Wisdom is an integratal part of all philosophical and religious traditions in the world. Focusing on the concept of wisdom, this book examines the difficulties and problems facing comparative studies of the early Confucian and Israelite traditions by exploring the cosmological and ethical implications of wisdom in the older layers of Christian and Confucian texts. Presenting a detailed discussion of how wisdom was understood in philosophical, religious and social contexts by the writers of the so-called early Confucian and Israelite wisdom texts, this book offers an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the significance of wisdom in the East and West, and to our knowledge of different and yet related ways of life as understood in their literature.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is widely regarded as North America's most influential theologian. Throughout the early decades of his ministry he engaged in a public and sustained debate with 'Arminian' theology, a crusade that contributed significantly to the events of the Great Awakening. This book investigates the contours and substance of this theological war. In establishing a clearer historical context for this polemic, McClenahan seeks to overturn the scholarly consensus that Edwards' own theology was a twisting of the Reformed tradition. By demonstrating that Edwards' interlocutor was the dead English Archbishop, John Tillotson, McClenahan provides the hermeneutical key for many of Edwards' most significant works. Justification by faith is one of the most contested doctrines in contemporary theology and Jonathan Edwards, referred to as America's Augustine, wrote extensively on this area. His is a voice that many people are keen to hear.

This is the first book-length critical analysis in any language of Hans Blumenberg's theory of myth. Blumenberg can be regarded as the most important German theorist of myth of the second half of the twentieth century, and his Work on Myth (1979) has resonated across disciplines ranging from literary theory, via philosophy, religious studies and anthropology, to the history and philosophy of science. Nicholls introduces Anglophone readers to Blumenberg's biography and to his philosophical contexts. He elucidates Blumenberg's theory of myth by relating it to three important developments in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German philosophy (hermeneutics, phenomenology and philosophical anthropology), while also comparing Blumenberg's ideas with those of other prominent theorists of myth such as Vico, Hume, Schelling, Max Muller, Frazer, Sorel, Freud, Cassirer, Heidegger, Horkheimer and Adorno. According to Nicholls, Blumenberg's theory of myth can only be understood in relation to the 'human sciences,' since it emerges from a speculative hypothesis concerning the emergence of the earliest human beings. For Blumenberg, myth was originally a cultural adaptation that constituted the human attempt to deal with anxieties concerning the threatening forces of nature by anthropomorphizing those forces into mythic images. In the final two chapters, Blumenberg's theory of myth is placed within the post-war political context of West Germany. Through a consideration of Blumenberg's exchanges with Carl Schmitt, as well as by analysing unpublished correspondence and parts of the original Work of Myth manuscript that Blumenberg held back from publication, Nicholls shows that Blumenberg's theory of myth also amounted to a reckoning with the legacy of National Socialism.

Medieval masters Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart considered problems inherent to speaking of God, exploring how religious language might compromise God's transcendence or God's immanence ultimately hindering believers in their journey of faith seeking understanding. Going beyond ordinary readings of Aquinas and building a foundation for further insights into the works of both theologians, this book draws out the implications of the thought of Eckhart and Aquinas for contemporary issues, including ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue, liturgy and prayer, and religious inclusivity. Reading Aquinas and Eckhart in light of each other reveals the profound depth and orthodoxy of both of these scholars and provides a novel approach to many theological and practical religious issues.

Today's biblical scholars and dogmaticians are giving a significant amount of attention to the topic of theological exegesis. A resource turned to for guidance and insight in this discussion is the history of interpretation, and Karl Barth's voice registers loudly as a helpful model for engaging Scripture and its subject matter. Most readers of Barth's theological exegesis encounter him on the level of his New Testament exegesis. This is understandable from several different vantage points. Unfortunately, Barth's theological exegesis of the Old Testament has not received the attention it deserves. This book seeks to fill this lacuna as it encounters Barth's theological exegesis of Isaiah in the Church Dogmatics. From the Church's inception, Isaiah has been understood as Christian Scripture. In the Church Dogmatics we find Barth reading Isaiah in multi-functional and multi-layered ways as he seeks to hear Isaiah as a living witness to God's triune revelation of himself in Jesus Christ.

Around the globe religion is under attack. Humanists, secularists and atheists depict believers as deluded and dangerous. The aim of this book is to challenge this perception. Sensible Religion defends the validity and emphasises the excitement of the religious quest across the faiths. It demonstrates that the practice of sensible religion is often a courageous path pitted against religious extremism and secularism. Written by committed believers from the major world's faiths, the book endorses the term 'sensible' as expressing religious reasonableness as well as sensitivity to criticism and new insights. Followers of the different traditions live ordinary lives in the mainstream of the world. This volume therefore addresses beliefs and the manner in which these convictions relate to social, political and ethical action. Countering the argument that religion is at root extremist and irrational, Sensible Religion brings together thoughtful and critical reflections by leading thinkers about humanity's spiritual quest.

Answering the question 'How is fruitful discussion possible?', this book addresses the central philosophical issue of how reason shall be understood and how it is limited. This study argues that the understanding of discussion according to which it necessarily starts from putative universal norms and rules for argumentation is problematic, among other reasons since such rules are unfruitful in contexts where there are vast disagreements such as religion. Inspired by Wittgensteinian ideas, Strandberg develops instead a new way of understanding discussion, truth and rationality which escapes these problems, and shows how this solution can be used to answer the accusation against Wittgensteinian philosophy for being conservative and resulting in fideism.

Recent dissatisfaction with individualism and the problems of religious pluralism make this an opportune time to reassess the way in which we define ourselves and conduct our relationships with others. The philosophical writings of John Macmurray are a useful resource for performing this examination, and recent interest in Macmurray's work has been growing steadily. A full-scale critical examination of Macmurray's religious philosophy has not been published and this work fills this gap, sharing his insistence that we define ourselves through action and through person-to-person relationships, while critiquing his account of the ensuing political and religious issues. The key themes in this work are the concept of the person and the ethics of personal relations.

Twentieth Century Christian Responses to Religious Pluralism begins with the recognition that the traditional three-fold typology adopted by Christians in responding to other living world religions is no longer adequate and offers a much more sophisticated and developed approach. This is accomplished with particular reference to ten key Twentieth Century theologians, each of whom had significant influence in the field of inter-religious studies, both during their lifetime and beyond. The author rejects the exclusivism and triumphalism of traditional Christian approaches and argues strongly and persuasively that the future for inter-religious relationships lies in what he describes as 'classical pluralism', and in an understanding of the importance of difference for inter-faith dialogue. Presenting an accessible introduction to the contemporary issues and challenges facing all those engaged in the further development of inter-faith relationships, dialogue and partnership between the world religions, Pitman argues that the future of world peace and prosperity depends on the outcome.

Exploring the philosophical concerns of the nature of self, this book draws from two of the most influential Indian masters, Sankara and Santideva. Todd demonstrates that an ethics of altruism is still possible within a metaphysics which assumes there to be no independent self. A new ethical model based on the notions of 'flickering consciousness' and 'constructive altruism' is proposed. By comparing the metaphysics and ethics of Sankara and Santideva, Todd shows that the methodologies and aims of these Buddhist and Hindu masters trace remarkably similar cross-cutting paths. Treating Buddhism and Hinduism with equal respect, this book compares and reinterprets the Indian material so as to engage with contemporary Western debates on self and to show that Indian philosophy is indeed a philosophy of dialogue.

Very few studies have examined the worldview of the Anishinaabeg from within the culture itself and none have explored the Anishinaabe worldview in relation to their efforts to maintain their culture in the present-day world. This book fills that gap. Focusing mainly on the Minnesota Anishinaabeg, Lawrence Gross explores how their worldview works to create a holistic way of living. However, as Gross also argues, the Anishinaabeg saw the end of their world early in the 20th century and experienced what he calls 'postapocalypse stress syndrome.' As such, the book further explores how the values engendered by the worldview of the Anishinaabeg are finding expression in the modern world as they seek to rebuild their society.

The Theology of Louis-Marie Chauvet provides a much needed accessible introduction to the philosophical and theological foundations of Chauvet's sacramental theology. Particular attention is given to his appropriation of Heidegger and use of the Social Sciences to elucidate the nature of the symbolic exchange that lies at the heart of the sacramental tradition. This book highlights the prophetic, deconstructive and even iconoclastic message for contemporary society and the church implicit in the Eucharistic liturgy. Common conceptions of God's presence and sacrifice are critically analyzed and the connection between sacramental worship and ethics is emphasized.

Aristotle in Coimbra is the first book to cover the history of both the College of Arts in Coimbra and its most remarkable cultural product, the Cursus Conimbricensis, examining early Jesuit pedagogy as performed in one of the most important colleges run by the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth century. The first complete philosophical textbook published by a Jesuit college, the Cursus Conimbricensis (1592-1606) was created by some of the most renowned early Jesuit philosophers and comprised seven volumes of commentaries and disputations on Aristotle's writings, which had formed the foundation of the university philosophy curriculum since the Middle Ages. In Aristotle in Coimbra, Cristiano Casalini demonstrates the connection between educational practices in a sixteenth-century college and the structure of a scholastic philosophical commentary, providing insight into this particular form of late-scholastic Aristotelianism through historiographical discourse. This book provides both a narrative of the historical background behind the publication of the Cursus and an analysis of the major philosophical and educational issues addressed by its seven volumes. It is valuable reading for all those interested in intellectual history, the history of education and the history of philosophy.

Arguments between those who hold religious beliefs and those who do not have been at fever pitch. They have also reached an impasse, with equally entrenched views held by believer and atheist - and even agnostic - alike. This collection is one of the first books to move beyond this deadlock. Specially commissioned chapters address major areas that cut across the debate between the two sides: the origin of knowledge, objectivity and meaning; moral values and the nature of the human person and the good life; and the challenge of how to promote honest and fruitful dialogue in the light of the wide diversity of beliefs, religious and otherwise. Under these broad headings leading figures in the field examine and reflect upon: Secular and religious humanism The idea of the sacred The vexed issue of science in both religious and secular accounts of knowledge Spirituality for the godless Non-western perspectives on the atheism/theism debate. A key feature of the collection is a dialogue between Raymond Tallis and Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury. Religion and Atheism: Beyond the Divide will interest anyone who is concerned about the clash between the religious and the secular and how to move beyond it, as well as students of ethics, philosophy of religion and religious studies.

In the sixteenth century, the saint and scholar Sri Caitanya set in motion a wave of devotion to Krishna that began in eastern India and has now found its way around the world. Caitanya taught that the highest aim of life is to develop selfless love for God Krishna, the blue-hued cowherd boy who spoke the Bhagavad Gita. Although only a handful of poetry is attributed to Caitanya, his devotional theology was expounded and systematized by his followers in a vast array of poetical, philosophical, and ritual literature. This book provides a thematic study of Caitanya Vaishnava philosophy, introducing key thinkers and ideas in the early tradition, using Sanskrit and Bengali sources that have seldom been studied in English. The book addresses major areas of the tradition, including epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, ethics, and history, and every chapter includes relevant readings from primary sources.

Exploring Kierkegaard's complex use of the Bible, the essays in this volume use source-critical research and tools ranging from literary criticism to theology and biblical studies, to situate Kierkegaard's appropriation of the biblical material in his cultural and intellectual context. The contributors seek to identify the possible sources that may have influenced Kierkegaard's understanding and employment of Scripture, and to describe the debates about the Bible that may have shaped, perhaps indirectly, his attitudes toward Scripture. They also pay close attention to Kierkegaard's actual hermeneutic practice, analyzing the implicit interpretive moves that he makes as well as his more explicit statements about the significance of various biblical passages. This close reading of Kierkegaard's texts elucidates the unique and sometimes odd features of his frequent appeals to Scripture. This volume in the series devotes one tome to the Old Testament and a second tome to the New Testament. Tome I considers the canonically disputed literature of the Apocrypha. Although Kierkegaard certainly cited the Old Testament much less frequently than he did the New, passages and themes from the Old Testament do occupy a position of startling importance in his writings. Old Testament characters such as Abraham and Job often play crucial and even decisive roles in his texts. Snatches of Old Testament wisdom figure prominently in his edifying literature. The vocabulary and cadences of the Psalms saturate his expression of the range of human passions from joy to despair. The essays in this first tome seek to elucidate the crucial rhetorical uses to which he put key passages from the Old Testament, the sources that influenced him to do this, and his reasons for doing so.

Michael Sudduth examines three prominent objections to natural theology that have emerged in the Reformed streams of the Protestant theological tradition: objections from the immediacy of our knowledge of God, the noetic effects of sin, and the logic of theistic arguments. Distinguishing between the project of natural theology and particular models of natural theology, Sudduth argues that none of the main Reformed objections is successful as an objection to the project of natural theology itself. One particular model of natural theology - the dogmatic model - is best suited to handle Reformed concerns over natural theology. According to this model, rational theistic arguments represent the reflective reconstruction of the natural knowledge of God by the Christian in the context of dogmatic theology. Informed by both contemporary religious epistemology and the history of Protestant philosophical theology, Sudduth''s examination illuminates the complex nature of the project of natural theology and its place in the Reformed tradition.

Advocacy for religious freedom has become a global project while religion, and the management of religion, has become of increasing interest to scholars across a wider range of disciplines. Rather than adopting the common assumption that religious freedom is simply incompletely realized, the authors in this book suggest that the starting point for understanding religion in public life today should be religious establishment. In the hyper-globalized world of the politics of religious freedom today, a focus on establishments brings into view the cultural assumptions, cosmologies, anthropologies, and institutions which structure religion and religious diversity. Leading international scholars from a diverse range of disciplines explore how countries today live with religious difference and consider how considering establishments reveals the limitations of universal, multicultural, and interfaith models of religious freedom. Examining the various forms religion takes in Tunisia, Canada, Taiwan, South Africa, and the USA, amongst others, this book argues that legal protections for religious freedom can only be understood in a context of socially and culturally specific constraints.

In The Moral Psychology of Clement of Alexandria, Kathleen Gibbons proposes a new approach to Clement's moral philosophy and explores how his construction of Christianity's relationship with Jewishness informed, and was informed by, his philosophical project. As one of the earliest Christian philosophers, Clement's work has alternatively been treated as important for understanding the history of relations between Christianity and Judaism and between Christianity and pagan philosophy. This study argues that an adequate examination of his significance for the one requires an adequate examination of his significance for the other. While the ancient claim that the writings of Moses were read by the philosophical schools was found in Jewish, Christian, and pagan authors, Gibbons demonstrates that Clement's use of this claim shapes not only his justification of his authorial project, but also his philosophical argumentation. In explaining what he took to be the cosmological, metaphysical, and ethical implications of the doctrine that the supreme God is a lawgiver, Clement provided the theoretical justifications for his views on a range of issues that included martyrdom, sexual asceticism, the status of the law of Moses, and the relationship between divine providence and human autonomy. By contextualizing Clement's discussions of volition against wider Greco-Roman debates about self-determination, it becomes possible to reinterpret the invocation of "free will" in early Christian heresiological discourse as part of a larger dispute about what human autonomy requires.

Where are the dead? What are they doing? What kind of a process is dying? What relationships exist among the dead themselves, and between the dead and those in the world they have left behind? Modern philosophers argue that the idea of disembodied survival - to which many believers pay lip service - is incoherent, and that there can be evidence neither for nor against something incoherent. By contrast, this book argues, the idea of an embodied survival (albeit a form of embodiment differing from our present embodiment) makes perfect sense in itself and fits much better with the alleged evidence for post-mortem survival. Exploring post-mortem survival, Where are the Dead? uses a variety of empirical data, alongside mythological, legendary and purely fictional material, to illustrate how the less familiar idea of embodied post-mortem survival might actually 'work' in some real afterlife environment. By asking questions about the nature and whereabouts of the afterlife, and about what it might be like to be dead, the book explores themes nowadays relatively neglected even in disciplines explicitly concerned with ideas about death, dying and life after death.

This book examines the significance of religion in the work of the twentieth century philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Exploring Bakhtin's contribution to debates on methodology in the study of religion, this book argues that his use of religious terminology is derived from his source material in philosophy of religion and not from his confessional commitment to Russian Orthodox Christianity. Critiquing Gavin Flood's important work Beyond Phenomenology, Hilary Bagshaw explains how Bakhtin's work on 'outsideness' presents invaluable insights for scholars of religion, particularly pertinent to the contemporary insider/outsider debate.

The nature and properties of angels occupied a prominent place in medieval philosophical inquiry. Creatures of two worlds, angels provided ideal ground for exploring the nature of God and his creation, being perceived as 'models' according to which a whole range of questions were defined, from cosmological order, movement and place, to individuation, cognition, volition, and modes of language. This collection of essays is a significant scholarly contribution to angelology, centred on the function and significance of angels in medieval speculation and its history. The unifying theme is that of the role of angels in philosophical inquiry, where each contribution represents a case study in which the angelic model is seen to motivate developments in specific areas and periods of medieval philosophical thought.

In the belief that all the great religions have similarities that confirm and differences that enrich peoples' spiritual outlook on the world, the editors inaugurated a series which they hoped would bring out the essential tenets of religion in what they perceived to be an age of doubt. The series was originally published in the 1950s and consisted of three kinds of books: translations of imaginative, devotional and philosophic works, with an introduction or commentary; reproductions of masterpieces of religious art; and background books showing the environment in which this literature and art arose and developed. The books overlap each other: Both Eastern and Western religious art often illustrates a religious text and many of the books seek the common ground in their cultural view of religion or philosophy.

The philosophy of religion and theology are related to the culture in which they have developed. These disciplines provide a source of values and vision to the cultures of which they are part, while at the same time they are delimited and defined by their cultures. This book compares the ideas of two contemporary philosophers, John Hick and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, on the issues of religion, religions, the concept of the ultimate reality, and the notion of sacred knowledge. On a broader level, it compares two world-views: the one formed by Western Christian culture, which is religious in intention but secular in essence; the other Islamic, formed through the assimilation of traditional wisdom, which is turned against the norms of secular culture and is thus religious both in intention and essence.

In Black Life Matter, Biko Mandela Gray offers a philosophical eulogy for Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, and Sandra Bland that attests to their irreducible significance in the face of unremitting police brutality. Gray employs a theoretical method he calls "sitting-with"-a philosophical practice of care that seeks to defend the dead and the living. He shows that the police who killed Stanley-Jones and Rice reduced them to their bodies in ways that turn black lives into tools that the state uses to justify its violence and existence. He outlines how Bland's arrest and death reveal the affective resonances of blackness, and he contends that Sterling's physical movement and speech before he was killed point to black flesh as unruly living matter that exceeds the constraints of the black body. These four black lives, Gray demonstrates, were more than the brutal violence enacted against them; they speak to a mode of life that cannot be fully captured by the brutal logics of antiblackness.