In Orthodoxy, Gilbert K. Chesterton explains how and why he came to believe in Christianity and more specifically the Catholic Church's brand of orthodoxy. In the book, Chesterton takes the spiritually curious reader on an intellectual quest. While looking for the meaning of life, he finds truth that uniquely fulfills human needs. This is the truth revealed in Christianity. Chesterton likens this discovery to a man setting off from the south coast of England, journeying for many days, only to arrive at Brighton, the point he originally left from. Such a man, he proposes, would see the wondrous place he grew up in with newly appreciative eyes. This is a common theme in Chesterton's works, and one which he gave fictional embodiment to in Manalive. A truly lively and enlightening book!

What is suspense, and why do we feel it? These questions are at the heart of the first part of this study. It develops and defends the 'imminence theory of suspense' - the view that suspense arises in situations that are structurally defined by something essential being imminent. Next, the study utilizes this theory as an interpretative key to Soren Kierkegaard's seminal work 'Frygt og Baeven' ('FB'). FB is an exploration of what it means to take the story of Abraham and Isaac as a paradigmatic example of faith. The study argues that a core aspect of how Kierkegaard conceptualizes faith through the figure of Abraham is suspense. The argument is built upon the observation that to have faith is to be a hero. To be hero means to belong to a story. Stories manifests different conceptualizations of time. Abraham's story, as FB frames it, is radically geared towards something imminent - it is characterized by an essential relation of suspense. The study then explores how suspense not only forms part of the conceptualization of faith, but is also part of how this conceptualization is communicated. Thus, the study argues that there exists a symmetry of suspense between the rhetorical and the conceptual levels of the text.

This book explores the philosophical issues arising from the distinctively Christian doctrines of the atonement, incarnation, and Trinity. To many philosophers and theologians, these doctrines raise considerable philosophical quandaries. In this volume, C. Stephen Layman explores such questions as: Why do these doctrines matter? Do they make sense? Do the historically influential theories about them hold up under scrutiny? To what extent do recent contributions by philosophers (e.g., Richard Swinburne, Thomas V. Morris, Stephen T. Davis, Brian Leftow, and Peter van Inwagen) shed light on these doctrines? This philosophical investigation illuminates how religious questions can be addressed with philosophical seriousness.

In "Abba's Way, " Jesus returns to set the world's religions straight.

Abba is the shockingly-familiar Aramaic name for God that Jesus uses in the Lord's Prayer. Jesus argues that this very Abba is within each of us, ready to change our lives for the better. If we only have eyes to see.

In 70 brief poetic essays, Jesus explains how we can move the world from its present violent precipice to a global society built around negotiation, individual achievement and openness to the presence of Abba in each person.

On the occasion of the publication of Stephen C. Rose's 'The Grass Roots Church," "The New York Times" called the author a new Martin Luther whose theses might change today's world.

Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul challenges the traditional reading of Paul. Troels Engberg-Pedersen argues that the usual, mainly cognitive and metaphorical, ways of understanding central Pauline concepts, such as 'being in Christ', 'having God's pneuma (spirit), Christ's pneuma, and Christ himself in one', must be supplemented by a literal understanding that directly reflects Paul's cosmology.
Engberg-Pedersen shows that Paul's cosmology, not least his understanding of the pneuma, was a materialist, bodily one: the pneuma was a physical element that would at the resurrection act directly on the ordinary human bodies of believers and transform them into 'pneumatic bodies'. This literal understanding of the future events is then traced back to the Pauline present as Engberg-Pedersen considers how Paul conceived in bodily terms of a range of central themes like his own conversion, his mission, the believers' reception of the pneuma in baptism, and the way the apostle took the pneuma to inform his own and their ways of life from the beginning to the projected end.
In developing this picture of Paul's world view, an explicitly philosophically oriented form of interpretation ('philosophical exegesis') is employed, in which the interpreter applies categories of interpretation that make sense philosophically, whether in an ancient or a modern context. For this enterprise Engberg-Pedersen draws in particular on ancient Stoic materialist and monistic physics and cosmology - as opposed to the Platonic, immaterialist and dualistic categories that underlie traditional readings of Paul - and on modern ideas on 'religious experience', 'self', 'body' and 'practice' derived from Foucault and Bourdieu. In this way Paul is shown to have spelled out philosophically his Jewish, 'apocalyptic' world view, which remains a central feature of his thought.
The book states the cosmological case for the author's earlier 'ethical' reading of Paul in his prize-winning book, Paul and the Stoics (2000).

This magnum opus is not another catalogue of the forms of biblical literature, but a deeply reflected account of the significance of form itself. Buss writes out of his experience in Western philosophy and the intricate involvement of biblical criticism in philosophical history. Equally, biblical criticism and the development of notions of form are related to social contexts, whether from the side of the aristocracy (tending towards generality) or of the bourgeois (tending towards particularity) or of an inclusive society (favouring a relational view). Form criticism, in Buss's conception, is no mere formal exercise, but the observation of interrelationships among thoughts and moods, linguistic regularities and the experiences and activities of life. This work, with its many examples from both Testaments, will be fundamental for Old and New Testament scholars alike.>

This book argues against the mainstream view that we should treat propositional attitudes as internal states, suggesting that to treat beliefs as things of certain sort (i.e. to reify them) is a mistake. The reificatory view faces several problems that the non-reificatory view avoids, and it is argued the non-reificatory view is more faithful to the everyday concept of belief. There are several major reasons why it might be thought that a reificatory approach to mental states is nevertheless unavoidable, but this book attempts to show that none of these reasons is at all convincing; in each case, the evidence is consistent with a non-reificatory view. Having argued that the popularity of the reificatory view is unjustified, the author examines history of psychology and philosophy of mind, and the structure of psychological language, in order to show that this popularity is quite understandable, but mistaken nonetheless.

This book answers questions about secularization: Does it dissolve religion, or transform it into faith in a universally valid value? Is it restricted to the west or can it occur everywhere? Using ideas of Max Weber, the book conceives secularization as a process comparable to the rational development of science and production. What is the value secularization propagates? Sifting historical texts, Steinvorth argues the value is authenticity, to be understood as being true to one's talents developed in activities that are done for their own sake and provide life with meaning, and as unconditionally commanded. How can a value be unconditionally demanded? This question leads to an investigation of the self that combines Kant's ideas on the conditions of the possibility of experience with modern brain science, and to the metaphysical deliberation whether to prefer a world with creatures able to do both good and evil to one without them. It is not enough, however, to point to facts. We rather need to understand what secularization, religion and their possible rationality consist in. Max Weber's sociology of religion has provided us with the conceptual means to do so, which this book develops. Secularization is rediscovered as the same progress of rationality in the sphere of religion that we find in the development of the spheres of science, art, the economy and politics or public affairs. It proves to be the perfection rather than the dissolution of religion - a perfection that consists in recognizing authenticity as the successor of the absolute of religion.

Richard Swinburne presents a substantially rewritten and updated edition of his most celebrated book. No other work has made a more powerful case for the probability of the existence of God. Swinburne argues compellingly that the existence of the universe, its law-governed nature and fine-tuning, human consciousness and moral awareness, and evidence of miracles and religious experience, all taken together (and despite the occurrence of pain and suffering), make it likely that there is a God.

This book presents a fascinating, philosophical approach to the concept of divine revelation, exploring the implications this theory may have for generating a new concept of religious truth. "Obstacles to Divine Revelation" applies a philosophical approach to examining the concept of divine revelation and explores the notion that it may not be a simple matter for God, if there is a God, to give revelation to human beings.Rolfe King argues that there are obstacles to divine revelation and that exploring these leads to a significant clarification of the idea of evidence for God. These obstacles may also account for aspects of divine hiddenness which have not been adequately explored in philosophy of religion or theology. King contends that it is impossible for God to give human beings knowledge of God unless they also have some trust, or faith, in God, and that it is impossible to separate the concept of evidence of possible divine revelation from notions of divine plans.The idea of a necessary structure of revelation, should there be a God who chooses to give revelation, is explored, and it is argued that this leads to Hume's famous argument about miracles being turned on its head. A unique explanation of the narrative power of the incarnation in Christian theology is given, seeing incarnation as part of the best divine plan to overcome obstacles to revelation. King highlights a new theory of religious truth as part of a suggested wider theory of knowledge which will be of interest to philosophers in both the Anglo-American and continental traditions of philosophy.

This book is based on the study of the traditional Chinese philosophy, and explores the relationship between philosophy and people's fate. The book points out that heaven is an eternal topic in Chinese philosophy. The concept of heaven contains religious implications and reflects the principles the Chinese people believed in and by which they govern their lives. The traditional Chinese philosophy of fate is conceptualized into the "unification of Heaven and man". Different interpretations of the inter-relationships between Heaven, man and their unification mark different schools of the traditional Chinese philosophy. This book identifies 14 different schools of theories in this regard. And by analyzing these schools and theories, it summarizes the basic characteristics of traditional Chinese philosophy, compares the Chinese philosophy of fate with the Western one, and discusses the relationship between philosophy and man's fate.

This book develops a new philosophy of Israel education. "Person-centered" Israel education is concerned with developing in individual learners the ability to understand and make rational, emotional, and ethical decisions about Israel, and about the challenges Israel regularly faces, whether they be existential, spiritual, democratic, humanitarian, national, etc. Chazan begins by laying out the terms of the conversation then examines the six-pronged theory of "person-centered" Israel education to outline the aims, content, pedagogy, and educators needed to implement this program. Finally, the author meditates on what a transformation from ethnic to ethical education might look like in this context and others. This book is Open Access under a CC-BY license.

Late-modern theology is marked by persistent and widespread uncertainty as to how the wrath of God can be taken up as a legitimate theme within dogmatics. Rather than engage the most fundamental task of clarifying the inner logic by which God's identity is revealed in scripture, privilege has been ceded either to cultural and textual criticism, to ostensibly self-evident moral sensibilities, or to the thematization of religious experience. The present work sets out to rectify this misstep. The result is a rigorous proposal for understanding wrath expressly within the doctrine of God, as a redemptive mode of divine righteousness.

'Content analysis'-which is a computer-assisted form of textual analysis-is used to examine divine activity in six prophetic texts, comparing God's activity to that of humans. In this methodologically innovative study, the author concludes, in the light of quantitative data, that God is harsher to non-Israelites than to Israelites in all the texts, and much kinder to Israelites in Joel than in the typical prophet. God and humans are involved in much the same kinds of physical and mental processes, but to considerably different degrees. Griffin argues persuasively that the God of the prophets is not the 'wholly other' of some theologies, but neither do his actions follow exactly the human pattern.

Transregional and regional elites of various backgrounds were essential for the integration of diverse regions into the early Islamic Empire, from Central Asia to North Africa. This volume is an important contribution to the conceptualization of the largest empire of Late Antiquity. While previous studies used Iraq as the paradigm for the entire empire, this volume looks at diverse regions instead. After a theoretical introduction to the concept of 'elites' in an early Islamic context, the papers focus on elite structures and networks within selected regions of the Empire (Transoxiana, Khurasan, Armenia, Fars, Iraq, al-Jazira, Syria, Egypt, and Ifriqiya). The papers analyze elite groups across social, religious, geographical, and professional boundaries. Although each region appears unique at first glance, based on their heterogeneous surviving sources, its physical geography, and its indigenous population and elites, the studies show that they shared certain patterns of governance and interaction, and that this was an important factor for the success of the largest empire of Late Antiquity.

In In Exile, Jessica Dubow situates exile in a new context in which it holds both critical capacity and political potential. She not only outlines the origin of the relationship between geography and philosophy in the Judaic intellectual tradition; but also makes secular claims out of Judaism’s theological sources. Analysing key Jewish intellectual figures such as Walter Benjamin, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt, Dubow presents exile as a form of thought and action and reconsiders attachments of identity, history, time, and territory. In her unique combination of geography, philosophy and some of the key themes in Judaic thought, she has constructed more than a study of interdisciplinary fluidity. She delivers a striking case for understanding the critical imagination in spatial terms and traces this back to a fundamental – if forgotten – exilic pull at the heart of Judaic thought.