Among contemporary Anglo-American philosophers and students there is a growing awareness of the need to engage more both with philosophical perspectives of other faith traditions and also the distinctive continental tradition of philosophy. This important new collection aims to engage philosophers from a variety of different backgrounds and traditions (religious and non-religious) to stimulate dialogue on philosophical method. The volume aims to ask an emerging generation of philosophers who specialize in philosophy of religion to write about their personal understanding of the practice, method and future focus of the subject, with the ultimate goal of illustrating why this expanding subject area is important.

Chaos is a perennial source of fear and fascination. The original "formless void" (tohu-wa-bohu) mentioned in the book of Genesis, chaos precedes the created world: a state of anarchy before the establishment of cosmic order. But chaos has frequently also been conceived of as a force that persists in the cosmos and in society and threatens to undo them both. From the cultures of the ancient Near East and the Old Testament to early modernity, notions of the divine have included the power to check and contain as well as to unleash chaos as a sanction for the violation of social and ethical norms. Yet chaos has also been construed as a necessary supplement to order, a region of pure potentiality at the base of reality that provides the raw material of creation or even constitutes a kind of alternative order itself. As such, it generates its own peculiar 'formations of the formless'. Focusing on the connection between the cosmic and the political, this volume traces the continuities and re-conceptualizations of chaos from the ancient Near East to early modern Europe across a variety of cultures, discourses and texts. One of the questions it poses is how these pre-modern 'chaos theories' have survived into and reverberate in our own time.

This book addresses several dimensions of religious revelation. These include its occurrence in various religious traditions, its different forms, its elaborations, how it has been understood by Western theologians, and differing views of revelation's ontological status. It has been remarked that revelation is most at home in theistic traditions, and this book gives each of the three Abrahamic traditions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - its own chapter. Revelation, however, is not limited to theistic traditions; forms found in Buddhism and nondevotional (nontheistic) Hinduism are also explored. In the book's final chapter a particularly significant form of religious revelation is identified and examined: pervasive revelation. The theistic manifestation of this form of revelation, pervasive in the sense that it may occurs in all the domains or dimensions of human existence, is shown to be richly represented in the Psalms, where God's presence may be found in the heavens, in the growing of grass, and in one's daily going out and coming in. Pervasive revelation of religious reality is also shown to be present in the Buddhist tradition.

This book addresses a variety of important questions on nature, science, and spirituality: Is the natural world all that there is? Or is it possible to move 'beyond nature'? What might it mean to transcend nature? What reflections of anything 'beyond nature' might be found in nature itself? Gathering papers originally delivered at the 2018 annual conference of the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology (ESSSAT), the book includes contributions of an international group of scientists, philosophers, theologians and historians, all discussing nature and what may lie beyond it. More than 20 chapters explore questions of science, nature, spirituality and more, including Nature - and Beyond? Immanence and Transcendence in Science and Religion Awe and wonder in scientific practice: Implications for the relationship between science and religion The Cosmos Considered as a Moral Institution The transcendent within: how our own biology leads to spirituality Preserving the heavens and the earth: Planetary sustainability from a Biblical and educational perspective Issues in Science and Theology: Nature - and Beyond will benefit a broad audience of students, scholars and faculty in such disciplines as philosophy, history of science, theology, and ethics.

Blaise Pascal's famous Pens es (Thoughts) is, in reality, a collection of notes he made for a book he never wrote. Many of the thoughts are fragmentary in nature, and the sectionalising and numbering was devised by a later editor. Yet they contain the key ideas of his religious philosophy, including his famous wager, as well as many other insights and ideas such as his celebrated comment on Cleopatra's nose. This is a new edition (not a scan) of the W. F. Trotter translation of 1908, with an introduction by T. S. Eliot.

Religion is considered by many to be something of the past, but it has a lasting hold in society and influences people across many cultures. This integration of spirituality causes numerous impacts across various aspects of modern life. Multiculturalism and the Convergence of Faith and Practical Wisdom in Modern Society is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly research on the cultural, sociological, economic, and philosophical effects of religion on modern society and human behavior. Featuring extensive coverage across a range of relevant perspectives and topics, such as social reforms, national identity, and existential spirituality, this publication is ideally designed for theoreticians, practitioners, researchers, policy makers, advanced-level students and sociologists.

This contribution to the global history of ideas uses biographical profiles of 18th-century contemporaries to find what Salafist and Sufi Islam, Evangelical Protestant and Jansenist Catholic Christianity, and Hasidic Judaism have in common. Such figures include Muhammad Ibn abd al-Wahhab, Count Nikolaus Zinzendorf, Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Israel Ba'al Shem Tov. The book is a unique and comprehensive study of the conflicted relationship between the "evangelical" movements in all three Abrahamic religions and the ideas of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. Centered on the 18th century, the book reaches back to the third century for precedents and context, and forward to the 21st for the legacy of these movements. This text appeals to students and researchers in many fields, including Philosophy and Religion, their histories, and World History, while also appealing to the interested lay reader.

According to Augustine's doctrine of original sin, Adam's progeny share a collective guilt which, like an infection, spreads through wayward sexual desires, passing from parent to child. But is it fair to blame sinners if they inherit evil like a disease? Stricken by Sin clarifies the logic and illogic of the controversial views about human agency Augustine defended in his later years. The first half of the book examines why Augustine believed we are trapped by evil, and why only Christ can save us. Couenhoven focuses on Augustine's debates with the Pelagians about whether we control our personal identities, what we should be held culpable for, and whether freedom is compatible with necessity. The second half of the book offers a philosophically and scientifically astute retrieval of some of Augustine's most divisive claims. Couenhoven makes a case for the surprising thesis that a carefully formulated doctrine of original sin is profoundly humane. The claim that sin is original takes seriously our dependence on one another for essential aspects of character and personality, our ownership of cognitive and volitional states that are not simply products of voluntary choices, and our status as personal agents of evil. Attending to these aspects of our lives challenges the idea that each individual's moral and spiritual standing is up to her or him, and drives us to ponder not only the shape of the freedom we seek and the nature of our responsibility, but also the need for grace we all share.

Contributions by leading philosophers in the United States and Europe address the decline of metaphysics and the gap that has developed for the non-theological analysis of religion. What role should religion play in society at a time when metaphysics has come into disrepute? The metaphysical assumptions behind traditional theologies are no longer widely accepted, but it is unclear as to how this "end of metaphysics" should be interpreted, or what implications it has for our comprehension of religion.

The posthumous publication of Emmanuel Levinas's wartime diaries, postwar lectures, and drafts for two novels afford new approaches to understanding the relationship between literature, philosophy, and religion. This volume gathers an international list of experts to examine new questions raised by Levinas's deep and creative experiment in thinking at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and religion. Chapters address the role and significance of poetry, narrative, and metaphor in accessing the ethical sense of ordinary life; Levinas's critical engagement with authors such as Leon Bloy, Paul Celan, Vassily Grossman, Marcel Proust, and Maurice Blanchot; analyses of Levinas's draft novels Eros ou Triple opulence and La Dame de chez Wepler; and the application of Levinas's thought in reading contemporary authors such as Ian McEwen and Cormac McCarthy. Contributors include Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Kevin Hart, Eric Hoppenot, Vivian Liska, Jean-Luc Nancy and Francois-David Sebbah, among others.

The phenomenological method in the study of religions has provided the linchpin supporting the argument that Religious Studies constitutes an academic discipline in its own right and thus that it is irreducible either to theology or to the social sciences. This book examines the figures whom the author regards as having been most influential in creating a phenomenology of religion. Background factors drawn from philosophy, theology and the social sciences are traced before examining the thinking of scholars within the Dutch, British and North American "schools" of religious phenomenology. Many of the severe criticisms, which have been leveled against the phenomenology of religion during the past twenty-five years by advocates of reductionism, are then presented and analyzed. The author concludes by reviewing alternatives to the polarized positions so characteristic of current debates in Religious Studies before making a case for what he deems a "reflexive phenomenology."