Even in the twenty-first century, critical and creative engagement with modern and postmodern philosophy is a rarity in Orthodox circles. The collection of essays presented here by Christoph Schneider makes a significant contribution to overcoming this deficit. Eight scholars from six different countries, working on the intersection between Orthodox thought and philosophy, present their research in short and accessible form. The topics covered range from political philosophy to phenomenology, metaphysics, philosophy of self, logic, ethics, and philosophy of language. The authors do not all promote one particular approach to the relationship between Orthodox theology and philosophy. Nevertheless, taken together, their work demonstrates that Orthodox scholarship is not con fined to historical research about the Byzantine era, but can contribute to, and enrich, contemporary intellectual debates.

This book investigates the central role of reason in Islamic intellectual life. Despite widespread characterization of Islam as a system of belief based only on revelation, John Walbridge argues that rational methods, not fundamentalism, have characterized Islamic law, philosophy and education since the medieval period. His research demonstrates that this medieval Islamic rational tradition was opposed by both modernists and fundamentalists, resulting in a general collapse of traditional Islamic intellectual life and its replacement by more modern but far shallower forms of thought. However, the resources of this Islamic scholarly tradition remain an integral part of the Islamic intellectual tradition and will prove vital to its revival. The future of Islam, Walbridge argues, will be marked by a return to rationalism.

In these letters to friends and colleagues spanning around twenty years, renowned radical theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer offers a series of meditative mini-essays on religious, theological, political, and philosophical matters that are central and vital to our contemporary era.

The theological attempts to understand Christ's body have either focused on ""philosophical"" claims about Jesus' identity or on ""contextual"" rebuttals - on a culturally transcendent, disembodied Jesus of the creeds or on a Jesus of color who rescues and saves a particular people because of embodied particularity. But neither of these two attempts has accounted for the world as it is, a world of mixed race, of hybridity, of cultural and racial intermixing. By not understanding the true theological problem, that we live in a mulatto world, the right question has not been posed: How can Christ save this mixed world? The answer, Brian Bantum shows, is in the mulattoness of Jesus' own body, which is simultaneously fully God and fully human. In Redeeming Mulatto, Bantum reconciles the particular with the transcendent to account for the world as it is: mixed. He constructs a remarkable new Christological vision of Christ as tragic mulatto--one who confronts the contrived delusions of racial purity and the violence of self-assertion and emerges from a ""hybridity"" of flesh and spirit, human and divine, calling humanity to a mulattic rebirth. Bantum offers a theology that challenges people to imagine themselves inside their bodies, changed and something new, but also not without remnants of the old. His theology is one for all people, offered through the lens of a particular people, not for individual possession but for redemption and transformation into something new.

According to 1 Cor 15.44 and 1 Cor 15.52, the human body "is sown an animal body, [but] it will rise a spiritual body" and "the dead will rise again incorruptible, and we will be changed." These passages prompted many questions: What is a spiritual body? How can a body become incorruptible? Where will the resurrected body be located? And, what will be the nature of its experience? Medieval theologians sought to answer such questions but encountered troubling paradoxes stemming from the conviction that the resurrected body will be an "impassible body" or constituted from "incorruptible matter." By the thirteenth century the resurrection demanded increased attention from Church authorities, not only in response to certain popular heresies but also to calm heated debates at the University of Paris. William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris, officially condemned ten errors in 1241 and in 1244, including the proposition that the blessed in the resurrected body will not see the divine essence. In 1270 Parisian Bishop Etienne Tempier condemned the view that God cannot grant incorruption to a corruptible body, and in 1277 he rejected propositions that a resurrected body does not return as numerically one and the same, and that God cannot grant perpetual existence to a mutable, corruptible body. The Dominican scholar Albert the Great was drawn into the university debates in Paris in the 1240s and responded in the text translated here for the first time. In it, Albert considers the properties of resurrected bodies in relation to Aristotelian physics, treats the condition of souls and bodies in heaven, discusses the location and punishments of hell, purgatory, and limbo, and proposes a "limbo of infants" for unbaptized children. Albert's On Resurrection not only shaped the understanding of Thomas Aquinas but also that of many other major thinkers.

God calls humans to be creative. The human drive to represent transcendent truths witnesses to the fact that we are destined to be transfigured and to transfigure the world. It is worth asking, then, what truthful representations, whether in art, spirituality, or theology, teach us about the one who is our truth, the one who made us and the one in whose image we are made. All Things Beautiful: An Aesthetic Christology is an experimental and constructive aesthetic Christology sourced by close readings of a wide array of artistic works, canonical and popular-including poems, films, essays, novels, plays, short stories, sculptures, icons, and paintings-as well as art criticism and passages from the Christian Scriptures. From first to last, these readings engage in conversation with the deep, broad wisdom of the Christian theological tradition. The liturgical calendar guides the themes of the book, beginning with Advent and Christmas; carrying through Epiphany, Ash Wednesday, Lent, Good Friday, Easter, and Ascension; and ending with Pentecost and Ordinary Time. Chris Green brings together these readings to create a mosaic-like impression of Jesus as the one through whom God graces and gives nature to all things, his life and death redeeming the whole creation, including human creativity and artistic endeavor, and transfiguring it into the full, free flourishing that God has purposed. This vision of Christ holds promise for artists and theologians, as well as preachers and teachers, revealing how our compulsions to create-and the meanings with which we endow our creations-become a site of the Spirit's presence, opening us to the goodness and wildness of God.

It is the first study which comprehensively, systematically and critically examines the role and usefulness of the concept of Maqasid al-Shari'a (higher Objectives of Islamic Law) in contemporary Muslim reformist thought in relation to number of specific issues pertaining to Islamic legal philosophy, law, ethics and the socio-political sphere.

Ali Zaidi discloses a largely unnoticed dialogue between Muslim and Western social thought on the search for meaning and transcendence in the human sciences. This disclosure is accomplished by a comparative reading of Muslim debates on secular knowledge on the one hand and of Western debates on the putative death of metaphysics in the human sciences on the other hand. The analysis is grounded in dialogical hermeneutics; that is, a hermeneutic approach to texts and cultural traditions that draws upon the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and upon the insights of inter-religious dialogue.

Comprising seven essays by learned contributors and controversially advocating a rationalist Christianity, this work became a sensation upon publication in 1860. Frederick Temple (1821 1902), later Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote on the cultural contributions of non-Christians; Roland Williams (1817 70), Professor of Hebrew at Lampeter, questioned Old Testament prophesies; Baden Powell (1796 1850), Oxford Professor of Geometry, challenged belief in miracles and embraced Darwinism; Henry Bristow Wilson (1803 88) questioned literal biblical history; the only lay contributor, Egyptologist Charles Wycliffe Goodwin (1817 78), embraced geology; Mark Pattison (1813 84), tutor at Lincoln College, wrote on the history of rationalist theology; and Benjamin Jowett (1817 93), Oxford Professor of Greek, advocated a historical reading of the Bible. Wilson and Williams were later found guilty of heresy by a Church court, though this was overturned on appeal. For readers interested in the theological controversies of the Victorian era, these essays remain invaluable.

This book guides scholars and teachers of theology and religion through a process of self-reflection that leads to intentional, transformative teaching, dialogue, and reform in theological education and religious studies.

Provides the first extensive collection of traditional and academic Jewish approaches to the religions of the world, focusing on those Jewish thinkers that actually encounter the other world religions -that is, it moves beyond the theory of inclusive/exclusive/pluralistic categories and looks at Judaism's interactions with other faiths.

This volume provides an overview of the nature and scope of the concept of Sunna both in pre-modern and modern Islamic discussions. The main focus is on shedding more light on the context in which the term Sunna in the major works of Islamic law and legal theory across all of the major madhahib was employed during the first six centuries Hijri.

The foundation of discipleship is sound, scriptural doctrine. The value of sound doctrine is often misunderstood by the modern church. While it can be dry and dull, when it flows from the story of Scripture, it can be full of life and love. This kind of doctrine, steeped in Scripture, is critical for disciple-making. And it's often overlooked by modern pastors. In Hearers and Doers, Kevin Vanhoozer makes the case that pastors, as pastor-theologians, ought to interpret Scripture theologically to articulate doctrine and help cultivate disciples. scriptural doctrine is vital to the life of the church, and local pastor-theologians should be the ones delivering it to their communities. With arresting prose and striking metaphors, Vanhoozer addresses the most pressing problems in the modern church with one answer: teach sound, scriptural doctrine to make disciples.

The Ecumenical Association of the Third World Theologians illuminated the struggles of liberating the poor, and sought to do theology with the marginalized seeking freedom, gender co-responsibility, and racial and ethnic equality. This book offers an interpretative history of the formative years of this historic movement.

While living in India for sixteen years, James Robert Ballantyne (1813 64) taught oriental languages to Indian pupils and became fascinated by Hindu philosophy, seeking to harmonise it with the Western tradition. He produced grammars of Hindi, Sanskrit and Persian, translations of Indian linguistics, and a science primer in English and Sanskrit (also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection). Intended for the Tyro missionary and published in 1859, this work offers a summary of Hinduism (covering the Nyaya, Sankhya and Vedanta schools) and argues for the truth of Christianity, while acknowledging certain shared ideas. It contains a facing Sanskrit translation (with redactions of parts considered to be of no importance to 'those whom the missionary has to teach'). A valuable primary source for scholars of orientalism, this work helps to illuminate the religious dimensions of British imperialism.

The subject of this book is the relationship and the difference between the temporal everlasting and the atemporal eternal. This book treats the difference between a temporal postmortem life and eternal life. It identifies the conceptual tension in the religious idea of eternal life and offers a resolution of that tension.

Jewish anthropological beliefs during the Hellenistic-Roman period are an important but previously neglected area of biblical exegesis and Jewish studies. In an effort to address this deficiency, this volume brings together 20 essays related to the subject of sin and death, with special emphasis on integrating material from neighboring cultures. Thus, the volume provides an exemplary foundation for further research on ancient Jewish anthropology.

Central to God’s character is the quality of holiness. Yet, even so, most people are hard-pressed to define what God’s holiness precisely is. Many preachers today avoid the topic altogether because people today don’t quite know what to do with words like “awe” or “fear.” R. C. Sproul, in this classic work, puts the holiness of God in its proper and central place in the Christian life. He paints an awe-inspiring vision of God that encourages Christian to become holy just as God is holy. Once you encounter the holiness of God, your life will never be the same.

This book is the first greater attempt to construct a dialogical theology from a Jewish point of view. It contributes to an emerging new theology that promotes the interrelatedness of religions in which encounter, openness, hospitality and permanent learning are central. The monograph is about the self and the other, inner and outer, own and strange; about borders and crossing borders, and about the sublime activities of passing and translating. Meir analyses and critically discusses the writings of great contemporary Jewish dialogical thinkers and argues that the values of interreligious theology are moored in their thoughts. In his view interreligious dialogue supposes attentive listening, humility, a critical attitude towards oneself and others, a good amount of self-relativism and humor. It is about proximity, dialogical reading, engagement and interconnectedness.

At the beginning of his gospel, John refers to Jesus Christ as the Logos--the "Word." John Ronning makes a case that the Jewish Targums--interpretive translations of the Old Testament into Aramaic that were read in synagogues--hold the key to understanding John's Logos title. Examining numerous texts in the fourth gospel in the light of the Targums, Ronning shows how connecting the Logos with the targumic Memra (word) unlocks the meaning of a host of theological themes that run throughout the Gospel of John.

A SPECIES IN DENIAL is the revolutionary bestseller by Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith. In it the author presents a series of essays addressesing the crux issue before us as a species of the human condition, our capacity for good and evil, describing how humans have coped with the dilemma of the human condition by living in denial of it. Griffith then explains the biological reason for the human condition, thus ending the need for the denial and maturing humanity to psychological freedom from its historic insecure human-condition-afflicted state. With a foreword by Templeton Prize winning biologist Charles Birch, this book provides a deeply insightful examination of science, religion, politics, men and women, psychiatry and mythology.

Published in 1851, this edition of an important second-century Gnostic work presents the Coptic text derived from codices held in the British Museum and originally ascribed to the authorship of a certain Valentinus. These manuscript sources were scrutinised and translated into Latin by the German scholar Moeritz Gotthilf Schwartze (1802-48) at the behest of the king of Prussia, but he died before the book could be completed. The task of preparing Schwartze's work for publication fell to Julius Heinrich Petermann (1801-76), professor of oriental literature at the University of Berlin. The arcane and difficult text describes esoteric Gnostic teachings which - just as in the traditional Gospels - are delivered by Jesus to his disciples. At the beginning, he is said to have spent eleven years after the resurrection teaching them this mysterious higher knowledge. Both the annotated Coptic text and Schwartze's Latin translation are frequently interspersed with Greek.

Contemporaries as Cambridge undergraduates in the late 1840s, Joseph Barber Lightfoot (1828-89), Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828-92), and John Eyton Bickersteth Mayor (1825-1910) all went on to distinguished careers. Mayor, a classical scholar, became President of St John's, while Lightfoot and Hort - members, along with Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901), later Regius Professor of Divinity, of the 'Cambridge triumvirate' - were eventually appointed respectively Bishop of Durham and Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. This short-lived triannual journal, which they founded and edited from 1854 to 1859, is interesting both for its combination of classical and patristic material, illuminating the close relationship between theology and classics as disciplines in the period, and as an example from the early history of academic journals, an emerging genre which would develop into its current form over the following decades. Volume 1, published in 1854, contains the year's three issues.

Contemporaries as Cambridge undergraduates in the late 1840s, Joseph Barber Lightfoot (1828-89), Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828-92), and John Eyton Bickersteth Mayor (1825-1910) all went on to distinguished careers. Mayor, a classical scholar, became President of St John's, while Lightfoot and Hort - members, along with Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901), later Regius Professor of Divinity, of the 'Cambridge triumvirate' - were eventually appointed respectively Bishop of Durham and Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. This short-lived triannual journal, which they founded and edited from 1854 to 1859, is interesting both for its combination of classical and patristic material, illuminating the close relationship between theology and classics as disciplines in the period, and as an example from the early history of academic journals, an emerging genre which would develop into its current form over the following decades. Volume 2, published in 1855, contains the year's three issues.

Contemporaries as Cambridge undergraduates in the late 1840s, Joseph Barber Lightfoot (1828-89), Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828-92), and John Eyton Bickersteth Mayor (1825-1910) all went on to distinguished careers. Mayor, a classical scholar, became President of St John's, while Lightfoot and Hort - members, along with Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901) of the 'Cambridge triumvirate' - were eventually appointed respectively Bishop of Durham and Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. This short-lived triannual journal, which they founded and edited from 1854 to 1859, is interesting both for its combination of classical and patristic material, illuminating the close relationship between theology and classics in the period, and as an example from the early history of academic journals, an emerging genre which would develop into its current form over the following decades. Volume 3, published in 1857, contains the previous year's issues and two responses concerning 'the Route of Hannibal'.