Happiness is a paradoxical thing. In our heart of hearts we all want to be happy, but we do not talk much about it, lest we seem sentimental or too optimistic. But what would happiness be like if we could find it? The second section deals with happiness in three major world religious traditions. The third section deals with various issues regarding the meaning and even the uses of happiness.

This volume contains essays that examine infinity in early modern philosophy. The essays not only consider the ways that key figures viewed the concept. They also detail how these different beliefs about infinity influenced major philosophical systems throughout the era. These domains include mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, science, and theology. Coverage begins with an introduction that outlines the overall importance of infinity to early modern philosophy. It then moves from a general background of infinity (before early modern thought) up through Kant. Readers will learn about the place of infinity in the writings of key early modern thinkers. The contributors profile the work of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant. Debates over infinity significantly influenced philosophical discussion regarding the human condition and the extent and limits of human knowledge. Questions about the infinity of space, for instance, helped lead to the introduction of a heliocentric solar system as well as the discovery of calculus. This volume offers readers an insightful look into all this and more. It provides a broad perspective that will help advance the present state of knowledge on this important but often overlooked topic.

This book explores religious epiphanies in which there is the appearance of God, a god or a goddess, or a manifestation of the divine or religious reality as received in human experience. Drawing upon the scriptures of various traditions, ancillary religious writings, psychological and anthropological studies, as well as reports of epiphanic experiences, the book presents and examines epiphanies as they have occurred across global religious traditions and cultures, historically and up to the present day. Primarily providing a study of the great range of epiphanies in their phenomenal presentation, Kellenberger also explores issues that arise for epiphanies, such as the matter of their veridicality (whether they are truly of or from the divine) and the question of whether all epiphanies are of the same religious reality.

This book examines how the beliefs and practices of each of the major world religions, as well as other belief systems, affect the variables that influence growth and development in the Global South. Evidence suggests that as countries develop, the influence of religion on all aspects of society declines. In stark contrast to the developed world, in the Global South, the role of religion is highly pervasive - the distinctive conclusion of this book is therefore that a lessening of religiosity is a sine qua non for growth and development, including secular laws and constitutions. Offering a ground-breaking study in an area little explored in the English language, this book will satisfy an important gap in the literature on the political economy of development, sociology of religion, law, and anthropology.

Jewish Theology Unbound challenges the widespread misinterpretation of Judaism as a religion of law as opposed to theology. James A. Diamond provides close readings of the Bible, classical rabbinic texts, Jewish philosophers, and mystics from the ancient, medieval, and modern period, which communicate a profound Jewish philosophical theology on human nature, God, and the relationship between the two. The study begins with an examination of questioning in the Hebrew Bible, demonstrating that what the Bible encourages is independent philosophical inquiry into how to situate oneself in the world ethically, spiritually, and teleologically. It explores such themes as the nature of God through the various names by which God is known in the Jewish intellectual tradition, love of others and of God, death, martyrdom, freedom, angels, the philosophical quest, the Holocaust, and the state of Israel, all in light of the Hebrew Bible and the way it is filtered through the rabbinic, philosophical, and mystical traditions.

Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of Nature: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning analyses the works of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) on natural philosophy in a series of contexts within which they may best be explored and understood. Its aim is to place Edwards's writings on natural philosophy in the broad historical, theological and scientific context of a wide variety of religious responses to the rise of modern science in the early modern period - John Donne's reaction to the new astronomical philosophy of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, as well as to Francis Bacon's new natural philosophy; Blaise Pascal's response to Descartes' mechanical philosophy; the reactions to Newtonian science and finally Jonathan Edwards's response to the scientific culture and imagination of his time.

Kierkegaard and the Refusal of Transcendence challenges the standard view that Kierkegaard's God is infinitely other than the world. It argues that his work immerses us in the paradoxical nature of existence itself, and opposes any flight into another world.

The 'Therapeutae' were a Jewish group of ascetic philosophers who lived outside Alexandria in the middle of the first century CE. They are described in Philo's treatise De Vita Contemplativa and have often been considered in comparison with early Christians, the Essenes, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. But who were they really? This study focuses particularly on issues of history, rhetoric, women, and gender in a wide exploration of the group, and comes to new conclusions about the 'Therapeutae' and their relationship with the Jewish allegorical school of exegesis in Alexandria. The volume includes a new translation of De Vita Contemplativa.

The first comprehensive and critical overview of Christian perspectives on the relationship between social justice and ecological integrity, this annotated bibliography focuses on works that include ecological issues, social-ethical values and problems, and explicitly theological or religious reflection on ecological and social ethics and their interrelations. This body of moral reflection on the relationship between ecological ethics and social and economic justice (sometimes called eco-justice) will be of interest to those involved in religious education, research, liturgical renewal, public policy recommendations, community action, lay witness, and personal life-style transformation. The work is comprised of an introductory review essay followed by over 500 complete annotations. As a contemporary subject, much has been written in the past 30 years about the Christian approaches to the relationship between ecological integrity and social justice. The literature comes from a variety of disciplines and perspectives: from biblical studies to philosophical theology and cultural criticism; and from evangelical theory to process, feminist, and creation-centered theologies. Although there have been significant movements and developments in this literature, much writing seems unaware of other or earlier discussions of the interrelationships. This volume brings all the works together.

The shadow of David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, has loomed large against all efforts to prove the existence of God from evidence in the natural world. Indeed from Hume's day to ours, the vast majority of philosophical attacks against the rationality of theism have borne an unmistakable Humean aroma. The last forty years, however, have been marked by a resurgence in Christian theism among philosophers, and the time has come for a thorough reassessment of the case for natural theology. James F. Sennett and Douglas Groothuis have assembled a distinguished team of philosophers to engage the task: Terence Penelhum, Todd M. Furman, Keith Yandell, Garrett J. DeWeese, Joshua Rasmussen, James D. Madden, Robin Collins, Paul Copan, Victor Reppert, J. P. Moreland and R. Douglas Geivett. Together this team makes vigorous individual and cumulative arguments that set Hume's attacks in fresh perspective and that offer new insights into the value of teleological, cosmological and ontological arguments for God's existence.

Hud Hudson offers a fascinating examination of philosophical reasons to believe in hyperspace. He begins with some stage-setting discussions, offering his analysis of the term 'material object', noting his adherence to substantivalism, confessing his sympathies regarding principles of composition and decomposition, identifying his views on material simples, material gunk, and the persistence of material objects, and preparing the reader for later discussions with introductory remarks on eternalism, modality and recombination, vagueness, bruteness, and the epistemic role of intuitions. The subsequent chapters are loosely organized around the theme of hyperspace. Hudson explores nontheistic reasons to believe in hyperspace in chapter 1 (e.g. reasons arising from reflection on incongruent counterparts and fine-tuning arguments), theistic reasons in chapter 7 (e.g. reasons arising from reflection on theistic puzzles known as the problem of the best and the problem of evil), and some distinctively Christian reasons in chapter 8 (e.g. reasons arising from reflection on traditional Christian themes such as heaven and hell, the Garden of Eden, angels and demons, and new testament miracles). In the intervening chapters, Hudson inquires into a variety of puzzles in the metaphysics of material objects that are either generated by the hypothesis of hyperspace, focusing on the topics of mirror determinism and mirror incompatibilism, or else informed by the hypothesis of hyperspace, with discussions of receptacles, boundaries, contact, occupation, and superluminal motion. Anyone engaged with contemporary metaphysics will find much to stimulate them here.

The recovery of nature has been a unifying and enduring aim of the writings of Ralph McInerny, Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame, director of the Jacques Maritain Center, former director of the Medieval Institute, and author of numerous works in philosophy, literature, and journalism. While many of the fads that have plagued philosophy and theology during the last half-century have come and gone, recent developments suggest that McInerny's commitment to Aristotelian-Thomism was boldly, if quietly, prophetic. In his persistent, clear, and creative defenses of natural theology and natural law, McInerny has appealed to nature to establish a dialogue between theists and non-theists, to contribute to the moral and political renewal of American culture, and particularly to provide some of the philosophical foundations for Catholic theology.

This volume brings together essays by an impressive group of scholars, including William Wallace, O.P., Jude P. Dougherty, John Haldane, Thomas DeKoninck, Alasdair MacIntyre, David Solomon, Daniel McInerny, Janet E. Smith, Michael Novak, Stanley Hauerwas, Laura Garcia, Alvin Plantinga, Alfred J. Freddoso, and David B. Burrell, C.S.C.

Our digital technologies have inspired new ways of thinking about old religious topics. Digitalists include computer scientists, transhumanists, singularitarians, and futurists. Writers such as Moravec, Bostrom, Kurzweil, and Chalmers are digitalists. Although they are usually scientists, rationalists, and atheists, digitalists they have worked out novel and entirely naturalistic ways of thinking about bodies, minds, souls, universes, gods, and life after death. Your Digital Afterlives starts with three digitalist theories of life after death. It examines personality capture, body uploading, and promotion to higher levels of simulation. It then examines the idea that reality itself is ultimately a system of self-surpassing computations. On that view, you will have infinitely many digital lives across infinitely many digital worlds. Your Digital Afterlives looks at superhuman bodies and infinite bodies. Thinking of nature in purely computational terms has the potential to radically and positively change our understanding of life after death.

In the twentieth century, many contemporary epistemologists in the analytic tradition have entered into debate regarding the right to belief with new tools: Richard Swinburne, Anthony Kenny, Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Peter van Inwagen (who contributes a piece in this volume) defending or contesting the requirement of evidence for any justified belief. The best things we can do, it seems, is to examine more attentively the true notion of "right to believe", especially about religious matters. This is exactly what authors of the papers in this book do.

This book pursues the implications for linking Lenin with theology, which is not a project that has been undertaken thus far. What does this inveterate atheist known for describing religion as 'spiritual booze' (a gloss on Marx's 'opium of the people') have to do with theology? This book reveals far more than might initially be expected, so much so that Lenin and the Russian Revolution cannot be understood without this complex engagement with theology.
It also seeks to bring Lenin into recent debates over the intersections between theology and the Left, between the Bible and political thought. The key names involved in this debate are reasonably well-known, including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zižek, Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Terry Eagleton, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Boer has written concerning these critics, among others, in Boer's earlier five-volume Criticism of Heaven and Earth (Brill and Haymarket, 2007-13). Lenin and Theology builds upon this earlier project but it also stands alone as a substantial study in its own right. But it will be recognised as a contribution that follows a series that has, as critics have pointed out, played a major role in reviving and taking to a new level the debate over Marxism and religion.
The book is based upon a careful, detailed and critical reading of the whole 45 volumes of his Collected Works in English translation - 55 volumes in the Russian original. From that close attention to the texts, a number of key themes have emerged: the ambivalence over freedom of choice in matters of religion; his love of the sayings and parables of Jesus in the Gospels; his own love of constructing new parables; the extended and complex engagements with Christian socialists and 'God-builders' among the Bolsheviks; the importance of Hegel for his reassessments of religion; the arresting suggestion that a revolution is a miracle, which redefines the meaning of miracle; and the veneration of Lenin after his death.

"Individualism Old and New" is a serious study of public and cultural issues surrounding the place of the individual in a technologically advanced society. Dewey outlines the fear that personal creative potential will be stomped on by assembly-line monotony, political bureaucracy and an industrialized culture of uniformity. Dewey beoieves in the power of critical intelligence and says that individualism has in fact been offered a unique higher kevek of technological development upon which to grow, mature and redine itself. In "Liberalism and Social Action" Dewey looks at earlier forms of liberalism where the State sunction is to rotect its citizens while allowing free reign to social-economic forces. He believes that as a society matures, so must liberalism. He believes that liberalism must redefine itself in a world where government must play a dynamic role in creating an enviornment in which citizens can achieve their potential. Dewey's advocacy of a posiive role for government - a new liberalism - is a natural application of Hegel's dialetic. "A Common Faith" presents a compelling prescription for a union of religious and social ideals, inluding consistency in both idea and action. His thesis is thought provoking. This book should not only be read by social scientist, but also people if faith who wish to intelligently enhance their own faith. A Collector's Edition.

Many people believe that during the Middle Ages Christianity was actively hostile toward science (then known as natural philosophy) and impeded its progress. This comprehensive survey of science and religion during the period between the lives of Aristotle and Copernicus demonstrates how this was not the case. Medieval theologians were not hostile to learning natural philosophy, but embraced it. Had they had not done so, the science that developed during the Scientific Revolution would not--and could not--have occurred. Students and lay readers will learn how the roots of much of the scientific culture of today originated with the religious thinkers of the Middle Ages. Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550 thoroughly covers the relationship between science and religion in the medieval period, and provides many resources for the student or lay reader: Discusses how the influx of Greek and Arabic science in the 12th and 13th centuries-- especially the works of Aristotle in logic and natural philosophy--dramatically changed how science was viewed in Western Europe. Demonstrates how medieval universities and their teachers disseminated a positive attitude toward rational inquiry and made it possible for Western Europe to become oriented toward science. Includes primary documents that allow the reader to see how important scholars of the period understood the relationship of science and religion. Provides an annotated bibliography of the most important works on science and religion in the Middle Ages, helping students to study the topic in more detail. BL

In a violation of our destiny, something is killing every one of us. The judge of ignorance has long sentenced every living being to death, has sentenced you, and I, all our ancestors, and our children to death. In a relentless holocaust, there are no survivors. Hope has not been enough to win an appeal, nor the visions of faith, nor the dream of justice and beauty, not even love. To the hearless judge of ignorance, these mean nothing. We will be saved in the end y knowledge. We will learn to overcome aging and death by engendering the noble and supreme intelligences. We will create the gods who will call us back to life, or we will not return at all. It is in our hands. It is time to inspire and begin the ultimate scientific, moral, and spiritual quest. The end of death.

"Following Vattimo's postmodern philosophy, Badiou's postmetaphysical ontology, and i ek's revolutionary style, the authors of this marvelous book invites us to reactivate our politics of resistance against our greatest enemy: corporate capitalism. The best solution to the ecological, energy, and financial crisis corporate capitalism has created, as Crockett Clayton and Jeffrey Robbins suggest, is a new theological materialism where Being is conceived as energy both subjectively and objectively. All my graduate students will have to read this book carefully if they want to become philosophers." - Santiago Zabala, ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona "This is a book of an extraordinary timeliness, written in an accessible and strikingly informative way. It is excellently poised to become a synthetic and agenda setting statement about the implications of a new materialism for the founding of a new radical theology, a new kind of spirituality. I consider this therefore quite a remarkable book which will be influential in ongoing discussions of psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and theology. Moreover, it will be, quite simply, the best book about spirituality and the new materialism on the market today. While all of the work of the new materialists engage at one level or another the question of a new spirituality, I do not think there is anything comparable in significance to what Crockett and Robbins have provided here." - Ward Blanton, University of Kent "This book will perhaps be most appreciated by the reader with an intuitive cast of mind, able to recognize the force of an argument in its imaginative suggestiveness . . . New Materialism is about energy transformation, we are told, energy which cannot be reduced to matter because it resonates with spirit and life . . . Yet the book strikes a fundamental note of hard reality: 'if we want our civilization to live on earth a little longer we will have to recognize our coexistence with and in earth'." - Christian Ecology Link