C.S. Lewis's celebrated Space Trilogy - Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength - was completed over sixty years ago and has remained in print ever since. In this groundbreaking study, Sanford Schwartz offers a new reading that challenges the conventional view of these novels as portraying a clear-cut struggle between a pre-modern cosmology and the modern scientific paradigm that supplanted it.
Schwartz situates Lewis's work in the context of modern intellectual, cultural, and political history. He shows that Lewis does not simply dismiss the modern "evolutionary model," but discriminates carefully among different kinds of evolutionary theory-"mechanistic" in Out of the Silent Planet, "vitalist" in Perelandra, and "spiritual" in That Hideous Strength-and their distinctive views of human nature, society, and religious belief. Schwartz also shows that in each book the conflict between Christian and "developmental" viewpoints is far more complex than is generally assumed. In line with the Augustinian understanding that "bad things are good things perverted," Lewis constructs each of his three "beatific" communities-the "unfallen" worlds on Mars and Venus and the terrestrial remnant at St. Anne's-not as the sheer antithesis but rather as the transfiguration or "raising up" of the particular evolutionary doctrine that is targeted in the novel. In this respect, Lewis is more deeply engaged with the main currents of modern thought than his own self-styled image as an intellectual "dinosaur" might lead us to believe. He is also far more prepared to explore the possibilities for reshaping the evolutionary model in a manner that is simultaneously compatible with traditional Christian doctrine and committed to addressing the distinctive concerns of modern existence.
C.S. Lewis on the Final Frontier highlights the enduring relevance of Lewis's fiction to contemporary concerns on a wide variety of issues, including the ethical problems surrounding bio-technology and the battle between religious and naturalistic worldviews in the twenty-first century. Far from offering a black and white contrast between an old-fashioned Christian humanism and a newfangled heresy, the Space Trilogy should be seen as a modern religious apologist's searching effort to enrich the former through critical engagement with the latter.

This volume aims to inspire a return to the energetics of Nietzsche's prose and the critical intensity of his approach to nihilism and to give back to the future its rightful futurity. The book states that for too long contemporary thought has been dominated by a depressed what is to be done?. All is regarded to be in vain, nothing is deemed real, there is nothing new seen under the sun. Such a postmodern lament is easily confounded with an apathetic reluctance to think engagedly. Hence the contributors draw on the variety of topical issues - the future of life, the nature of life forms, the techno sciences, the body, religion - as a way of tackling the question of nihilism's pertinence to us now.

Inheritance and Originality is an innovative study of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard which argues that they find themselves unable simply to inherit the prevailing conventions definitive of philosophy. By placing these conventions in question, they reconceive the form of philosophical writing, and of philosophy itself, together with prevailing notions of language, scepticism, morality, and the self; and in so doing, they confront certain fundamentally theological preoccupations.

This book provides a translation and critical bilingual edition on the Verse Comments on the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. The Verse Comments by Giun (1253-1333), the fifth abbot of Eiheiji temple, is an important early medieval Japanese commentary on the 60-chapter edition of the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Shobogenzo), one of the main versions of the masterwork written by Eihei Dogen (1200-1253), the founder of the Soto Zen sect in Japan who established Eiheiji in the mid-1240s. Giun's Verse Comments was one of only two commentaries of the Treasury written during the Kamakura era, with the other being a prose analysis of the 75-chapter edition, called Prose Comments on the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, often abbreviated to Distinguished Comments (Gosho). While Distinguished Comments fell into disuse rather quickly and was only revived nearly three hundred years later, the Verse Comments was circulated widely from the time of its composition and read by many Soto monks over the next couple of centuries. Offering poems and cryptic expressions that seek to capture the spiritual flavor and essential meaning of Dogen's thought as suggested in each chapter, the Verse Comments is crucial for understanding how Dogen's Treasury was received and appropriated in the religious and literary context of medieval Japan. In this book, Steven Heine's careful interpretations, historical investigations, and theoretical reflections demonstrate the significance of Giun's writings in light of the history of pre-modern and modern commentaries on Dogen's masterwork, the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye.

This is the third volume in Alvin Plantinga's trilogy on the notion of warrant, which he defines as that which distinguishes knowledge from true belief. In this volume, Plantinga examines warrant's role in theistic belief, tackling the questions of whether it is rational, reasonable, justifiable, and warranted to accept Christian belief and whether there is something epistemically unacceptable in doing so. He contends that Christian beliefs are warranted to the extent that they are formed by properly functioning cognitive faculties, thus, insofar as they are warranted, Christian beliefs are knowledge if they are true.

During the seventeenth century Francisco Suarez was considered one of the greatest philosophers of the age. He was the last great Scholastic thinker and profoundly influenced the thought of his contemporaries within both Catholic and Protestant circles. Suarez contributed to all fields of philosophy, from natural law, ethics, and political theory to natural philosophy, the philosophy of mind, and philosophical psychology, and-most importantly-to metaphysics, and natural theology. Echoes of his thinking reverberate through the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and beyond. Yet curiously Suarez has not been studied in detail by historians of philosophy. It is only recently that he has emerged as a significant subject of critical and historical investigation for historians of late medieval and early modern philosophy. Only in recent years have small sections of Suarez's magnum opus, the Metaphysical Disputations, been translated into English, French, and Italian. The historical task of interpreting Suarez's thought is still in its infancy. The Philosophy of Francisco Suarez is one of the first collections in English written by the leading scholars who are largely responsible for this new trend in the history of philosophy. It covers all areas of Suarez's philosophical contributions, and contains cutting-edge research which will shape and frame scholarship on Suarez for years to come-as well as the history of seventeenth-century generally. This is an essential text for anyone interested in Suarez, the seventeenth-century world of ideas, and late Scholastic or early modern philosophy.

Provides an overview of the complex history of the interaction of science and religion. Can science and religious belief co-exist? Many people - including many practicing scientists - insist that one can simultaneously follow the principles of the scientific method and believe in a particular spiritual tradition. But throughout history there have been people for whom science challenges the very validity of religious belief. Whether called atheists, agnostics, skeptics, or infidels, these individuals use the naturalism of modern science to deny the existence of any supernatural power. This book chronicles, in a balanced and accessible way, the long history of the battle between adherents of religious doctrines and the nonbelievers who adhere to the naturalism of modern science. Science and Nonbelief provides a nontechnical introduction to the leading questions that concern science and religion today: what place does evolution hold in the arguments of nonbelievers?; what does modern physics tell us about the place of humanity in the natural world?; how do modern neurosciences challenge traditional beliefs about mind and matter?; what can scientific research about religion tell us and psychics? The volume also addresses the political context of debates over science and nonbelief, and questions about the nature of morality. It includes a selection of provocative primary source documents that illustrate the complexity and varieties of nonbelief. Part of the Greenwood Guides to Science and Religion series, this book includes a discussion of scientific attitudes to pseudo-science and the paranormal. A primary source section illustrates views on the relationship between science and belief. It adopts a balanced approach to the questions raised.

What difference does a worldview make? These eclectic essays from twenty scholars show how embodying a biblical Christian worldview helps transform mere existence into fullness of life. Read them to discover . . . How Genesis answers the four most important human questions of pre-modern and post-modern times (W. Brouwer); Why the concept "Christian worldview" fits the unique experience of reality Christianity affords, despite recent criticisms of the term and concept (R. Kurka); How worldview competition in the global South differs from the West (D. Button); How Western civilization lost its Christian mind and can find it again (M. E. Roberts); How well the reasons celebrity scholar Bart Ehrman gives for his "deconversion" stack up (E. Meadors); How higher education has abandoned its own source by expelling "religion of the heart" (R. Wenyika & W. Adrian); How an "engineering mindset" helps evaluate worldviews and how a Christian worldview fares (D. Halsmer); Christian Humanism as an exodus from the cultural wasteland for today's youth (R. Williams); The worldview John Grisham's fiction expresses (J. Han & M. Bagley); How Intelligent Design strengthens its status as science by using the concept of "design" in a new way (D. Leonard); In the spirit of "The Screwtape Letters," a new epistle to Wormwood that praises compartmentalized Christianity (D. K. Naugle); How an orphaned Japanese girl experienced "the American dream," God's way (K. Takeuchi); How words, grammar, and style embody one's worldview, for good or ill (S. Robbins); What happens to preaching-and the church-when emotional response to visual stimuli preempts thought (W. Wilson II); . . . and much more. "That which God has created and sin has divided Christ is reuniting . . ., and this includes the divisions generated by our . . . compartmentalizations. Our gracious, redeeming God is putting Humpty Dumpty back together again For Christian scholars and teachers, this magnificent truth is fraught with implications for us . . . personally and professionally." - David K. Naugle, "Squashing Screwtape: Debunking Dualism and Restoring Integrity in Christian Educational Thought and Practice"

The brilliant and ground-breaking mimetic theory of the French-American theorist Rene Girard (1923-2015)has gained wide-ranging recognition, yet its development has received less attention. This volume presents the important correspondence-conducted in French and as yet unpublished, let alone translated into English-between Girard and his major theological interlocutor Raymund Schwager SJ (1935-2004). It presents the personal relationship between two great thinkers that led to the development of a significant break-through in the humanities. In particular it reveals the theological development of Girard's thought in dialogue with Schwager, who was concerned to assist Girard in areas where he had little expertise and had encountered major criticism, such as the theological application of sacrifice. These issues in particular had placed major barriers to Girard's acceptance in theological circles. These letters reveal how Girard, with Schwager's help, entered the mainstream of theological debate.