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Books > Religion & Spirituality > General > Philosophy of religion > General
This book is an inquiry into the mystical thought of Gregory
Barhebraeus (1226-1286CE) and its contemporary relevance, to offer
a reading of Barhebraeus' mystical texts by bringing them into
conversation with critical religious studies and the hermeneutical
tradition of philosophy. The methodological focus of my thesis has
led me to pay particular attention to the language used for the
study of mysticism, and I lay emphasis on finding a new language
that avoids the phenomenological assumptions concerning 'mysticism'
to attend to the particularity of 'mystic' traditions, such as that
of the Syriac mystic tradition inherited by Barhebraeus.
Few historical figures have been more important in modeling the
ideal of impartial critical scholarship than Erasmus of Rotterdam
(1469-1536). Yet his critical scholarship, though beholden to no
one, was not dispassionate. James Tracy shows how Erasmus the
scholar sought through his writings to promote the moral and
religious renewal of Christian society. Tracy finds the genesis of
the humanist's notion of a "Christian republic" of pious and
learned individuals in his "Burgundian," or Low Countries, roots.
Erasmus's vision of reform, Tracy argues, sprung from a humanist
tradition focusing on the importance of teaching (doctrina), a
tradition from which Erasmus departed in his optimism about human
nature and his deep suspicion of the powers that be. Amid the
storms of Reformation controversy, he pruned back the
"dissimulation" by which he had thought to convey different
meanings to different readers, yet in the end he could not control
the way his words were read. If Erasmus's scholarly ideal carries
an enduring fascination, so too does his dilemma as a man of
circumspection who would also be a reformer. This title is part of
UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of
California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest
minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist
dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed
scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology.
This title was originally published in 1966.
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United in Love
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Nicholas P. Wolterstorff; Edited by Joshua Cockayne, Jonathan C. Rutledge
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This book provides an ethical framework for understanding the good
and how we can experience it in increasing measure. In Part 1,
Kevin Kinghorn offers a formal analysis of the meaning of the term
"good," the nature of goodness, and why we are motivated to pursue
it. Setting this analysis within a larger ethical framework,
Kinghorn proposes a way of understanding where noninstrumental
value lies, the source of normativity, and the relationship between
the good and the right. Kinghorn defends a welfarist conception of
the good along with the view that mental states alone directly
affect a person's well-being. He endorses a Humean account of
motivation-in which desires alone motivate us, not moral beliefs-to
explain the source of the normative pressure we feel to do the good
and the right. Turning to the place of objectivity within ethics,
he concludes that the concept of "objective wrongness" is a
misguided one, although a robust account of "objective goodness" is
still possible. In Part 2, Kinghorn shifts to a substantive,
Christian account of what the good life consists in as well as how
we can achieve it. Hume's emphasis of desire over reason is not
challenged but rather endorsed as a way of understanding both the
human capacity for choice and the means by which God prompts us to
pursue relationships of benevolence, in which our ultimate
flourishing consists.
The language of habit plays a central role in traditional accounts
of the virtues, yet it has received only modest attention among
contemporary scholars of philosophy, psychology, and religion. This
volume explores the role of both "mere habits" and sophisticated
habitus in the moral life. Beginning with an essay by Stanley
Hauerwas and edited by Gregory R. Peterson, James A. Van Slyke,
Michael L. Spezio, and Kevin S. Reimer, the volume explores the
history of the virtues and habit in Christian thought, the
contributions that psychology and neuroscience make to our
understanding of habitus, freedom, and character formation, and the
relation of habit and habitus to contemporary philosophical and
theological accounts of character formation and the moral life.
Contributors are: Joseph Bankard, Dennis Bielfeldt, Craig Boyd,
Charlene Burns, Mark Graves, Brian Green, Stanley Hauerwas, Todd
Junkins, Adam Martin, Darcia Narvaez, Gregory R. Peterson, Kevin S.
Reimer, Lynn C. Reimer, Michael L. Spezio, Kevin Timpe, and George
Tsakiridis.
Throughout history, humans have dreamed of knowing the reason for the existence of the universe. In The Mind of God, physicist Paul Davies explores whether modern science can provide the key that will unlock this last secret. In his quest for an ultimate explanation, Davies reexamines the great questions that have preoccupied humankind for millennia, and in the process explores, among other topics, the origin and evolution of the cosmos, the nature of life and consciousness, and the claim that our universe is a kind of gigantic computer. Charting the ways in which the theories of such scientists as Newton, Einstein, and more recently Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman have altered our conception of the physical universe. Davies puts these scientists' discoveries into context with the writings of philosophers such as Plato. Descartes, Hume, and Kant. His startling conclusion is that the universe is "no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here." By the means of science, we can truly see into the mind of God.
What does it really mean to be modern? The contributors to this
collection offer critical attempts both to re-read Max Weber's
historical idea of disenchantment and to develop further his
understanding of what the contested relationship between modernity
and religion represents. The approach is distinctive because it
focuses on disenchantment as key to understanding those aspects of
modern society and culture that Weber diagnosed. This is in
opposition to approaches that focus on secularization, narrowly
construed as the rise of secularism or the divide between religion
and politics, and that then conflate this with modernization as a
whole. Other novel contributions are discussions of temporality -
meaning the sense of time or of historical change that posits a
separation between an ostensibly secular modernity and its
religious past - and of the manner in which such a sense of time is
constructed and disseminated through narratives that themselves may
resemble religious myths. It reflects the idea that disenchantment
is a narrative with either Enlightenment, Romantic, or Christian
roots, thereby developing a conversation between critical studies
in the field of secularism (such as those of Talal Asad and Gil
Anidjar) and conceptual history approaches to secularization and
modernity (such as those of Karl Loewith and Reinhart Koselleck),
and in the process creates something that is more than merely the
sum of its parts.
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