin / the solution is salvation Confucianism: the problem is chaos / the solution is social order Buddhism: the problem is suffering / the solution is awakening Judaism: the problem is exile / the solution is to return to God Prothero reveals each of these traditions on its own terms to create an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to better understand the big questions human beings have asked for millennia and the disparate paths we are taking to answer them today.
©2010 Stephen Prothero (P)2010 HarperCollins Publishers
Religious Literacy
Summary
What's Your Religious Literacy IQ? Quick - can you: Name the four Gospels? Name a sacred text of Hinduism? Name the holy book of Islam? Name the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament? List the Ten Commandments? List the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism? If you can't, you're not alone. We are a religiously illiterate nation, yet despite this lack of knowledge, politicians continue to root public policy arguments in religious rhetoric whose meanings are missed or misinterpreted by the vast majority of Americans. "We have a major civics education problem today," says religion scholar Stephen Prothero. He makes the provocative case that to remedy this, we should return to teaching religion in the public schools. Alongside "reading, writing, and arithmetic", religion ought to become the fourth "R" of American education, he says. Many believe that America's descent into religious illiteracy was the doing of activist judges and secularists hell-bent on banishing religion from the public square. Prothero reveals that this is a profound misunderstanding. "In one of the great ironies of American religious history," says Prothero, "it was the nation's most fervent people of faith who steered us down the road to religious illiteracy. Just how that happened is one of the stories this audio has to tell." Religious Literacy reveals what every American needs to know in order to confront the domestic and foreign challenges facing this country today.
©2007 Stephen Prothero (P)2007 HarperCollins Publishers
The American Bible
Summary
Since Thomas Jefferson first recorded those self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence, America has been a nation that has unfolded as much on the page and the podium as on battlefields or in statehouses. Here Stephen Prothero reveals which texts continue to generate controversy and drive debate. He then puts these voices into conversation, tracing how prominent leaders and thinkers of one generation have commented upon the core texts of another, and invites listeners to join in. Few can question that the Constitution is part of our shared cultural lexicon, that the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision still impacts lives, or that "The Star-Spangled Banner" informs our national identity. But Prothero also considers lesser known texts that have sparked our war of words, including Thomas Paine's Common Sense and Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In The American Bible, Christopher Hitchens weighs in on Huck Finn, and Sarah Palin comments on Martin Luther King Jr. From the speeches of Presidents Lincoln, Kennedy, and Reagan to the novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Ayn Rand, Prothero takes the listener into the heart of America's culture wars. These "scriptures" provide the words that continue to unite, divide, and define Americans today.
©2012 Stephen Prothero (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers
Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars (Even When They Lose Elections)
Summary
In this timely, carefully reasoned social history of the United States, the New York Times best-selling author of Religious Literacy and God Is Not One places today's heated culture wars within the context of a centuries-long struggle of right versus left and religious versus secular to reveal how, ultimately, liberals always win. Though they may seem to be dividing the country irreparably, today's heated cultural and political battles between right and left, progressives and the Tea Party, religious and secular are far from unprecedented. In this engaging and important work, Stephen Prothero reframes the current debate, viewing it as the latest in a number of flashpoints that have shaped our national identity. Prothero takes us on a lively tour through time, bringing into focus the election of 1800, which pitted Calvinists and Federalists against Jeffersonians and "infidels"; the Protestants' campaign against Catholics in the mid-19th century; the anti-Mormon crusade of the Victorian era; the fundamentalist-modernist debates of the 1920s; the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s; and the current crusade against Islam. As Prothero makes clear, our culture wars have always been religious wars, progressing through the same stages of conservative reaction to liberal victories that eventually benefit all Americans. Drawing on his impressive depth of knowledge and detailed research, he explains how competing religious beliefs have continually molded our political, economic, and sociological discourse and reveals how the conflicts that separate us today, like those that came before, are actually the byproducts of our struggle to come to terms with inclusiveness and ideals of "Americanness". To explore these battles, he reminds us, is to look into the soul of America - and perhaps find essential answers to the questions that beset us.
©2015 Stephen Prothero (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers