Jean-Luc Marion's early work on Descartes and his more recent writings in phenomenology have not only elicited huge interest in France and the US, but also created huge potential in the field of theology. This book is organised around central questions about the divine raised by Marion's work: how to speak of God, how to approach God, how to experience God, how to receive God, how to believe in God, how to worship God. Within that context it deals with the important aspects of his philosophical work: the inspiration of his writings in what he calls Descartes' "white theology" and its late medieval context as well as the apophatic theology associated with Dionysius the Areopagite; his important claims about idolatrous and iconic ways of speaking of the divine; his notion of the saturated phenomenon or a phenomenology of revelation and givenness, and his extensive writings on love. Christina M. Gschwandtner also considers Marion's explicitly theological writings and establishes their relationship to his larger phenomenological oeuvre. Overall, it approaches Marion's work not only as a philosophy of religion, but with specifically theological questions in mind. It hence shows how Marion's extensive historical and phenomenological work can be profitable and inspiring for theology today, for both systematic questions and for concerns of spirituality, in a way that holds the theoretical and the practical together.

This volume provides the first comprehensive treatment of the central topics in the contemporary philosophy of religion from a Thomist point of view. It focuses on central themes, including religious knowledge, language, science, evil, morality, human nature, God and religious diversity. It should prove valuable to students and faculty in philosophy of religion and theology, who are looking for an introduction to the Thomist tradition.

This book treats the critical theory of religion of Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Friedrich Pollock, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, J rgen Habermas and other critical theorists who tried to make sense out of the senseless war experience by exploring the writings of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich W.J. Schelling, Georg W.F. Hegel, Artur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.

Michael P. Berman's Merleau-Ponty and God: Hallowing the Hollow examines issues in the philosophy of religion through the phenomenological and existential writings of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961). Merleau-Ponty addressed issues like the nature of faith, the problem of evil, and the love and judgment of God. Throughout the book Berman explains and critically interrogates the religious perspectives articulated in Merleau-Ponty's thought. Merleau-Ponty challenges us to think through these issues but always with an eye to our embodiment and perceptual experience. In this vein, Merleau-Ponty and God fleshes out the French philosopher's treatment of God in his writings. Merleau-Ponty and God will appeal to those interested in the philosophy of religion (inside and outside the academy), as well as scholars and students of Merleau-Ponty, continental philosophy, phenomenology, or existentialism.

Marking a major new reassessment of Camus' writing, this book investigates the nature and philosophical origins of Camus' thinking on "authenticity" and "the absurd" as these motions are expressed in "The Myth of Sisyphus" and "The Outsider", showing these books to be the product not only of a literary figure, but of a genuine philosopher as well. Moreover, the author provides a complete English-language translation of Camus' "Metaphysique Chretienne et Neoplatonisme" and underlines the importance of this study for the understanding of the early Camus. The book also contains analyses of the influence of St Augustine and Nietzsche on Camus.

What is language? How did it originate and how does it work? What is its relation to thought and, beyond thought, to reality? Questions like these have been at the center of lively debate ever since the rise of scholarly activities in the Islamic world during the 8th/9th century. However, in contrast to contemporary philosophy, they were not tackled by scholars adhering to only one specific discipline. Rather, they were addressed across multiple fields and domains, no less by linguists, legal theorists, and theologians than by Aristotelian philosophers. In response to the different challenges faced by these disciplines, highly sophisticated and more specialized areas emerged, comparable to what nowadays would be referred to as semantics, pragmatics, and hermeneutics, to name but a few - fields of research that are pursued to this day and still flourish in some of the traditional schools. Philosophy of language, thus, has been a major theme throughout Islamic intellectual culture in general; a theme which, probably due to its trans-disciplinary nature, has largely been neglected by modern research. This book brings together for the first time experts from the various fields involved, in order to explore the riches of this tradition and make them accessible to a broader public interested both in philosophy and the history of ideas more generally.

B. W. Young describes and analyses the intellectual culture of the eighteenth-century Church of England, in particular relation to those developments traditionally described as constituting the Enlightenment. It challenges conventional perceptions of an intellectually moribund institution by contextualising the polemical and scholarly debates in which churchmen engaged. In particular, it delineates the vigorous clerical culture in which much eighteenth-century thought evolved. The book traces the creation of a self-consciously enlightened tradition within Anglicanism, which drew on Erasmianism, seventeenth-century eirenicism and the legacy of Locke. By emphasizing the variety of its intellectual life, the book challenges those notions of Enlightenment which advance predominantly political interpretations of this period. Thus, eighteenth-century critics of the Enlightenment, notably those who contributed to a burgeoning interest in mysticism, are equally integral to this study.

How do various concepts of God impact the moral life? Is God ultimately required for goodness? In this edited collection, an international panel of contemporary philosophers and theologians offer new avenues of exploration from a theist perspective for these important questions. The book features several approaches to address these questions. Common themes include philosophical and theological conceptions of God with reference to human morality, particular Trinitarian accounts of God and the resultant ethical implications, and how communities are shaped, promoted, and transformed by accounts of God. Bringing together philosophical and theological insights on the relationship between God and our moral lives, this book will be of keen interest to scholars of the philosophy of religion, particularly those looking at ethics, social justice and morality.

Theological concepts continue to maintain political concepts well after those theological concepts are no longer supported by belief. "Cities on the Plains" examines some of these concepts in the light of five different times and places. It is both a response to theological concerns in contemporary political theory and broadly accessible examination of familiar political issues touched by the divine--such as gay marriage, 911, or the French tradition of "laicite." Concerns of difference and the divine are pursued through broadly familiar texts (the Bible, and Gore Vidal), significant texts of political theory (Plato and Augustine), and less common texts (Averroes). Gods, or the intellectual territory they used to occupy, are treated as important features of the political; contesting with these gods can help us visit, defend, and desire, (to paraphrase Deleuze and Guatarri) new cities and new peoples.

Wittgenstein, Frazer and Religion expounds and analyses the argument of Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough . It details the reasons for Wittgenstein's rejection of the intellectualist theory of religion, and suggests a new interpretation of his rival view of ritual. Denying that Wittgenstein's account is straightforwardly expressivist, the author builds his own interpretation on Wittgenstein's claim that magic is akin to metaphysics. In the course of the book, the author considers such matters as expressivism, 'perspicuous representation', the nature of human sacrifice, and Wittgenstein's cultural pessimism.

Science has now demonstrated without a doubt that we live in an "unfinished universe." Discoveries in geology, biology, cosmology and other fields of scientific inquiry have shown that the cosmos has a narrative character and that the story is far from over. The sense of a universe that is still coming into being provides a fertile new framework for thinking about the relationship of faith to science. John F. Haught argues that if we take seriously the fact that the universe is a drama still unfolding, we can think new thoughts about God, and indeed about all the perennial themes of theology. Science's recent realization that the universe is dramatic, however, has yet to penetrate deeply into either spiritual or intellectual life. Most Christian thought and spirituality still presuppose an essentially static universe while influential academic and intellectual culture remains stuck in a stagnant materialist naturalism and cosmic pessimism. Resting on the Future asks about the meaning of an unfinished universe from the point of view of both Christian theology and contemporary intellectual life. Each chapter covers a distinct aspect of what Haught takes to be an essential transition to a new age in Catholic life and thought. Biology, cosmology, and other fields of science now provide the setting for a wholesome transformation of Catholic thought from a still predominantly pre-scientific to a more hopeful and scientifically informed vision of God, humanity and the natural world.

"Natural Social Order, Moses, and Jesus" demonstrates that the most realistic and practical foundations for life are not those that people choose in order to try to create what they imagine to be a better world. The most realistic and practical foundations inhere in a world and order that people did not create, the natural world and its order.

Discover those foundations and a way of life based upon them. See from an objective, natural worldview, instead of from the more familiar perspectives of artificial worldviews which present subjective, biased, and misleading views of reality and practicality. Instead of focusing on idealistic or other worlds of human imagination and design, be inspired by the real world, the natural world and order that inspired Moses, Jesus, and the Bible.

Learn how much more realistic, practical, and beneficial life can be when it is oriented and adapted to God's creation and order, instead of to man-made worlds and orders which invariably conflict with God's creation. Learn how to live within the original context for life, as life was made to be, as part of the only world and order that gave birth to life and upon which all life depends.

This book offers the rare opportunity to assess, within a single volume, the leading schools of thought in the contemporary philosophy of religion. With contributions by well-known exponents of each school, the book is an ideal text for assessing the deep proximities and divisions which characterize contemporary philosophy of religion. The schools of thought represented include philosophical theism, Reformed epistemology, Wittgensteinianism, Postmodernism, Critical Theory, and Process Thought.

Contemporary discussions in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of mind are dominated by the presupposition of naturalism. Arguing against this established convention, Jim Slagle offers a thorough defence of Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism (EAAN) and in doing so, reveals how it shows that evolution and naturalism are incompatible. Charting the development of Plantinga's argument, Slagle asserts that the probability of our cognitive faculties reliably producing true beliefs is low if ontological naturalism is true, and therefore all other beliefs produced by these faculties, including naturalism itself, are self-defeating. He critiques other well-known epistemological approaches, including those of Descartes and Quine, and deftly counters the many objections against the EAAN to conclude that metaphysical naturalism should be rejected on the grounds of self-defeat. By situating Plantinga's argument within a wider context and showing that science and evolution cannot entail naturalism, Slagle renders this most common metaphysical view irrational. As such, the book advocates an important reconsideration of contemporary thought at the intersection of philosophy, science and religion.

The early essays in this volume proceed on the assumption that a compatibility system can be fashioned that will not only bring religious knowledge claims into harmony with scientific claims but will also show there to be a fundamental similarity of method in religious and scientific thinking. They are not, however, unambiguously successful. Consequently Professor Wiebe sets out in the succeeding essays to seek an understanding of the religion/science relationship that does not assume they must be compatible. That examination, in the final analysis, reveals a fundamental contradiction in the compatibility system building programme which more than suggests that religious belief (knowledge) is beyond legitimation.

In this study, the scientific principles of learning and brain functions are applied to the God Experience. The author skillfully blends modern neurophysiology with critical behavioral psychology to offer an objective explanation for why people believe in God. This provocative and scholarly work will interest psychologists, neuroscientists, clergy, and anyone studying mystical experience.

This is an introduction to the core ideas in Theodor Adorno's work and their relevance for theology. Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969), the German sociologist and philosopher was one of the intellectual leaders of the post-war Frankfurt School. This book presents and analyzes Adorno's writings on theology and religion in a clear and accessible manner. It is targeted at upper level undergraduate and postgraduate students, and will not presuppose any familiarity with Adorno. The book includes a general introduction to Adorno's thought, and examines his relationship with the work of Walter Benjamin and Jewish theology, his confrontation with scientific positivism (Karl Popper), and his criticism of the 'Culture Industry' and ideology. All of these topics are explored with attention to how they engage with contemporary debates within theology. This is accomplished by bringing Adorno's work into dialogue with major concerns and authors. The volume concludes by highlighting an often neglected aspect of Adorno's writing - his philosophy of music - and how this aesthetic appreciation of the sublime informs contemporary theological reflection. "The Philosophy and Theology" series looks at major philosophers and explores their relevance to theological thought as well as the response of theology.

The Mahayana tradition in Buddhist philosophy is defined by its ethical orientation-the adoption of bodhicitta, the aspiration to attain awakening for the benefit of all sentient beings. And indeed, this tradition is known for its literature on ethics, particularly such texts as Nagarjuna's Jewel Garland of Advice (Ratnavali), Aryadeva's Four Hundred Verses (Catuhsataka), and especially Santideva's How to Lead an Awakened Life (Bodhicaryavatara) and its commentaries. All of these texts reflect the Madhyamaka tradition of philosophy, and all emphasize both the imperative to cultivate an attitude of universal care (karuna) grounded in the realization of emptiness, impermanence, independence and the absence of any self in persons or other phenomena. This position is morally very attractive, but raises an important problem: if all phenomena, including persons and actions, are only conventionally real, can moral injunctions or principles be binding, or does the conventional status of the reality we inhabit condemn us to an ethical relativism or nihilism? In Moonshadows, the international collective known as the Cowherds addresses an analogous problem in the domain of epistemology and argues that the Madhyamaka tradition has the resources to develop a robust account of truth and knowledge within the context of conventional reality. The essays explore a variety of ways in which to understand important Buddhist texts on ethics and Mahayana moral theory so as to make sense of the genuine force of morality. The volume combines careful textual analysis and doctrinal exposition with philosophical reconstruction and reflection, and considers a variety of ways to understand the structure of Mahayana Buddhist ethics.