The Greeks are on trial. They have been for generations, if not millennia, fromRome in the first century, to Romanticism in the nineteenth. We debate the place of the Greeks in the university curriculum, in New World culture--we even debate the place of the Greeks in the European Union. This book notices the lingering and half-hidden presence of the Greeks in some strange places--everywhere from the US Supreme Court to the Modern Olympic Games--and in so doing makes an important new contribution to a very old debate.

Does God exist? What is the nature of evil, and where does it come from? Are humans free? Responsible? Immortal? Does it matter? Saints, Heretics and Atheists offers a historical introduction to fundamental questions in the philosophy of religion. Ranging from ancient times to the twentieth century, it is divided into twenty-five succinct, chronological chapters. Individual chapters discuss philosophies from history's greatest thinkers including Plato, Augustine, al-Ghazali, Aquinas, Margarite Porte, Spinoza, Hume, Mary Shepherd, and Nietzche. The book closes with an exploration of William James's defense of the right to believe, possible limitations of that right, and the nature of philosophical progress. Based on lectures from a popular course taught in the Program for General Education at Harvard University for over a decade, Saints, Heretics, and Atheists invites readers along for a journey that is unique in its sweeping historical approach to the philosophy of religion and the balance it strikes between traditional, non-traditional, and atheistic standpoints with respect to religion in the western tradition.

Hofmann (1810-1877) was one of the most significant theologians of the 19th century and perhaps the century's most influential Lutheran theologian. Matthew L. Becker introduces us to Hofmann's trinitarian view of God. According to Hofmann, God freely chose to give himself out of divine love. Becker's book centers on Hofmann's understanding of history. In Hofmann's trinitarian kenosis, the eternal God has become historical by self-emptying God's self into Jesus. For Hofmann, world history can only be understood within the historical self-giving of the triune God who is love. Thus, for Hofmann all of history is salvation-history, a kind of history that embraces and fulfills God's purposes in the world.Matthew L. Becker is a Professor of Theology at Concordia University, Portland, Oregon. An ordained Lutheran minister, Dr. Becker has served congregations in Chicago and Orgegon. He is a co-editor of God Opens Doors, a history of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in the Pacific Northwest.

Throughout history human beings have been preoccupied with personal survival after death. Most world religions therefore proclaim that life continues beyond the grave, and they have depicted the Hereafter in a variety of forms. These various conceptions constitute answers to the most perplexing spiritual questions: Will we remember our former lives in the Hereafter? Will we have bodies? Can bodiless souls recognize each other? Will we continue to have personal identity? Will we be punished or rewarded, or absorbed into the Godhead? These issues serve as the basis of this collection of essays which provide a framework for understanding traditional conceptions of the Hereafter as well as new perspectives.

Levinas's ethical metaphysics is essentially a meditation on what makes ethical agency possible - that which enables us to act in the interest of another, to put the well-being of another before our own. This line of questioning found its inception in and drew its inspiration from the mass atrocities that occurred during the Second World War. The Holocaust , like the Cambodian genocide, or those in Rwanda and Srebrenica, exemplifies what have come to be known as the 'never again' situations. After these events, we looked back each time, with varying degrees of incomprehension, horror, anger and shame, asking ourselves how we could possibly have let it all happen again. And yet, atrocity crimes are still rampant. After Rwanda (1994) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995), came Kosovo (1999) and Darfur (2003). In our present-day world , hate crimes motivated by racial, sexual, or other prejudice, and mass hate such as genocide and terror, are on the rise (think, for example, of Burma, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and North Korea). A critical revaluation of the conditions of possibility of ethical agency is therefore more necessary than ever. This volume is committed to the possibility of 'never again'. It is dedicated to all the victims - living and dead - of what Levinas calls the 'sober, Cain-like coldness' at the root of all crime against humanity , as much as every singular crime against another human being .

Walter Benjamin's work represents one of the most radical and controversial responses to the problems of 20th century culture and society. This new interpretation analyzes some of the central enigmatic features of his writing, arguing that they result from the co-presence of religious skepticism and the desire for a religious foundation of social life. Margarete Kohlenbach focuses on the structure of self-reference as an expression of Benjamin's skeptical religiosity and examines its significance in his writing on language, literature and the cinema, as well as history, politics and modern technology.

Between 1820 and 1860, American social reformers pioneered a sentimental "politics of identification" that invited people of all backgrounds to identify with the victims of war, slavery, and addiction. By portraying Native Americans, slaves, and "drunkards" as both physically vulnerable and socially related, these activists helped their neighbours see them as fully and equally human. Sentimental writers, like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, proposed that the image of God was visible in the victims of violence. Dan Mckanan traces the theme of identification through the literature of social reform, focusing on sentimental novels, temperance tales, and fugitive slave narratives. All of these genres, he suggests, were rooted in a liberal Christian theology that rejected traditional notions of original sin and claimed, instead, that all people possess a divine image with the power to transform the world. Throughout, McKanan integrates the perspectives of theology, history, and literary studies to provide a fuller picture of antebellum social reform. In an era when sentimentality is synonymous with saccharine excess and liberalism with government bureaucracy, he defends both traditions. Though he recognizes the liabilities and limitations of sentimental liberalism, he insists that contemporary activists have much to learn from the abolitionists, nonresistants, and temperance reformers of the antebellum period.

George Berkeley was considered "the most engaging and useful man in Ireland in the eighteenth century." This hyperbolic statement refers both to Berkeley's life and thought; in fact, he always considered himself a pioneer called to think and do new things. He was an empiricist well versed in the sciences, an amateur of the mechanical arts, as well as a metaphysician; he was the author of many completely different discoveries, as well as a very active Christian, a zealous bishop and the apostle of the Bermuda project. The essays collected in this volume, written by some leading scholars, aim to reconstruct the complexity of Berkeley's figure, without selecting "major" works, nor searching for "coherence" at any cost. They will focus on different aspects of Berkeley's thought, showing their intersections; they will explore the important contributions he gave to various scientific disciplines, as well as to the eighteenth-century philosophical and theological debate. They will highlight the wide influence that his presently most neglected or puzzling books had at the time; they will refuse any anachronistical trial of Berkeley's thought, judged from a contemporary point of view.

Many contemporary philosophers assume that, before one can discuss prayer, the question of whether there is a God or not must be settled. In this title, first published in 1965, D. Z. Phillips argues that to understand prayer is to understand what is meant by the reality of God. Beginning by placing the problem of prayer within a philosophical context, Phillips goes on to discuss such topics as prayer and the concept of talking, prayer and dependence, superstition and the concept of community. This is a fascinating reissue that will be of particular value to students with an interest in the philosophy of religion, prayer and religious studies more generally.

This book focuses on the work of Mircea Eliade, taking a methodological concern, but also focusing on a wider concern, trying to indicate the many facets and implications of Eliade's scholarship as a historian of religions. Chapters two and three are concerned with the work of Eliade as a historian of religions, whereas chapter four examines the theological aspects of his work. After an examination of the human situation and his understanding of God, the book goes on to discover that the key to understanding Eliade's theological reflections is the role of nostalgia. As well as the theological aspects of Eliade's work, this book looks at his participation and contribution to cross-cultural dialogue, his theory of myth, his theory of archaic ontology, his concept of power and his views on time from the perspective of his roles as both a historian of religions and a literary figure.

The subject of this book is the relationship and the difference between the temporal everlasting and the atemporal eternal. This book treats the difference between a temporal postmortem life and eternal life. It identifies the conceptual tension in the religious idea of eternal life and offers a resolution of that tension.

A fascinating exploration of the many faces of God and what they reveal about our own humanity He was a whole pantheon in Himself . He constantly appeared in many and ever-changing roles lest He be frozen and converted into the dumb idols He Himself despised. God was a polyvalent personality who, by mirroring to man His many faces, provided the models that man so needed to survive and flourish. This is the true humanity of God. from the Introduction In scholarly but accessible terms, with many startling and controversial insights, renowned Bible scholar Dr. Yochanan Muffs examines the anthropomorphic evolution of the Divine Image from creator of the cosmos to God the father, God the husband, God the king, God the "chess-player," God the ultimate master and how these different images of God have shaped our faith and world view. Muffs also examines how expressions of divine power, divine will and divine love throughout the Bible have helped develop the contemporary human condition and our enriching dialectic between faith and doubt."

Pluriverse, the final work of the American poet and philosopher Benjamin Paul Blood, was published posthumously in 1920. After an experience of the anaesthetic nitrous oxide during a dental operation, Blood came to the conclusion that his mind had been opened, that he had undergone a mystical experience, and that he had come to a realisation of the true nature of reality. This title is the fullest exposition of Blood's esoteric Christian philosophy-cum-theology, which, though deemed wildly eccentric by commentators both during his lifetime and later in the twentieth century, was nonetheless one of the most influential sources for American mystical-empiricism. In particular, Blood's thought was a major inspiration for William James, and can be seen to prefigure the latter's concept of Sciousness directly.