If the secular university by definition is non-sectarian or non-denominational, then how can it accommodate a discipline like Christian theology? Doesn't the traditional goal of theological study, which is to attain knowledge of the divine, fundamentally conflict with the main goal of secular academic study, which is to attain knowledge about ourselves and the world in which we live? So why should theology be admitted, or even care about being admitted, into secular academic life? And even if theology were admitted, what contribution to secular academic life could it make? Working from a Christian philosophical and theological perspective but also engaging a wide range of theologians, philosophers, and religious studies scholars, Christian Theology and the Secular University takes on these questions, arguing that Christian theology does belong in the secular university because it provides distinct resources that the secular university needs if it is going to fulfill what should be its main epistemic and educative ends. This book offers a fresh and unique perspective to scholars working in the disciplines of theology, philosophy, and religious studies, and to those in other academic disciplines who are interested in thinking critically and creatively about the place and nature of theological study within the secular university.

A new and groundbreaking investigation which takes full account of the finding of the social and historical sciences whilst offering a religious interpretation of the religions as different culturally conditioned responses to a transcendent Divine Reality. Written with great clarity and force, and with a wealth of fresh insights, this major work (based on the author's Gifford Lectures of 1986-7) treats the principal topics in the philosophy of religion and establishes both a basis for religious affirmation today and a framework for the developing world-wide inter-faith dialogue.

"I think all the great religions of the world - Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism - both untrue and harmful. It is evident as a matter of logic that, since they disagree, not more than one of them can be true."
Bertrand Russell wrote these words in his famous essay, "Why I Am Not A Christian." In Bertrand Russell on God and Religion, Al Seckel presents in one volume the severe scrutiny Russell brought to bear on organized religion in his best essays.
Bertrand Russell on God and Religion is an exhaustive compilation of Russell's best essays on religion, freethought, and rationalism. Al Seckel has rescued many of the writings from obscure pamphlets, chapters buried in books, and from out-of-print periodicals.
From the outset of his career, Russell struggled to uproot and expose the remnants of Puritanism's emphasis upon guilt, sin, and moral condemnation. In "Why I Am Not A Christian," he wrote, "Religion is based . . . primarily and mainly upon fear . . . fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore, it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand."
It is in this vein that Russell approached religion. The essays in this book are representative of the full range of his thinking on the subject. Some of the essays included are, "My Religious Reminiscences," "A Debate On The Existence of God," "What Is An Agnostic?" and "Are the World's Troubles Due to Decay in Faith?"
Bertrand Russell was the recipient of countless awards for excellence during his long lifetime (1872-1970), including the Nobel Prize for literature, which he won in 1950. The range of his critical inquiry is without parallel in contemporary Western culture.

The Greeks are on trial. They have been for generations, if not millennia, fromRome in the first century, to Romanticism in the nineteenth. We debate the place of the Greeks in the university curriculum, in New World culture--we even debate the place of the Greeks in the European Union. This book notices the lingering and half-hidden presence of the Greeks in some strange places--everywhere from the US Supreme Court to the Modern Olympic Games--and in so doing makes an important new contribution to a very old debate.

Challenging commonly held assumptions in the field of religious studies, the author argues that religious pluralism as a paradigm of religious belief is deeply flawed. This work focuses particularly on the foundations of John Hick's influential articulation of religious pluralism, and suggests its consonance with postmodernist criticism. The critique of pluralism is followed by a defense of Christian exclusivism, and its moral viability as a style of religious belief. The comprehensive reference bibliography records the major works in the study of religious pluralism.

This volume focuses on religion from a trans-cultural and international perspective. Its aim is to open up new perspectives on how religions might coexist peacefully within 21st century societies and simultaneously contribute to global pacification. Can a religion cope peacefully with the existence of other religions, without having to abandon its own claim to truth, and if so, what already inherent, specific characteristics would have to be emphasized? Or is secular culture the path to convince different religions of a shared ideal of peaceful co-existence? These questions are approached considering the socio-political implications of religions in Asian, African, Latin-American and European contexts. This collection of essays reflects on the entire spectrum of the highly topical and complex academic discussions pertaining to the interrelation of society, state and religion. One example in this collection features the analysis of a secular state engaging in dialog with Muslim communities through a state-moderated communication platform; another article concentrates on the political impact of Christian churches on Nigerian society by means of political advertisement. Moreover, the different concepts of religion in Western societies are considered: one essay argues that in democratic societies it is the state that must guarantee the freedom of religion and thereby provide the basis for a peaceful co-existence between all religions.

What is language? How did it originate and how does it work? What is its relation to thought and, beyond thought, to reality? Questions like these have been at the center of lively debate ever since the rise of scholarly activities in the Islamic world during the 8th/9th century. However, in contrast to contemporary philosophy, they were not tackled by scholars adhering to only one specific discipline. Rather, they were addressed across multiple fields and domains, no less by linguists, legal theorists, and theologians than by Aristotelian philosophers. In response to the different challenges faced by these disciplines, highly sophisticated and more specialized areas emerged, comparable to what nowadays would be referred to as semantics, pragmatics, and hermeneutics, to name but a few - fields of research that are pursued to this day and still flourish in some of the traditional schools. Philosophy of language, thus, has been a major theme throughout Islamic intellectual culture in general; a theme which, probably due to its trans-disciplinary nature, has largely been neglected by modern research. This book brings together for the first time experts from the various fields involved, in order to explore the riches of this tradition and make them accessible to a broader public interested both in philosophy and the history of ideas more generally.

Contemporary discussions in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of mind are dominated by the presupposition of naturalism. Arguing against this established convention, Jim Slagle offers a thorough defence of Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism (EAAN) and in doing so, reveals how it shows that evolution and naturalism are incompatible. Charting the development of Plantinga's argument, Slagle asserts that the probability of our cognitive faculties reliably producing true beliefs is low if ontological naturalism is true, and therefore all other beliefs produced by these faculties, including naturalism itself, are self-defeating. He critiques other well-known epistemological approaches, including those of Descartes and Quine, and deftly counters the many objections against the EAAN to conclude that metaphysical naturalism should be rejected on the grounds of self-defeat. By situating Plantinga's argument within a wider context and showing that science and evolution cannot entail naturalism, Slagle renders this most common metaphysical view irrational. As such, the book advocates an important reconsideration of contemporary thought at the intersection of philosophy, science and religion.

Throughout history human beings have been preoccupied with personal survival after death. Most world religions therefore proclaim that life continues beyond the grave, and they have depicted the Hereafter in a variety of forms. These various conceptions constitute answers to the most perplexing spiritual questions: Will we remember our former lives in the Hereafter? Will we have bodies? Can bodiless souls recognize each other? Will we continue to have personal identity? Will we be punished or rewarded, or absorbed into the Godhead? These issues serve as the basis of this collection of essays which provide a framework for understanding traditional conceptions of the Hereafter as well as new perspectives.

In The Relevance of Bernard Lonergan's Notion of Self-Appropriation to a Mystical-Political Theology, Ian Bell takes on the issue of the separation of the interior and exterior lives that has come to dominate mystical theology over the years. The mystical life, he claims, is necessarily involved in the establishment of social structures and institutions that govern human living, and the work of Bernard Lonergan on the human subject provides a means by which the connection between the interior and exterior lives may be established. Because human persons operate in a consistent pattern regardless of a given moment's particularities, mystical experience is no longer relegated to so-called spiritual matters, and the insights of mystics may be applied to the Christian call to live as agents of love. With this connection in place, mystical theology and political theology come together in a theology that is both mystical and political.

In Divine Audacity, Peter Dillard presents a historically informed and rigorous analysis of the themes of mystical union, volition and virtue that occupied several of the foremost theological minds in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In particular, the work of Marguerite Porete raises complex questions in these areas, which are further explored by a trio of her near contemporaries. Their respective meditations are thoroughly analysed and then skilfully brought into dialogue. What emerges from Dillard's synthesis of these voices is a contemporary mystical theology that is rooted in Hugh of Balma's affective approach, sharpened through critical engagement with Meister Eckhart's intellectualism, and strengthened by crucial insights gleaned from the writings of John Ruusbroec. The fresh examination of these thinkers - one of whom paid with her life for her radicalism - will appeal to philosophers and theologians alike, while Dillard's own propositions demand attention from all who concern themselves with the nature of the union between the soul and God.

Representing the highest quality of scholarship, Gilles Emery offers a much-anticipated introduction to Catholic doctrine on the Trinity. His extensive research combined with lucid prose provides readers a resource to better understand the foundations of Trinitarian reflection. The book is addressed to all who wish to benefit from an initiation to Trinitarian doctrine. The path proposed by this introductory work comprises six steps. First the book indicates some liturgical and biblical ways for entering into Trinitarian faith. It then presents the revelation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the New Testament, by inviting the reader to reflect upon the signification of the word "God." Next it explores the confessions of Trinitarian faith, from the New Testament itself to the Creed of Constantinople, on which it offers a commentary. By emphasizing the Christian culture inherited from the fourth-century Fathers of the Church, the book presents the fundamental principles of Trinitarian doctrine, which find their summit in the Christian notion of "person." On these foundations, the heart of the book is a synthetic exposition of the persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in their divine being and mutual relations, and in their action for us. Finally, the last step takes up again the study of the creative and saving action of the Trinity: the book concludes with a doctrinal exposition of the "missions" of the Son and Holy Spirit, that is, the salvific sending of the Son and Holy Spirit that leads humankind to the contemplation of the Father.

Levinas's ethical metaphysics is essentially a meditation on what makes ethical agency possible - that which enables us to act in the interest of another, to put the well-being of another before our own. This line of questioning found its inception in and drew its inspiration from the mass atrocities that occurred during the Second World War. The Holocaust , like the Cambodian genocide, or those in Rwanda and Srebrenica, exemplifies what have come to be known as the 'never again' situations. After these events, we looked back each time, with varying degrees of incomprehension, horror, anger and shame, asking ourselves how we could possibly have let it all happen again. And yet, atrocity crimes are still rampant. After Rwanda (1994) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995), came Kosovo (1999) and Darfur (2003). In our present-day world , hate crimes motivated by racial, sexual, or other prejudice, and mass hate such as genocide and terror, are on the rise (think, for example, of Burma, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and North Korea). A critical revaluation of the conditions of possibility of ethical agency is therefore more necessary than ever. This volume is committed to the possibility of 'never again'. It is dedicated to all the victims - living and dead - of what Levinas calls the 'sober, Cain-like coldness' at the root of all crime against humanity , as much as every singular crime against another human being .

Between 1820 and 1860, American social reformers pioneered a sentimental "politics of identification" that invited people of all backgrounds to identify with the victims of war, slavery, and addiction. By portraying Native Americans, slaves, and "drunkards" as both physically vulnerable and socially related, these activists helped their neighbours see them as fully and equally human. Sentimental writers, like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, proposed that the image of God was visible in the victims of violence. Dan Mckanan traces the theme of identification through the literature of social reform, focusing on sentimental novels, temperance tales, and fugitive slave narratives. All of these genres, he suggests, were rooted in a liberal Christian theology that rejected traditional notions of original sin and claimed, instead, that all people possess a divine image with the power to transform the world. Throughout, McKanan integrates the perspectives of theology, history, and literary studies to provide a fuller picture of antebellum social reform. In an era when sentimentality is synonymous with saccharine excess and liberalism with government bureaucracy, he defends both traditions. Though he recognizes the liabilities and limitations of sentimental liberalism, he insists that contemporary activists have much to learn from the abolitionists, nonresistants, and temperance reformers of the antebellum period.