Robert Crumb (b. 1943) read widely and deeply a long roster of authors including Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, J. D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as religious classics including biblical, Buddhist, Hindu, and Gnostic texts. Crumb's genius, according to author David Stephen Calonne, lies in his ability to absorb a variety of literary, artistic, and spiritual traditions and incorporate them within an original, American mode of discourse that seeks to reveal his personal search for the meaning of life. R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self contains six chapters that chart Crumb's intellectual trajectory and explore the recurring philosophical themes that permeate his depictions of literary and biographical works and the ways he responds to them through innovative, dazzling compositional techniques. Calonne explores the ways Crumb develops concepts of solitude, despair, desire, and conflict as aspects of the quest for self in his engagement with the book of Genesis and works by Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, the Beats, Charles Bukowski, and Philip K. Dick, as well as Crumb's illustrations of biographies of musicians Jelly Roll Morton and Charley Patton. Calonne demonstrates how Crumb's love for literature led him to attempt an extremely faithful rendering of the texts he admired while at the same time highlighting for his readers the particular hidden philosophical meanings he found most significant in his own autobiographical quest for identity and his authentic self.

This book is the first of two volumes collecting together Michael C. Rea's most substantial work in analytic theology. This volume considers the nature of God and our ability to talk and discover truths about God, whereas the companion volume focuses on theological questions about humanity and the human condition. The chapters in the first part of Volume I explore issues pertaining to discourse about God and the authority of scripture. Part two focuses on divine attributes, while part three discusses doctrine of the trinity and related issues.

Arguments about the "evidences of Christianity" have consumed the talents of believers and agnostics. These arguments have tried to give-or to deny-Christian belief a "foundation." Belief is rational, the argument goes, only if it is logically derived from axiomatic truths or is otherwise supported by "enough evidence." Arguments for belief generally fail to sway the unconvinced. But is this because the evidence is flimsy and the arguments weak-or because they attempt to give the right answer to the wrong question? What, after all, would satisfy Russell's all for evidence? Faith and Rationality investigates the rich implications of what the authors call "Calvinistic" or "Reformed epistemology." This is the view of knowledge-enunciated by Calvin, further developed by Barth-that sees belief in God as its own foundation; in the authors' terms, is it properly "basic" in itself.