Why is the philosopher Hegel returning as a potent force in contemporary thinking? Why, after a long period when Hegel and his dialectics of history have seemed less compelling than they were for previous generations of philosophers, is study of Hegel again becoming important? Fashionable contemporary theorists like Francis Fukuyama and Slavoj Zizek, as well as radical theologians like Thomas Altizer, have all recently been influenced by Hegel, the philosopher whose philosophy now seems somehow perennial- or, to borrow an idea from Nietzsche-eternally returning. Exploring this revival via the notion of 'negation' in Hegelian thought, and relating such negativity to sophisticated ideas about art and artistic creation, Andrew W. Hass argues that the notion of Hegelian negation moves us into an expansive territory where art, religion and philosophy may all be radically conceived and broken open into new forms of philosophical expression. The implications of such a revived Hegelian philosophy are, the author argues, vast and current. Hegel thereby becomes the philosopher par excellence who can address vital issues in politics, economics, war and violence, leading to a new form of globalised ethics. Hass makes a bold and original contribution to religion, philosophy, art and the history of ideas.

Protestant theology and culture are known for a reserved, at times skeptical, attitude to the use of art and aesthetic forms of expression in a religious context. In Transcendence and Sensoriness, this attitude is analysed and discussed both theoretically and through case studies considered in a broad theological and philosophical framework of religious aesthetics. Nordic scholars of theology, philosophy, art, music, and architecture, discuss questions of transcendence, the human senses, and the arts in order to challenge established perspectives within the aesthetics of religion and theology.

What difference does a worldview make? These eclectic essays from twenty scholars show how embodying a biblical Christian worldview helps transform mere existence into fullness of life. Read them to discover . . . How Genesis answers the four most important human questions of pre-modern and post-modern times (W. Brouwer); Why the concept "Christian worldview" fits the unique experience of reality Christianity affords, despite recent criticisms of the term and concept (R. Kurka); How worldview competition in the global South differs from the West (D. Button); How Western civilization lost its Christian mind and can find it again (M. E. Roberts); How well the reasons celebrity scholar Bart Ehrman gives for his "deconversion" stack up (E. Meadors); How higher education has abandoned its own source by expelling "religion of the heart" (R. Wenyika & W. Adrian); How an "engineering mindset" helps evaluate worldviews and how a Christian worldview fares (D. Halsmer); Christian Humanism as an exodus from the cultural wasteland for today's youth (R. Williams); The worldview John Grisham's fiction expresses (J. Han & M. Bagley); How Intelligent Design strengthens its status as science by using the concept of "design" in a new way (D. Leonard); In the spirit of "The Screwtape Letters," a new epistle to Wormwood that praises compartmentalized Christianity (D. K. Naugle); How an orphaned Japanese girl experienced "the American dream," God's way (K. Takeuchi); How words, grammar, and style embody one's worldview, for good or ill (S. Robbins); What happens to preaching-and the church-when emotional response to visual stimuli preempts thought (W. Wilson II); . . . and much more. "That which God has created and sin has divided Christ is reuniting . . ., and this includes the divisions generated by our . . . compartmentalizations. Our gracious, redeeming God is putting Humpty Dumpty back together again For Christian scholars and teachers, this magnificent truth is fraught with implications for us . . . personally and professionally." - David K. Naugle, "Squashing Screwtape: Debunking Dualism and Restoring Integrity in Christian Educational Thought and Practice"

Becoming god was an ideal of many ancient Greek philosophers, as was the life of reason, which they equated with divinity. This book argues that their rival accounts of this equation depended on their divergent attitudes toward time. Affirming it, Heraclitus developed a paradoxical style of reasoning--"chiasmus"--that was the activity of his becoming god. Denying it as contradictory, Parmenides sought to purify thinking of all contradiction, offering eternity to those who would follow him. Plato did, fusing this pure style of reasoning--consistency--with a Pythagorean program of purification and divinization that would then influence philosophers from Aristotle to Kant. Those interested in Greek philosophical and religious thought will find fresh interpretations of its early figures, as well as a lucid presentation of the first and most influential attempts to link together divinity, rationality, and selfhood.

Rory Fox challenges the traditional understanding that Thomas Aquinas believed that God exists totally outside of time. His study investigates the work of several mid-thirteenth-century writers, including Albert the Great and Bonaventure as well as Aquinas, examining their understanding of the topological and metrical properties of time. Fox thus provides access to a wealth of material on medieval concepts of time and eternity, while using the conceptual tools of modern analytic philosophy to express his conclusions.

Molinism, named after the sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina, re-emerged in the 1970s after it was unwittingly assumed in versions of Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defense against the Logical Argument from Evil. The Molinist notion of middle knowledge--and especially its main objects, so-called counterfactuals of (creaturely) freedom--have been the subject of vigorous debate in analytical philosophy of religion ever since. Is middle knowledge logically coherent? Is it a benefit or a liability overall for a satisfying account of divine providence? The essays in this collection examine the status, defensibility, and application of Molinism. Friends and foes of Molinism are well represented, and there are some lively exchanges between them. The collection provides a snap-shot of the current state of the Molinism Wars, along with some discussion of where we've been and where we might go in the future. More battles surely lie ahead; the essays and ideas in this collection are likely to have a major impact on future directions. The essays are specially written by a line-up of established and respected philosophers of religion, metaphysicians, and logicians. There is a substantive Introduction and an extensive Bibliography to assist both students and professionals.

In his widely praised book, award-winning psychologist Jonathan Haidt examines the world's philosophical wisdom through the lens of psychological science, showing how a deeper understanding of enduring maxims-like Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, or What doesn't kill you makes you stronger-can enrich and even transform our lives.

World's fairs contributed mightily to defining a relationship between religion and the wider world of human culture. Even at the base level of popular culture found on the midways of the earliest international expositions--where Victorian ladies gawked at displays of non-Western, "primitive" life--the concept of religion as an independent field of study began to take hold in public consciousness. The World's Parliament of Religions at the Chicago exposition of 1893 did as much as any other single event to introduce the idea that religion could be viewed as simply one concern among many within the rapidly diversifying modern lifestyle.

A chronicle of the emergence and development of religion as a field of intellectual inquiry, Exhibiting Religion: Colonialism and Spectacle at International Expositions, 1851-1893 is an extensive survey of world's fairs from the inaugural Great Exhibition in London to the Chicago Columbian Exposition and World's Parliament of Religions. As the first broad gatherings of people from across the world, these events were pivotal as forums in which the central elements of a field of religion came into contact with one another.

John Burris argues that comparative religion was the focal point for early attempts at comparative culture and that both were defined more by the intercultural politics and material exchanges of colonialism than by the spirit of objective intellectual inquiry. Equally a work of American and British religious history and a cultural history of the emerging field of religion, this book offers definitive theoretical insights into the discipline of religious studies in its early formation.

If you're a Dan Brown fan, you'll want to read, The Secret Behind the Cross and Crucifix. Author Nwaocha Ogechukwu has written an easy to read, enlightening and academically sound book regarding the symbolism and meaning of the cross in relation to religion. Ogechukwu gives historical accounts of Christianity's cover up of what the cross truly is: a satanic symbol. "For centuries after Christ, the church and other religions that use cruciform symbols have misrepresented the physical nature of Christ's death with a satanic symbol (cross), and a pagan idol (corpus). This secret has been concealed by the church for centuries after Christ." Ogechukwu's research leads to a stunning conclusion as it explores to understand the real nature of Christ's death, religion's role in the symbolism, and to release humankind from the "painful knowledge bondage" of cruciform propaganda. Nwaocha Ogechukwu is a graduate of medical science, member of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and a researcher in philosophy, religion, history, and psychology. Nominated as "One of the Great Minds of the 21st Century," by the American Biographical Institute, Mr. Ogechukwu lives in Nigeria. The Secret Behind the Cross and Crucifix is his second novel. He is currently working on his third book and fourth books.

His name is David Riley, a man challenged by his dream, his ambition and even his faith. In his efforts to provide a service to his clients, he finds himself in a place where being different means being suspect. His colleagues call him a fool. His family and friends say he has too much compassion for a nation of people who don't give his practice much respect and the woman he loves supports him the least when he needs her the most. Something terrible is about to happen to him. He finds himself in dire circumstances as his world starts coming apart at the seams. Circumstances that threaten to ruin everything he's worked for and stands for. Can a man have compassion or is the price too high? Can a man live by faith alone? The gripping yet inspiring story author Norton Helton tells in All Things Are Possible asks these questions and explores the dim side of the legal practice. Norton Helton's first novel signals the emergence of an exciting new writer. All Things Are Possible is among the first contemporary novels that go inside the legal practice- where having compassion and faith means being different.

The Bible and its Rewritings examines some of the most beautiful and intriguing scenes from the Old and New Testament such as the encounter between Abraham and God, and Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The author also investigates the direct or indirect Re-Scriptures of these by writers like Thomas Mann, Chaucer, Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Faulkner, Tournier, Joseph Roth, as well as by ancient exegesis, catacomb frescoes, and church paintings.

In this updated edition, author Joseph Keysor addresses the growing trend among secularists to label Hitler as a Christian and therefore attribute the atrocities of the second world war to the Christian religion. Keysor does not settle for simply contrasting the Nazis' behavior with the Biblical record. He also examines the true sources of Nazi ideology which are anything but Christian: Wagner, Chamberlain, Haeckel, and Nietzsche, to name a few. Keysor does not shy away from discussing Christian anti-semitism (alleged and real) throughout history and discusses Martin Luther, medieval anti-semitism, and the behavior of the Roman Catholic church and other Christian denominations during the Holocaust in Germany. Joseph Keysor's well reasoned, well researched, and comprehensive defense of the Christian faith against modern accusations is a useful tool for scholars, pastors, and educators who are interested in the truth. "Hitler and Christianity" is a necessity in one's apologetics library, and secularists, skeptics, and atheists will be obliged to respond.

This book offers the first comparative evaluation of Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Marion, two of the most important philosophers at work today."Badiou, Marion and St Paul" addresses the difficult question of whether it is possible to coherently think the notion of grace strictly in terms of immanence. The book develops a model for the thought of an immanent grace that avoids the traps of both obscurantism (the invocation of a wholly ineffably or transcendent ground for grace) and banality (the reduction of grace to nothing more than a variation of the established order).The conceptual resources needed for the development of such a model are gathered from sustained and original readings of St Paul's letter to the Romans, Jean-Luc Marion's "Being Given" and Alain Badiou's "Being and Event". As each thinker is taken up, their unique contributions to the model are elaborated and their positions are coordinated with each of the others in order to render a comparative evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses possible. The result of this triangulation is the emergence of a common conceptual strategy that simultaneously opens surprisingly direct paths into the heart of each of their disparate projects and, more importantly, a viable route to the thought of a genuinely immanent grace.

This title offers a critique of rationalism in contemporary American thought by recovering a lost tradition of intimacy in the writings of Thoreau, Bugbee, James, Arendt, Dickinson, Fuller, Wilshire and Cavell. "The Loss of Intimacy in American Thought" focuses on a number of American philosophers whose work overlaps the religious and the literary. Henry David Thoreau, Henry Bugbee, Hannah Arendt, Bruce Wilshire and Stanley Cavell are included, as well as Henry James, whose novels are treated as presenting an implicit moral philosophy. The chapters are linked by a concern for lost intimacy with the natural world and others. The early Marx would see this as the alienations in industrial societies of persons from nature, from the processes of work, from each other, and from themselves. Weber might call it the disenchantment of the world. In any case, it is a condition that forms a focus of concern for Thoreau, Bugbee, Arendt, Cavell and Wilshire as well as writers such Henry James, Dickinson and Margaret Fuller. These writers hold out a hope for closing the gaps that sustain alienations of multiple sorts and Mooney brings them into critical discourse with the secularised and constricted rationalism of contemporary analytic philosophy. The latter exalts 'objectivity' and encourages the approach that one should adopt a third person view on everything, dividing the world into rigid binary oppositions: self/other; mind/matter; human/animal; religious/secular; fact/value; rational/irrational; and, enlightened/indigenous. By contrast, each of the thinkers that Mooney discusses see writing as a way of saving the object of attention from neglect or misplaced appropriation, outright attack, or occlusion. His aim is to recognise the importance of non-argumentative forms of address in these American thinkers. The method he employs is analysis of particular texts and passages that exhibit a generous, often poetic or lyrical discernment of worth in the world. It is not meant to be an exhaustive treatment of any one thinker or theme, but a set of case studies, as it were, or a set of particular explorations, each self-sufficient yet resonating with its companion pieces. Mooney's objective is to spark interest in those who are ready to recover Thoreau and Emerson and Bugbee for the sort of American tradition that Cavell has sought to discover and rejuvenate; the tradition, as Mooney puts it, of 'American Intimates'.

The first publication of Beverley Clack and Brian R. Clack's exciting and innovative introduction to the philosophy of religion has been of enormous value to students, as well as providing a bold and refreshing alternative to the standard analytic approaches to the subject. This second edition retains the accessibility which made it popular for both teachers and students, while furthering its distinctive argument that emphasises the human dimension of religion.
The text has been fully revised and updated. The traditional emphasis on the arguments for the existence of God is reflected in a newly extended and reworked investigation into natural theology. Recent developments in the subject are also reflected in updated chapters, and, in a move that highlights the originality of the authors' approach, they offer a critical engagement with current world events. An entirely new concluding chapter interrogates the connection between religion and terror, and demonstrates how philosophy of religion might be conducted under the terrible shadow of 9/11.
This new edition of The Philosophy of Religion will continue to be essential reading for all students and practitioners of the subject.