Dalmatian-Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and radical cultural critic Ivan Illich is best known for polemical writings such as Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality, which decried Western institutions of the 1970s. This collection brings together Illich's shorter writings from his early publications through the rise of his remarkable intellectual career, making available works that had fallen into undue obscurity. A fervent critic of Western Catholicism, Illich also addressed contemporary practices in fields from education and medicine to labor and socioeconomic development. At the heart of his work is his opposition to the imperialistic nature of state- and Church-sponsored missionary activities. His deep understanding of Church history, particularly the institutions of the thirteenth century, lent a historian's perspective to his critique of the Church and other twentieth-century institutions. The Powerless Church and Other Selected Writings, 1955-1985 comprises some of Illich's most salient and influential short works as well as a foreword by philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Featuring writings that had previously appeared in now-defunct publications, this volume is an indispensable resource for readers of Illich's longer works and for scholars of philosophy, religion, and cultural critique.

This book offers a new reading of Jonathan Edwards’s virtue ethic that examines a range of qualities Edwards identifies as “virtues� and considers their importance for contemporary ethics. Each of Edwards’s human virtues is “receptive� in nature: humans acquire the virtues through receiving divine grace, and therefore depend utterly on Edwards’s God for virtue’s acquisition. By contending that humans remain authentic moral agents even as they are unable to attain virtue apart from his God’s assistance, Edwards challenges contemporary conceptions of moral responsibility, which tend to emphasize human autonomy as a central part of accountability.

Kierkegaard's God and the Good Life focuses on faith and love, two central topics in Kierkegaard's writings, to grapple with complex questions at the intersection of religion and ethics. Here, leading scholars reflect on Kierkegaard's understanding of God, the religious life, and what it means to exist ethically. The contributors then shift to psychology, hope, knowledge, and the emotions as they offer critical and constructive readings for contemporary philosophical debates in the philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, and epistemology. Together, they show how Kierkegaard continues to be an important resource for understandings of religious existence, public discourse, social life, and how to live virtuously.

David Hume is traditionally seen as a devastating critic of religion. He is widely read as an infidel, a critic of the Christian faith, and an attacker of popular forms of worship. His reputation as irreligious is well forged among his readers, and his argument against miracles sits at the heart of the narrative overview of his work that perennially indoctrinates thousands of first-year philosophy students. In Toward a Humean True Religion, Andre Willis succeeds in complicating Hume's split approach to religion, showing that Hume was not, in fact, dogmatically against religion in all times and places. Hume occupied a "watershed moment," Willis contends, when old ideas of religion were being replaced by the modern idea of religion as a set of epistemically true but speculative claims. Thus, Willis repositions the relative weight of Hume's antireligious sentiment, giving significance to the role of both historical and discursive forces instead of simply relying on Hume's personal animus as its driving force. Willis muses about what a Humean "true religion" might look like and suggests that we think of this as a third way between the classical and modern notions of religion. He argues that the cumulative achievements of Hume's mild philosophic theism, the aim of his moral rationalism, and the conclusion of his project on the passions provide the best content for this "true religion."

This is a textual and contextual study of an early Arabic mirror for princes. 'Mirrors for princes' offer advice to rulers on the ethical and practical aspects of statecraft. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach to an early Arabic mirror, the 'Counsel for Kings' of Pseudo Mawardi, this study evokes the mentality of the distinctive environment - the border region of eastern Iran - in which, it is argued, the text originated. Exploring the 'Counsel for Kings' as the product of a specific cultural milieu at a particular historical moment, as a substantial and influential work of Arabic literature, and as a critical commentary on the political and social conditions of the author's time, this book restores this multi faceted mirror for princes to history. The first volume in this two part study covers the literary, cultural, political and historical contexts and their confluence in Pseudo Mawardi's Nasihat al muluk. The second volume gives direct access to a substantial portion of the text through translation and commentary.

The Qurʾan contains many miracle stories, from Moses's staff turning into a serpent to Mary's conceiving Jesus as a virgin. In Understanding the Qurʾanic Miracle Stories in the Modern Age, Isra Yazicioglu offers a glimpse of the ways in which meaningful implications have been drawn from these apparently strange narratives, both in the premodern and modern era. It fleshes out a fascinating medieval Muslim debate over miracles and connects its insights with early and late modern turning points in Western thought and with contemporary Qurʾanic interpretation. Building on an apparent tension within the Qurʾan and analyzing crucial cases of classical and modern Muslim engagement with these miracle stories, this book illustrates how an apparent site of conflict between faith and reason, or revelation and science, can become a site of fruitful exchange.

This book is a distinctive contribution to a new trend in Qurʾanic studies: it reveals the presence of insightful Qurʾanic interpretation outside of the traditional line-by-line commentary genre, engaging with the works of Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, and Said Nursi. Moreover, focused as it is on the case of miracle stories, the book also goes beyond these specific passages to reflect more broadly on the issue of Qurʾanic hermeneutics. It notes the connections between literal and symbolic approaches and highlights the importance of approaching the Qurʾan with an eye to its potential implications for everyday life.

The essays in Religious Upbringing and the Costs of Freedom are the personal stories of philosophers who were brought up religiously and have broken free, in one way or another, from restraint and oppression. As trained philosophers, they are well equipped to reflect on and analyze their experiences. In this book, they offer not only stories of stress and liberation but ruminations on the moral issues that arise when parents and other caregivers, in seeking to do good by their children, sometimes end up doing real harm to their personal development and sense of autonomy as individuals.

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Raymond D. Bradley, Damien Alexander DuPont, Diane Enns, Paul H. Hirst, Amalia Jiva, Irfan Khawaja, Christine Overall, Tasia R. Persson, and Glen Pettigrove.

Writing has come face-to-face with a most crucial juncture: to negotiate with the inescapable presence of violence. From the domains of contemporary Middle Eastern literature, this book stages a powerful conversation on questions of cruelty, evil, rage, vengeance, madness, and deception. Beyond the narrow judgment of violence as a purely tragic reality, these writers (in states of exile, prison, martyrdom, and war) come to wager with the more elusive, inspiring, and even ecstatic dimensions that rest at the heart of a visceral universe of imagination. Covering complex and controversial thematic discussions, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh forms an extreme record of voices, movements, and thought-experiments drawn from the inner circles of the Middle Eastern region. By exploring the most abrasive writings of this vast cultural front, the book reveals how such captivating outsider texts could potentially redefine our understanding of violence and its now-unstoppable relationship to a dangerous age.

Ibn Rushd, known to Christian Europe as Averroes, came from Cordoba in Spain and lived from 1126 to 1198. He is regarded as the last great Arab philosopher in the Classical tradition, and, under the patronage of the Almohad ruler Abu Ya'quib Yusuf, was a very prolific one. The Tahafut al-Tahafut, written not long after 1180, is his major work and the one in which his original philosophical doctrine is to be found. It takes the form of a refutation of Ghazali's Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), a work begun in 1095 which attacked philosophical speculation and declared some of the beliefs of the Philosophers to be contrary to Islam. Averroes sets his Aristotelian views in contrast with the Neo-Platonist ones attributed to the philosophers by Ghazali. Published in the UNESCO Collection of Great Works under the auspices of the Gibb Memorial Trust and the International Commission for the Translation of Great Works.

A unique introductory guide to the rich, complex and diverse tradition of Islamic philosophy.

"Islamic Philosophy A-Z" comprises over a hundred concise entries, alphabetically ordered and cross-referenced for easy access. All the essential aspects of Islamic philosophy are covered here: key figures, schools, concepts, topics, and issues. Articles on the Peripatetics, Isma'ilis, Illuminationists, Sufis, kalam theologians and later modern thinkers are supplemented by entries on classical Greek influences as well as Jewish philosophers who lived and worked in the Islamic world. Topical entries cover various issues and key positions in all the major areas of philosophy, making clear why the central problems of Islamic philosophy have been, and remain, matters of rational disputation.

This book will prove an indispensable resource to anyone who wishes to gain a better understanding of this fascinating intellectual tradition.

Reflecting upon some problems of the moral life, Gilbert Meilaender considers their difficulties within a vision that accentuates not only the limits, but also the promise, of the Christian story. Created by God as finite beings, we make particular attachments. Redeemed by God for a community transcending nature and history, our love always carries us beyond the special bonds of time and place. We live, therefore, with a sense of permanent tension.

If this tension heightens our sense of the perplexities of life, it should not free us from the obligation to probe, clarify, and (where we can) resolve some of those difficulties. The author holds that theological ethics must clarify the direction for growth and development within the Christian life. He undertakes such analysis, emphasizing throughout the limits of the human condition, the importance of our nature as embodied persons, and the danger and pretension in some of our attempts to take control of and master human life. This Christian vision is developed in chapters that explore a range of moral problems, such as abortion, artificial reproduction, euthanasia, care for defective infants, provision of artificial nutrition and hydration, and marital and political community. These are throughout, however, theological explorations. Taken together they illumine not only particular problems of the moral life but a vision of life--classically Christian in its conception, humane in its care for particular bonds of attachment, and modest in its recognition of moral limits on our ability to seek the good.

Meilaender has developed a broad recognition both among scholars and students of ethics and among interested general readers. He has the capacity to throw fresh angles of vision on complex problems so as to help both the sophisticated and the uninitiated reader to think more penetratingly about moral questions.

The Mahāratnakūta Sūtra is one of the five major sutra groups in the Mahāyāna canon. Of the two great schools of Buddhism, Mahāyāna has the greatest number of adherents worldwide--it prevails among the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Tibetans, and Vietnamese--and contains within it a number of movements, notably Zen, which have been of growing interest in the West in recent decades. Yet despite this increased attention and enormous following, translations of Mahāyāna scriptures have been scarce and fragmentary; clearly, a comprehensive translation of a major work within the canon was called for.

This volume addresses that need. It contains 22 of the 49 Sūtras of the Mahāratnakūta (or "Treasury") Sūtra, many translated for the first time in a Western language, selected and arranged to give the modern reader a progressive introduction to one of the world's major religious traditions. Subjects covered include Māyā and miracles, the teachings on Consciousness, Emptiness, and monastic discipline, the Mystical Light of the Tathāgata, and the devotional practice of Pure Land, making this a comprehensive source book of Mahāyāna Buddhism hitherto unavailable in English. The book also includes an introduction to provide historical and interpretive guidance, annotations that assist in the comprehension of difficult passages, and an extensive glossary that will be valuable to specialist and layman alike. A team of scholars, working in Taiwan, spent eight years translating the Treasury's million words from Chinese, using Tibetan texts for comparison and checking each Sūtra with an international board of scholars. In the course of translating from the original, special effort was made to retain both the devotional style appropriate for religious reading and the precision required by the scholar, while presenting the material with a clarity and flow that would make it accessible to the Western layman. The editors then selected, arranged, and annotated the 22 Sūtras presented here.

Published in cooperation with The Institute for Advanced Studies of World Religions.

The Hwa Yen school of Mahāyāna Buddhism bloomed in China in the 7th and 8th centuries A.D. Today many scholars regard its doctrines of Emptiness, Totality, and Mind-Only as the crown of Buddhist thought and as a useful and unique philosophical system and explanation of man, world, and life as intuitively experienced in Zen practice.

For the first time in any Western language Garma Chang explains and exemplifies these doctrines with references to both oriental masters and Western philosophers. The Buddha's mystical experience of infinity and totality provides the framework for this objective revelation of the three pervasive and interlocking concepts upon which any study of Mahāyāna philosophy must depend.

Following an introductory section describing the essential differences between Judeo-Christian and Buddhist philosophy, Professor Chang provides an extensive, expertly developed section on the philosophical foundations of Hwa Yen Buddhism dealing with the core concept of True Voidness, the philosophy of Totality, and the doctrine of Mind-Only. A concluding section includes selections of Hwa Yen readings and biographies of the patriarchs, as well as a glossary and list of Chinese terms.

The rapid expansion of the halal industry and its markets has occurred not only in the heavily Islamic regions of Southeast Asia and the Middle East, but also in more unexpected countries such as Turkey, Japan, and South Korea, plus many others around the world. Yet despite both the increasing number of practicing Muslims and the demand for halal products worldwide, a base of scholarship on the subject has never emerged. The industry has been more market driven rather than knowledge driven. As such, industry operators have frequently drawn attention to the absence of such an authoritative text, one that would elucidate the shariah credibly of halal as well as its market presence. Mohammad Hashim Kamali's Shariah and the Halal Industry is designed to fill this gap. The first of its kind in the English language, the book is written in an accessible and reader-friendly style by a world-renowned authority on Islamic law and jurisprudence. The book serves as a reference on the shariah foundations of halal and meets the needs not only of industry operators and decision-makers, but also of students, scholars of Islam, and the many practicing Muslims who are customers of the halal industry across the globe. The book can also serve to educate the general public and non-specialist readers on Islam and shariah law at-large.

Late antique Corinth was on the frontline of the radical political, economic and religious transformations that swept across the Mediterranean world from the second to sixth centuries CE. A strategic merchant city, it became a hugely important metropolis in Roman Greece and, later, a key focal point for early Christianity. In late antiquity, Corinthians recognised new Christian authorities; adopted novel rites of civic celebration and decoration; and destroyed, rebuilt and added to the city's ancient landscape and monuments. Drawing on evidence from ancient literary sources, extensive archaeological excavations and historical records, Amelia Brown here surveys this period of urban transformation, from the old Agora and temples to new churches and fortifications. Influenced by the methodological advances of urban studies, Brown demonstrates the many ways Corinthians responded to internal and external pressures by building, demolishing and repurposing urban public space, thus transforming Corinthian society, civic identity and urban infrastructure. In a departure from isolated textual and archaeological studies, she connects this process to broader changes in metropolitan life, contributing to the present understanding of urban experience in the late antique Mediterranean.

Commonly known as the 'spiritual father of Pakistan', the philosophical and political ideas of Muhammad Iqbal shaped the face of Indian Muslim nationalism and the direction of modernist reformist Islam around the world. This volume brings together a range of prominent and emerging voices within American and European Islamic studies to share the latest developments on Iqbal's thought. They re-examine the ideas that lie at the heart of Iqbal's own thought: religion, science, metaphysics, nationalism and religious identity, and bring out many new connections between the 'Sage of the Ummah' and the greatest thinkers and ideas of European and Islamic philosophies.

Philosophy in the Islamic world from the 9th to 11th centuries was characterized by an engagement with Greek philosophical works in Arabic translation. This volume collects papers on both the Greek philosophers in their new Arabic guise, and on reactions to the translation movement in the period leading up to Avicenna. In a first section, Adamson provides general studies of the 'formative' period of philosophy in the Islamic world, discussing the Arabic reception of Aristotle and of his commentators. He also argues that this formative period was characterized not just by the use of Hellenic materials, but also by a productive exchange of ideas between Greek-inspired 'philosophy (falsafa)' and Islamic theology (kalAE m). A second section considers the underappreciated philosophical impact of Galen, using Arabic sources to understand Galen himself, and exploring the thought of the doctor and philosopher al-RAE zAE", who drew on Galen as a chief inspiration. A third section looks at al-FAE rAE bAE" and the so-called 'Baghdad school' of the 10th century, examining their reaction to Aristotle's Metaphysics, his epistemology, and his famous deterministic 'sea battle' argument. A final group of papers is devoted to Avicenna's philosophy, which marks the beginning of a new era of philosophy in the Islamic world.

The volume brings together seventeen studies on Avicenna by Dimitri Gutas, written over the past twenty-five years. They aim to establish Avicenna's historical and philosophical context as a means to determining his philosophical project and the orientations of his thought. They deal with his life and works, his method, his epistemology, and his later reception in the Islamic world, ending with a programmatic essay on the state of the field of Avicennan studies and future agenda. Occasioned by issues raised in Gutas's monograph on Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (whose second edition has just appeared), they form a substantive complement to it. For this reprint, a number of the essays have been reset and accordingly revised and updated. Provided with exhaustive indexes of names, places, subjects, and technical terms, the volume constitutes a new and major research tool for the study of Avicenna and his heritage. (CS1050).

A militant Marxist atheist and a "Radical Orthodox" Christian theologian square off on everything from the meaning of theology and Christ to the war machine of corporate mafia. "What matters is not so much that Zizek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what he sometimes claims) a heterodox version of Christian belief."-John Milbank "To put it even more bluntly, my claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank."-Slavoj Zizek In this corner, philosopher Slavoj Zizek, a militant atheist who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion's illusions; in the other corner, "Radical Orthodox" theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Zizek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have not only proven themselves worthy adversaries, they have shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed. Zizek has long been interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology. And Milbank, seeing global capitalism as the new century's greatest ethical challenge, has pushed his own ontology in more political and materialist directions. Their debate in The Monstrosity of Christ concerns the future of religion, secularity, and political hope in light of a monsterful event-God becoming human. For the first time since Zizek's turn toward theology, we have a true debate between an atheist and a theologian about the very meaning of theology, Christ, the Church, the Holy Ghost, Universality, and the foundations of logic. The result goes far beyond the popularized atheist/theist point/counterpoint of recent books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others. Zizek begins, and Milbank answers, countering dialectics with "paradox." The debate centers on the nature of and relation between paradox and parallax, between analogy and dialectics, between transcendent glory and liberation. Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher and cultural critic. He has published over thirty books, including Looking Awry, The Puppet and the Dwarf, and The Parallax View (these three published by the MIT Press). John Milbank is an influential Christian theologian and the author of Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason and other books. Creston Davis, who conceived of this encounter, studied under both Zizek and Milbank.

The essays in Religious Upbringing and the Costs of Freedom are the personal stories of philosophers who were brought up religiously and have broken free, in one way or another, from restraint and oppression. As trained philosophers, they are well equipped to reflect on and analyze their experiences. In this book, they offer not only stories of stress and liberation but ruminations on the moral issues that arise when parents and other caregivers, in seeking to do good by their children, sometimes end up doing real harm to their personal development and sense of autonomy as individuals.

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Raymond D. Bradley, Damien Alexander DuPont, Diane Enns, Paul H. Hirst, Amalia Jiva, Irfan Khawaja, Christine Overall, Tasia R. Persson, and Glen Pettigrove.

Medieval Islamic philosophers were occupied with questions of cosmology, predestination and salvation and human responsibility for actions. For Ismailis, the related notions of religious leadership, namely the imamate, and the eschatological role of the prophets and imams were equally central. These were also a matter of doctrinal controversy within the so-called Iranian school of Ismaili philosophical theology. Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani (d. after 411/1020) was one of the most important theologians in the Fatimid period, who rose to prominence during the reign of the imam-caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (r. 386/996-411/1021). He is renowned for blending the Neoplatonic philosophical heritage with Ismaili religious tradition. This book provides an analysis of al-Kirmani's thought and sheds new light on the many layers of allusion which characterise his writings. Through a translation and analytical commentary of the eighth chapter of al-Kirm?n?'s Kit?b al-Riy?? (Book of Meadows), which is devoted to the subject of divine preordination and human redemption, Maria De Cillis shows readers first-hand his theologically distinctive interpretation of qada and qadar (divine decree and destiny). Here, al-Kirm?n? attempts to harmonise the views of earlier renowned Ismaili missionaries, Abu Hatim Ahmad b. Hamdan al-Razi (d. 322/934), Muhammad b. Ahmad al-Nasafi (d. 331/942) and Abu Ya?qub Ishaq b. Ahmad al-Sijistani (d. c. 361/971). De Cillis skilfully guides the reader through al-Kirmani's metaphysical and esoteric correspondences, offering new insights into Shi'i/Ismaili philosophical thought which will be of great interest to those in the field of Shi?i studies and, more broadly, to scholars of medieval philosophy.

In his "New York Times" bestseller "What Jesus Meant," Garry Wills offered a fresh and incisive reading of Jesusa teachings. Now Wills turns to Paul, whose writings have provoked controversy throughout Christian history. Upending many common assumptions, Wills argues eloquently that what Paul meant was not something contrary to what Jesus meant. Rather, the best way to know Jesus is to discover Paul. In this stimulating and masterly analysis, Wills illuminates how Paul, writing on the road and in the heat of the moment, and often in the midst of controversy, galvanized a movement and offers us the best reflection of those early times.