The recovery of nature has been a unifying and enduring aim of the writings of Ralph McInerny, Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame, director of the Jacques Maritain Center, former director of the Medieval Institute, and author of numerous works in philosophy, literature, and journalism. While many of the fads that have plagued philosophy and theology during the last half-century have come and gone, recent developments suggest that McInerny's commitment to Aristotelian-Thomism was boldly, if quietly, prophetic. In his persistent, clear, and creative defenses of natural theology and natural law, McInerny has appealed to nature to establish a dialogue between theists and non-theists, to contribute to the moral and political renewal of American culture, and particularly to provide some of the philosophical foundations for Catholic theology.

This volume brings together essays by an impressive group of scholars, including William Wallace, O.P., Jude P. Dougherty, John Haldane, Thomas DeKoninck, Alasdair MacIntyre, David Solomon, Daniel McInerny, Janet E. Smith, Michael Novak, Stanley Hauerwas, Laura Garcia, Alvin Plantinga, Alfred J. Freddoso, and David B. Burrell, C.S.C.

Our digital technologies have inspired new ways of thinking about old religious topics. Digitalists include computer scientists, transhumanists, singularitarians, and futurists. Writers such as Moravec, Bostrom, Kurzweil, and Chalmers are digitalists. Although they are usually scientists, rationalists, and atheists, digitalists they have worked out novel and entirely naturalistic ways of thinking about bodies, minds, souls, universes, gods, and life after death. Your Digital Afterlives starts with three digitalist theories of life after death. It examines personality capture, body uploading, and promotion to higher levels of simulation. It then examines the idea that reality itself is ultimately a system of self-surpassing computations. On that view, you will have infinitely many digital lives across infinitely many digital worlds. Your Digital Afterlives looks at superhuman bodies and infinite bodies. Thinking of nature in purely computational terms has the potential to radically and positively change our understanding of life after death.

'A Theory of the Absolute' develops a worldview that is opposed to the dominant paradigm of physicalism and atheism. It provides powerful arguments for the existence of the soul and the existence of the absolute, showing that faith is not in contradiction to reason.

In the twentieth century, many contemporary epistemologists in the analytic tradition have entered into debate regarding the right to belief with new tools: Richard Swinburne, Anthony Kenny, Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Peter van Inwagen (who contributes a piece in this volume) defending or contesting the requirement of evidence for any justified belief. The best things we can do, it seems, is to examine more attentively the true notion of "right to believe", especially about religious matters. This is exactly what authors of the papers in this book do.

This book pursues the implications for linking Lenin with theology, which is not a project that has been undertaken thus far. What does this inveterate atheist known for describing religion as 'spiritual booze' (a gloss on Marx's 'opium of the people') have to do with theology? This book reveals far more than might initially be expected, so much so that Lenin and the Russian Revolution cannot be understood without this complex engagement with theology.
It also seeks to bring Lenin into recent debates over the intersections between theology and the Left, between the Bible and political thought. The key names involved in this debate are reasonably well-known, including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zižek, Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Terry Eagleton, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Boer has written concerning these critics, among others, in Boer's earlier five-volume Criticism of Heaven and Earth (Brill and Haymarket, 2007-13). Lenin and Theology builds upon this earlier project but it also stands alone as a substantial study in its own right. But it will be recognised as a contribution that follows a series that has, as critics have pointed out, played a major role in reviving and taking to a new level the debate over Marxism and religion.
The book is based upon a careful, detailed and critical reading of the whole 45 volumes of his Collected Works in English translation - 55 volumes in the Russian original. From that close attention to the texts, a number of key themes have emerged: the ambivalence over freedom of choice in matters of religion; his love of the sayings and parables of Jesus in the Gospels; his own love of constructing new parables; the extended and complex engagements with Christian socialists and 'God-builders' among the Bolsheviks; the importance of Hegel for his reassessments of religion; the arresting suggestion that a revolution is a miracle, which redefines the meaning of miracle; and the veneration of Lenin after his death.

Many people believe that during the Middle Ages Christianity was actively hostile toward science (then known as natural philosophy) and impeded its progress. This comprehensive survey of science and religion during the period between the lives of Aristotle and Copernicus demonstrates how this was not the case. Medieval theologians were not hostile to learning natural philosophy, but embraced it. Had they had not done so, the science that developed during the Scientific Revolution would not--and could not--have occurred. Students and lay readers will learn how the roots of much of the scientific culture of today originated with the religious thinkers of the Middle Ages. Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550 thoroughly covers the relationship between science and religion in the medieval period, and provides many resources for the student or lay reader: Discusses how the influx of Greek and Arabic science in the 12th and 13th centuries-- especially the works of Aristotle in logic and natural philosophy--dramatically changed how science was viewed in Western Europe. Demonstrates how medieval universities and their teachers disseminated a positive attitude toward rational inquiry and made it possible for Western Europe to become oriented toward science. Includes primary documents that allow the reader to see how important scholars of the period understood the relationship of science and religion. Provides an annotated bibliography of the most important works on science and religion in the Middle Ages, helping students to study the topic in more detail. BL

"Individualism Old and New" is a serious study of public and cultural issues surrounding the place of the individual in a technologically advanced society. Dewey outlines the fear that personal creative potential will be stomped on by assembly-line monotony, political bureaucracy and an industrialized culture of uniformity. Dewey beoieves in the power of critical intelligence and says that individualism has in fact been offered a unique higher kevek of technological development upon which to grow, mature and redine itself. In "Liberalism and Social Action" Dewey looks at earlier forms of liberalism where the State sunction is to rotect its citizens while allowing free reign to social-economic forces. He believes that as a society matures, so must liberalism. He believes that liberalism must redefine itself in a world where government must play a dynamic role in creating an enviornment in which citizens can achieve their potential. Dewey's advocacy of a posiive role for government - a new liberalism - is a natural application of Hegel's dialetic. "A Common Faith" presents a compelling prescription for a union of religious and social ideals, inluding consistency in both idea and action. His thesis is thought provoking. This book should not only be read by social scientist, but also people if faith who wish to intelligently enhance their own faith. A Collector's Edition.

In a violation of our destiny, something is killing every one of us. The judge of ignorance has long sentenced every living being to death, has sentenced you, and I, all our ancestors, and our children to death. In a relentless holocaust, there are no survivors. Hope has not been enough to win an appeal, nor the visions of faith, nor the dream of justice and beauty, not even love. To the hearless judge of ignorance, these mean nothing. We will be saved in the end y knowledge. We will learn to overcome aging and death by engendering the noble and supreme intelligences. We will create the gods who will call us back to life, or we will not return at all. It is in our hands. It is time to inspire and begin the ultimate scientific, moral, and spiritual quest. The end of death.

Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, two twentieth-century Jewish philosophers and two extremely provocative thinkers whose reputations have grown considerably, are rarely studied together. This is due to the disparate interests of many of their intellectual heirs. Strauss has influenced political theorists and policy makers on the right while Levinas has been championed in the humanities by different cadres associated with postmodernist thought. In Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation, first published in 2006, Leora Batnitzky brings together these two seemingly incongruous contemporaries, demonstrating that they often had the same philosophical sources and their projects had many formal parallels. While such a comparison is valuable in itself for better understanding each figure, it also raises profound questions in the debate on the definitions of 'religion', suggesting ways that religion makes claims on both philosophy and politics.

"Following Vattimo's postmodern philosophy, Badiou's postmetaphysical ontology, and i ek's revolutionary style, the authors of this marvelous book invites us to reactivate our politics of resistance against our greatest enemy: corporate capitalism. The best solution to the ecological, energy, and financial crisis corporate capitalism has created, as Crockett Clayton and Jeffrey Robbins suggest, is a new theological materialism where Being is conceived as energy both subjectively and objectively. All my graduate students will have to read this book carefully if they want to become philosophers." - Santiago Zabala, ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona "This is a book of an extraordinary timeliness, written in an accessible and strikingly informative way. It is excellently poised to become a synthetic and agenda setting statement about the implications of a new materialism for the founding of a new radical theology, a new kind of spirituality. I consider this therefore quite a remarkable book which will be influential in ongoing discussions of psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and theology. Moreover, it will be, quite simply, the best book about spirituality and the new materialism on the market today. While all of the work of the new materialists engage at one level or another the question of a new spirituality, I do not think there is anything comparable in significance to what Crockett and Robbins have provided here." - Ward Blanton, University of Kent "This book will perhaps be most appreciated by the reader with an intuitive cast of mind, able to recognize the force of an argument in its imaginative suggestiveness . . . New Materialism is about energy transformation, we are told, energy which cannot be reduced to matter because it resonates with spirit and life . . . Yet the book strikes a fundamental note of hard reality: 'if we want our civilization to live on earth a little longer we will have to recognize our coexistence with and in earth'." - Christian Ecology Link

In The Ends of Philosophy of Religion, Timothy D. Knepper advances a new, historically grounded and religiously diverse program for the philosophy of religion. Knepper first critiques existing efforts in analytic and continental philosophy of religion for neglect of diversity among its objects and subjects of inquiry, as well as for failing to thickly describe, formally compare, and critically evaluate historical acts of reason-giving in the religions of the world. Knepper then constructs an alternative vision for the philosophy of religion, one in which religious reason-giving is described with empathetic yet suspicious sensitivity, compared with methodological and categorical awareness, and explained and evaluated with a plurality of resources and criteria."The Ends of Philosophy of Religion casts a critical eye over both analytic and continental philosophy of religion and finds an ailment that besets them both. Knepper provides an analysis that is not only clear and eloquent but also sometimes frustrated and angry one. This gives his book the feeling of a manifesto, something I judge that the discipline needs." - Kevin Schilbrack, Professor, Philosophy and Religion Department, Western Carolina University, USA"Philosophy of religion is entering a new dawn, beyond the Western confines of bare theism and pale postmodernism, and towards the religions of the world, Eastern and Western, in all their rich diversity and complexity. Knepper's timely and insightful book outlines these broad and deep changes that have yet to be acknowledged by practitioners from both the analytic and Continental schools." - Nick Trakakis, Assistant Director of the Centre for the Philosophy and Phenomenology of Religion, Australian Catholic University, Australia"Those of us who believe philosophy of religion should be about religion in all its complexity and diversity will welcome this book with relief. Knepper attacks the pretense of using the phrase 'philosophy of religion' to describe parochial philosophy of western theism or the disorganized religious insights of postmodern philosophers. He argues for historically grounded philosophy of religions, up-to-date on religious studies, and fearless about analyzing reasons for religious beliefs and practices. This is the kind of philosophy of religion that belongs in university religious studies departments. Here's hoping it catches on quickly." - Wesley J. Wildman, Professor of Philosophy, Theology, and Ethics, Boston University School of Theology, US

This book offers a fascinating account of Heidegger's middle and later thought."Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology" offers an important new reading of Heidegger's middle and later thought. Beginning with Heidegger's early dissertation on the doctrine of categories in Duns Scotus, Peter S. Dillard shows how Heidegger's middle and later works develop a philosophical anti-theology or 'atheology' that poses a serious threat to traditional metaphysics, natural theology and philosophy of religion.Drawing on the insights of Scholastic thinkers such as St Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, the book reveals the problematic assumptions of Heideggerian 'atheology' and shows why they should be rejected. Dillard's critique paves the way for a rejuvenation of Scholastic metaphysics and reveals its relevance to some contemporary philosophical disputes. In addition to clarifying the question of being and explaining the role of phenomenology in metaphysics, Dillard sheds light on the nature of nothingness, necessity and contingency. Ultimately the book offers a revolutionary reorientation of our understanding, both of the later Heidegger and of the legacy of Scholasticism.

John Foster presents a clear and powerful discussion of a range of topics relating to our understanding of the universe: induction, laws of nature, and the existence of God. He begins by developing a solution to the problem of induction - a solution whose key idea is that the regularities in the workings of nature that have held in our experience hitherto are to be explained by appeal to the controlling influence of laws, as forms of natural necessity. His second line of argument focuses on the issue of what we should take such necessitational laws to be, and whether we can even make sense of them at all. Having considered and rejected various alternatives, Foster puts forward his own proposal: the obtaining of a law consists in the causal imposing of a regularity on the universe as a regularity. With this causal account of laws in place, he is now equipped to offer an argument for theism. His claim is that natural regularities call for explanation, and that, whatever explanatory role we may initially assign to laws, the only plausible ultimate explanation is in terms of the agency of God. Finally, he argues that, once we accept the existence of God, we need to think of him as creating the universe by a method which imposes regularities on it in the relevant law-yielding way. In this new perspective, the original nomological-explanatory solution to the problem of induction becomes a theological-explanatory solution. The Divine Lawmaker is bold and original in its approach, and rich in argument. The issues on which it focuses are among the most important in the whole epistemological and metaphysical spectrum.

The Roman Catholic Bishops of the Caribbean, the Antilles Episcopal Conference (AEC), have over the past forty years written statements addressed to their faithful and people in the wider Caribbean. The statements covered a wide range of issues impinging on the life and faith of Caribbean people, including political engagement, crime and violence, homosexuality, HIV-AIDS, sexuality, the environment. A key theme running through the statements is the concern with justice. This collection of critical essays and personal reflections explores the insights provided by these statements. In so doing, it presents a critical reading of the corpus with a view to presenting its relevance to the regional and global conversation on matters of human flourishing. The authors of the volume represent the diverse voices from within the Catholic Caribbean, particularly some fresh new voices. This collection brings together the voices of men and women--pastors, laity, theologians, political leaders, educators; each essayist considers a specific statement and provides a commentary and interpretation of its contents as well as a considered assessment of its impact on the life of the faithful. Academics, lay persons, pastors, policy makers and politicians will find this a useful collection.

Can it be justifiable to commit oneself 'by faith' to a religious claim when its truth lacks adequate support from one's total available evidence? In Believing by Faith, John Bishop defends a version of fideism inspired by William James's 1896 lecture 'The Will to Believe'. By critiquing both 'isolationist' (Wittgensteinian) and Reformed epistemologies of religious belief, Bishop argues that anyone who accepts that our publicly available evidence is equally open to theistic and naturalist/atheistic interpretations will need to defend a modest fideist position. This modest fideism understands theistic commitment as involving 'doxastic venture' - practical commitment to propositions held to be true through 'passional' causes (causes other than the recognition of evidence of or for their truth).
While Bishop argues that concern about the justifiability of religious doxastic venture is ultimately moral concern, he accepts that faith-ventures can be morally justifiable only if they are in accord with the proper exercise of our rational epistemic capacities. Legitimate faith-ventures may thus never be counter-evidential, and, furthermore, may be made supra-evidentially only when the truth of the faith-proposition concerned necessarily cannot be settled on the basis of evidence. Bishop extends this Jamesian account by requiring that justifiable faith-ventures should also be morally acceptable both in motivation and content. Hard-line evidentialists, however, insist that all religious faith-ventures are morally wrong. Bishop thus conducts an extended debate between fideists and hard-line evidentialists, arguing that neither side can succeed in establishing the irrationality of itsopposition. He concludes by suggesting that fideism may nevertheless be morally preferable, as a less dogmatic, more self-accepting, even a more loving, position than its evidentialist rival.

Philosophical naturalism, according to which philosophy is continuous with the natural sciences, has dominated the Western academy for well over a century; but Michael Rea claims that it is without rational foundation, and that the costs of embracing it are surprisingly high. Rea argues compellingly to the surprising conclusion that naturalists are committed to rejecting realism about material objects, materialism, and perhaps realism about other minds. That is surely a price that naturalists are unwilling to pay: this philosophical orthodoxy should be rejected.