Mark Johnston – författare

How tiny variations in our personal DNA can determine how we look, how we behave, how we get sick, and how we get well.

News stories report almost daily on the remarkable progress scientists are making in unraveling the genetic basis of disease and behavior. Meanwhile, new technologies are rapidly reducing the cost of reading someone''s personal DNA (all six billion letters of it). Within the next ten years, hospitals may present parents with their newborn''s complete DNA code along with her footprints and APGAR score. In Genetic Twists of Fate, distinguished geneticists Stanley Fields and Mark Johnston help us make sense of the genetic revolution that is upon us.

Fields and Johnston tell real life stories that hinge on the inheritance of one tiny change rather than another in an individual''s DNA: a mother wrongly accused of poisoning her young son when the true killer was a genetic disorder; the screen siren who could no longer remember her lines because of Alzheimer''s disease; and the president who was treated with rat poison to prevent another heart attack. In an engaging and accessible style, Fields and Johnston explain what our personal DNA code is, how a few differences in its long list of DNA letters makes each of us unique, and how that code influences our appearance, our behavior, and our risk for such common diseases as diabetes or cancer.

A bold and persuasive case for abandoning old religions and still believing in GodIn this book, Mark Johnston argues that God needs to be saved not only from the distortions of the "undergraduate atheists" (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) but, more importantly, from the idolatrous tendencies of religion itself. Each monotheistic religion has its characteristic ways of domesticating True Divinity, of taming God''s demands so that they do not radically threaten our self-love and false righteousness. Turning the monotheistic critique of idolatry on the monotheisms themselves, Johnston shows that much in these traditions must be condemned as false and spiritually debilitating.A central claim of the book is that supernaturalism is idolatry. If this is right, everything changes; we cannot place our salvation in jeopardy by tying it essentially to the supernatural cosmologies of the ancient Near East. Remarkably, Johnston rehabilitates the ideas of the Fall and of salvation within a naturalistic framework; he then presents a conception of God that both resists idolatry and is wholly consistent with the deliverances of the natural sciences.Princeton University Press is publishing Saving God in conjunction with Johnston''s forthcoming book Surviving Death, which takes up the crux of supernaturalist belief, namely, the belief in life after death.Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Why supernatural beliefs are at odds with a true understanding of the afterlifeIn this extraordinary book, Mark Johnston sets out a new understanding of personal identity and the self, thereby providing a purely naturalistic account of surviving death.Death threatens our sense of the importance of goodness. The threat can be met if there is, as Socrates said, "something in death that is better for the good than for the bad." Yet, as Johnston shows, all existing theological conceptions of the afterlife are either incoherent or at odds with the workings of nature. These supernaturalist pictures of the rewards for goodness also obscure a striking consilience between the philosophical study of the self and an account of goodness common to Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism: the good person is one who has undergone a kind of death of the self and who lives a life transformed by entering imaginatively into the lives of others, anticipating their needs and true interests. As a caretaker of humanity who finds his or her own death comparatively unimportant, the good person can see through death.But this is not all. Johnston''s closely argued claims that there is no persisting self and that our identities are in a particular way "Protean" imply that the good survive death. Given the future-directed concern that defines true goodness, the good quite literally live on in the onward rush of humankind. Every time a baby is born a good person acquires a new face.

This book provides a Biblically-based, seven-month program to turn your son into a solid man of God based on the Seven Pillars of Manhood:

1. Identity in Christ

2. Love

3. Godly Wisdom

4. The Word of God

5. Purity

6. Character

7. Legacy

Churches are filled with well-meaning youth pastors and programs that promote Christian values, doctrine, and culture to todays youth. But it is rare to find a program that includes a comprehensive set of pillars that are specifically designed to bring a teenage boy into Christian Manhood. By providing an intentional framework for Christian Manhood that can be worked through by a father/guardian and son over seven months, this book is designed to provide such a program.