The purpose of this book is to use neuroscience discoveries concerning religious experiences, the Self and personhood to deepen, enhance and interrogate the theological and philosophical set of ideas known as Personalism. McNamara proposes a new eschatological form of personalism that is consistent with current neuroscience models of relevant brain functions concerning the self and personhood and that can meet the catastrophic challenges of the 21st century. Eschatological Personalism, rooted in the philosophical tradition of "Boston Personalism", takes as its starting point the personalist claim that the significance of a self and personality is not fully revealed until it has reached its endpoint, but theologically that end point can only occur within the eschatological realm. That realm is explored in the book along with implications for personalist theory and ethics. Topics covered include the agent intellect, dreams and the imagination, future-orientation and eschatology, phenomenology of Time, social ethics, Love, the challenge of AI, privacy and solitude and the individual ethic of autarchy. This book is an innovative combination of the neuroscientific and theological insights provided by a Personalist viewpoint. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of Cognitive Science, Theology, Religious Studies and the philosophy of the mind.

Essential reading for students and researchers in metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of mind, and also of interest to those in related discplines where idealist and immaterialist ontology impinge on history, science, and theology.

This book is an exercise in political theology, exploring the problem of gender- based violence by focusing on violent male subjects and the issue of entitlement. It addresses gender-based violence in familial and military settings before engaging with a wider political context. The chapters draw on sources ranging from Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Etienne Balibar to Rowan Williams and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza. Entitlement is theorized and interpreted as a gender pattern, predisposing subjects towards controlling behaviour and/or violent actions. Steven Ogden develops a theology of transformation, stressing immanence. He examines entitled subjects, predisposed to violence, where transformation requires a limit-experience that wrenches the subject from itself. The book then reflects on today's pervasive strongman politics, where political rationalities foster proprietorial thinking and entitlement gender patterns, and how theology is called to develop counter-discourses and counter-practices.

This essential book critically examines the various ways in which Eastern spiritual traditions have been typically stripped of their spiritual roots, content and context, to be more readily assimilated into secular Western frames of Psychology. Beginning with the colonial histories of Empire, the author draws from the 1960s Counterculture and the subsequent romanticising and idealising of the East. Cohen explores how Hindu, Buddhist and Daoist traditions have been gradually transformed into forms of Psychology, Psychotherapy and Self-Help, undergoing processes of 'modernisation' and secularisation until their respective cosmologies had been successfully reinterpreted and reimagined. An important component of this psychologisation is the accompanying commodification of Eastern spiritual practices, including the mass-marketing of mindfulness and meditation as part of the burgeoning well-being industry. Also presenting emerging voices of resistance from within Eastern spiritual traditions, the book ends with a chapter on Transpersonal Psychology, showing a path for how to gradually move away from colonisation and towards collaboration. Engaging with the 'mindfulness movement' and other practices assimilated by Western culture, this is fascinating reading for students and academics in psychology, philosophy and religious studies, as well as mindfulness practitioners.

The Reformation was one of the defining cultural turning points in Western history, even if there is a longstanding stereotype that Protestants did away with art and material culture. Rather than reject art and aestheticism, Protestants developed their own aesthetic values, which Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts addresses as it identifies and explains the link between theological aesthetics and the arts within a Protestant framework across five-hundred years of history. Featuring essays from an international gathering of leading experts working across a diverse set of disciplines, Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts is the first study of its kind, containing essays that address Protestantism and the fine arts (visual art, music, literature, and architecture), and historical and contemporary Protestant theological perspectives on the subject of beauty and imagination. Contributors challenge accepted preconceptions relating to the boundaries of theological aesthetics and religiously determined art; disrupt traditional understandings of periodization and disciplinarity; and seek to open rich avenues for new fields of research. Building on renewed interest in Protestantism in the study of religion and modernity and the return to aesthetics in Christian theological inquiry, this volume will be of significant interest to scholars of Theology, Aesthetics, Art and Architectural History, Literary Criticism, and Religious History.

This book challenges the widespread view of Kierkegaard's idiosyncratic and predominantly religious position on mimesis. Taking mimesis as a crucial conceptual point of reference in reading Kierkegaard, this book offers a nuanced understanding of the relation between aesthetics and religion in his thought. Kaftanski shows how Kierkegaard's dialectical-existential reading of mimesis interlaces aesthetic and religious themes, including the familiar core concepts of imitation, repetition, and admiration as well as the newly arisen notions of affectivity, contagion, and crowd behavior. Kierkegaard's enduring relevance to the malaises of our own day is firmly established by his classic concern for the meaning of human life informed by reflective meditation on the mimeticorigins of the contemporary age. Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Kierkegaard, Continental philosophy, the history of aesthetics, and critical and religious studies.

"Relativism "offers a critique of moral relativism and suggests ways Christians can defend their moral beliefs. The authors survey the rising tide of relativism in recent decades, explore its inherent inconsistencies, suggest specific approaches that can be used in the course of dialogue, and consider its everyday implications. (48)

The long period from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century supplied numerous sources for Kierkegaard's thought in any number of different fields. The present, rather heterogeneous volume covers the long period from the birth of Savonarola in 1452 through the beginning of the nineteenth century and into Kierkegaard's own time. The Danish thinker read authors representing vastly different traditions and time periods. Moreover, he also read a diverse range of genres. His interests concerned not just philosophy, theology and literature but also drama and music. The present volume consists of three tomes that are intended to cover Kierkegaard's sources in these different fields of thought. Tome I is dedicated to the philosophers of the early modern period and the Enlightenment who played a role in shaping Kierkegaard's intellectual development. He was widely read in German and French philosophy of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, making reference to the leading rationalist philosophers Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz in his journals and published works. Further, connections have also been pointed out between his thought and the writings of the French thinkers Montaigne, Pascal and Rousseau, who share with Kierkegaard a form of philosophy that is more interested in life and existence than purely conceptual analysis. Through the works of the authors explored here Kierkegaard became acquainted with some of the major philosophical discussions of the modern era such as the beginning of philosophy, the role of doubt, the status of autonomy in ethics and religion, human freedom, the problem of the theodicy found in thinkers such as Bayle and Leibniz, and the problem of the relation of philosophy to religion as it appears in the German writers Jacobi and Lessing.

This book, authored by an international group of scholars, focuses on a vibrant central current within the history of Russian legal thought: how Christianity, and theistic belief generally, has inspired the aspiration to the rule of law in Russia, informed Russian philosophies of law, and shaped legal practices. Following a substantial introduction to the phenomenon of Russian legal consciousness, the volume presents twelve concise, non-technical portraits of modern Russian jurists and philosophers of law whose thought was shaped significantly by Orthodox Christian faith or theistic belief. Also included are chapters on the role the Orthodox Church has played in the legal culture of Russia and on the contribution of modern Russian scholars to the critical investigation of Orthodox canon law. The collection embraces the most creative period of Russian legal thought-the century and a half from the later Enlightenment to the Russian emigration following the Bolshevik Revolution. This book will merit the attention of anyone interested in the connections between law and religion in modern times.

Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828 1892) was a scholar of the Bible, patristics and theology whose contributions to scholarship included an influential critical edition of the Greek New Testament and portions of The Ante-Nicene Fathers. This posthumous publication (1902) on the important Miscellanies of Clement, includes the complete Greek text of Book Seven with English translation and detailed notes. This is preceded by an extensive introduction based on Hort's lectures, discussing Christianity and philosophy in Clement's foundational work, which relates to a Victorian debate concerning the supposed pollution of 'pure' Christianity by 'alien' Greek thought. Hort argued that not only had Hellenism been present from the earliest days of Christianity, but also that the interaction between the two had resulted in a 'de-secularization of philosophy'. He also emphasised Clement's view that the archetypal Christian ought to live 'as much by prayer and love as by knowledge and thought'.

Underground rap is largely a subversive, grassroots, and revolutionary movement in underground hip-hop, tending to privilege creative freedom as well as progressive and liberating thoughts and actions. This book contends that many practitioners of underground rap have absorbed religious traditions and ideas, and implement, critique, or abandon them in their writings. This in turn creates processural mutations of God that coincide with and speak to the particular context from which they originate. Utilising the work of scholars like Monica Miller and Alfred North Whitehead, Gill uses a secular religious methodology to put forward an aesthetic philosophy of religion for the rap portion of underground hip-hop. Drawing from Whiteheadian process thought, a theopoetic argument is made. Namely, that it is not simply the case that is God the "poet of the world", but rather rap can, in fact, be the poet (creator) of its own form of quasi-religion. This is a unique look at the religious workings and implications of underground rap and hip hop. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Hip-Hop Studies and Process Philosophy and Theology.

This volume examines several theoretical concerns of embodiment in the context of Asian religious practice. Looking at both subtle and spatial bodies, it explores how both types of embodiment are engaged as sites for transformation, transaction and transgression. Collectively bridging ancient and modern conceptualizations of embodiment in religious practice, the book offers a complex mapping of how body is defined. It revisits more traditional, mystical religious systems, including Hindu Tantra and Yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, Bon, Chinese Daoism and Persian Sufism and distinctively juxtaposes these inquiries alongside analyses of racial, gendered, and colonized bodies. Such a multifaceted subject requires a diverse approach, and so perspectives from phenomenology and neuroscience as well as critical race theory and feminist theology are utilised to create more precise analytical tools for the scholarly engagement of embodied religious epistemologies. This a nuanced and interdisciplinary exploration of the myriad issues around bodies within religion. As such it will be a key resource for any scholar of Religious Studies, Asian Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, and Gender Studies.

Experimental philosophy was an exciting and extraordinarily successful development in the study of nature in the seventeenth century. Yet experimental philosophy was not without its critics and was far from the only natural philosophical method on the scene. In particular, experimental philosophy was contrasted with and set against speculative philosophy and, in some quarters, was accused of tending to irreligion. This volume brings together ten scholars of early modern philosophy, history and science in order to shed new light on the complex relations between experiment, speculation and religion in early modern Europe. The first six chapters of the book focus on the respective roles of experimental and speculative philosophy in individual seventeenth-century philosophers. They include Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Isaac Newton. The next two chapters deal with the relation between experimental philosophy and religion with a special focus on hypotheses and natural religion. The penultimate chapter takes a broader European perspective and examines the paucity of concerns with religion among Italian natural philosophers of the period. Finally, the concluding chapter draws all these individuals and themes together to provide a critical appraisal of recent scholarship on experimental philosophy. This book is the first collection of essays on the subject of early modern experimental philosophy. It will appeal to scholars and students of early modern philosophy, science and religion.

The fifth volume of The History of Evil covers the twentieth century from 1900 through 1950. The period saw the maturation of intellectual movements such as Pragmatism and Phenomenology, and the full emergence of several new academic disciplines; all these provided novel intellectual tools that were used to shed light on a human capacity for evil that was becoming increasingly hard to ignore. An underlying theme of this volume is the effort to reconstruct an understanding of human nature after confidence in its intrinsic goodness and moral character had been shaken by world events. The chapters in this volume cover globally relevant topics such as education, propaganda, power, oppression, and genocide, and include perspectives on evil drawn from across the world. Theological and atheistic responses to evil are also examined in the volume. This outstanding treatment of approaches to evil at a determinative period of modernity will appeal to those with interests in the intellectual history of the era, as well as to those with interests in the political, philosophical and theological movements that matured within it.

We are living in an emerging technoculture. Machines and gadgets not only weave the fabric of daily life, but more importantly embody philosophical and religious values which shape the contemporary moral vision-a vision that is often at odds with Christian convictions. This book critically examines those values, and offers a framework for how Christian moral theology should be formed and lived-out within the emerging technoculture. Brent Waters argues that technology represents the principal cultural background against which contemporary Christian moral life is formed. Addressing contemporary ethical and religious issues, this book will be of particular interest to students and scholars exploring the ideas of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Grant, Arendt, and Borgmann.

Legal scholars and authorities generally agree that the law should be obeyed and should apply equally to all those subject to it, without favour or discrimination. Yet it is possible to see that in any legal system there will be situations when strict application of the law will produce undesirable results, such as injustice or other consequences not intended by the law as framed. In such circumstances the law may be changed but there may be broad policy reasons not to do so. The allied concepts of dispensation and economy grew up in the western and eastern traditions of the Christian church as mechanisms whereby an individual or a class of people could, by authority, be excused from obligations under a particular law in particular circumstances without that law being changed. This book uncovers and explores this neglected area of church life and law. Will Adam argues that dispensing power and authority exist in various guises in the systems of different churches. Codified and understood in Roman Catholic and Orthodox canon law, this arouses suspicion in the Church of England and in English law in general. The book demonstrates that legal flexibility can be found in English law and is integral to the law of the Church, to enable the Church today better to fulfil its mission in the world.

Drawing together leading scholars from both theological and literary backgrounds, Christian Theology and Tragedy explores the rich variety of conversations between theology and tragedy. Three main areas are examined: theological readings of a range of tragic literature, from plays to novels and the Bible itself; how theologians have explored tragedy theologically; and how theology can interact with various tragic theories. Encompassing a range of perspectives and topics, this book demonstrates how theologians can make productive use of the work of tragedians, tragic theorists and tragic philosophers. Common misconceptions - that tragedy is monolithic, easily definable, or gives straightforward answers to theodicy - are also addressed. Interdisciplinary in nature, this book will appeal to both the theological and literary fields.

"God is eternal" is a standard belief of all theistic religions. But what does it mean? If, on the one hand, "eternal" means timeless, how can God hear the prayers of the faithful at some point of time? And how can a timeless God act in order to answer the prayers? If God knows what I will do tomorrow from all eternity, how can I be free to choose what to do? If, on the other hand, "eternal" means everlasting, does that not jeopardize divine majesty? How can everlastingness be reconciled with the traditional doctrines of divine simplicity and perfection? An outstanding group of American, UK, German, Austrian, and Swiss philosophers and theologians discuss the problem of God's relation to time. Their contributions range from analyzing and defending classical conceptions of eternity (Boethius's and Aquinas's) to vindicating everlastingness accounts, and from the foreknowledge problem to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. This book tackles philosophical questions that are of utmost importance for Systematic Theology. Its highest aim is to deepen our understanding of religious faith by surveying its relations to one of the most fundamental aspects of reality: time.

Professor Sell explores the lives and ideas of four unjustly neglected Anglican philosophers: W.G. De Burgh (1866-1943); W.R. Matthews (1881-1973); O.C. Quick (1885-1944); H.A. Hodges (1905-1976). This study fills an important gap in the history of twentieth-century philosophical and theological thought. Sell argues that these writers covered a wide range of philosophical topics in an illuminating way, and that a comparison of their respective standpoints and methods is instructive from the point of view of the viability or otherwise of Christian philosophizing. He discusses the challenges these four philosophical Anglicans issued to certain important trends in the philosophy and theology of their day, and argues that some of them are of continuing relevance.

After the postmodern turn, every tradition seeks the right to have their own rules of rational discourse. The crucial question is: are there ways to communicate between the traditions so that the traditions do not need to give up their identities in order to take part in conversation? Vainio examines the basic assumptions behind well known types of Christian theology and seeks ways in which they might interact with one other and with other non-Christian traditions without capitulation of their identities. Vainio claims that there are religious identities that can be negotiated and communicated, and that there are ecclesiastical doctrines which can be meaningfully discussed among churches. This book explores three key areas: analysis of the uses of 'fideism' within classical Christian theology; clarification of different types of theological method that seek to express the task of theology in contemporary setting; an explanation of the contours of religious identity and rationality which takes seriously both classical Christian identity and pluralistic contexts where most of the Christian communities dwell nowadays. The proposal for "negotiability" of Christian identity draws together ideas from, among others, virtue epistemology, reformed epistemology, communitarianism, and feminist sensibilities.

How should we relate to 'others' - those within a particular tradition, those of different traditions, and those who are oppressed? In the light of these anxieties, and building on the work of Andrew Shanks, this book offers a vision of Christ as 'the Shaken One', rooted in community with others. Shaped through dialogue with the theologies of John Hick and Lesslie Newbigin, Adams urges Christian communities to attend more deeply to the demands of ecumenical, dialogical and political theologies, to embody an ever greater 'solidarity of others' - a quality of community better demonstrating Christlike 'other-regard'.

Engaging variously with the legacy of Paul L. Lehmann, these essays argue for a reorientation in Christian theology that better honours the formative power of the gospel to animate and shape doctrine and witness, as well as ethical and political life. The authors explore key themes in Christian theology and ethics - forgiveness, discernment, responsibility, spirituality, the present day tasks of theology and the role of faith in public life - making plain the unabated importance of Lehmann's work at this juncture in contemporary theology. The internationally recognized contributors draw crucial connections between the gospel of reconciliation, the form of Christian theology and witness, and the challenges of contemporary ethical and political reflection. This book demonstrates why this close friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and author of Ethics in a Christian Context and The Transfiguration of Politics continues to influence generations of theologians in both the English-speaking world and beyond.

The long period from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century supplied numerous sources for Kierkegaard's thought in any number of different fields. The present, rather heterogeneous volume covers the long period from the birth of Savonarola in 1452 through the beginning of the nineteenth century and into Kierkegaard's own time. The Danish thinker read authors representing vastly different traditions and time periods. Moreover, he also read a diverse range of genres. His interests concerned not just philosophy, theology and literature but also drama and music. The present volume consists of three tomes that are intended to cover Kierkegaard's sources in these different fields of thought. Tome II is dedicated to the wealth of theological and religious sources from the beginning of the Reformation to Kierkegaard's own day. It examines Kierkegaard's relations to some of the key figures of the Reformation period, from the Lutheran, Reformed and Catholic traditions. It thus explores Kierkegaard's reception of theologians and spiritual authors of various denominations, most of whom are known to history primarily for their exposition of practical spirituality rather than theological doctrine. Several of the figures investigated here are connected to the Protestant tradition of Pietism that Kierkegaard was familiar with from a very early stage. The main figures in this context include the "forefather" of Pietism Johann Arndt, the Reformed writer Gerhard Tersteegen, and the Danish author Hans Adolph Brorson. With regard to Catholicism, Kierkegaard was familiar with several popular figures of Catholic humanism, Post-Tridentine theology and Baroque spirituality, such as FranAois Fenelon, Ludwig Blosius and Abraham a Sancta Clara. He was also able to find inspiration in highly controversial and original figures of the Renaissance and the early Modern period, such as Girolamo Savonarola or Jacob BAhme, the latter of whom was at the time an en vogue topic among trendsetting philosophers and theologians such as Hegel, Franz von Baader, Schelling and Hans Lassen Martensen.

Who is God? The variety of images of God tends to overwhelm us in the present age. Is 'God' a fiction of human construction, or a reality that makes claims upon how we practice 'faith in God'? How does this quest for an understanding of 'God' illumine who 'we' are? God in Postliberal Perspective presents an introduction to the doctrine and concept of God in contemporary philosophy and theology, exploring how some theologians and philosophers dare to speak of God as "real" in our sceptical, pluralistic, and interfaith age. Robert Cathey tours the "house of realism" as constructed by postliberal Christians (David Burrell, William Placher, Bruce Marshall), in conversation with living communities of faith and critical work in philosophy and theology, and develops a distinctive argument about the relation of realism and non-realism in constructing the doctrine of God in postliberal theology. Offering a reading of postliberal theology which is open to critical discussion with other types of theology, philosophy, and faith traditions, this book proposes a model of theological reflection that may be extended to the reality-claims of a wide range of doctrines and concepts.

Does science argue against the existence of the human soul? Many scientists and scholars believe the whole is more than the sum of the parts. This book uses information and systems theory to describe the "more" that does not reduce to the parts. One sees this in the synapses"or apparently empty gaps between the neurons in one's brain"where informative relationships give rise to human mind, culture, and spirituality. Drawing upon the disciplines of cognitive science, computer science, neuroscience, general systems theory, pragmatic philosophy, and Christian theology, Mark Graves reinterprets the traditional doctrine of the soul as form of the body to frame contemporary scientific study of the human soul.