Medieval masters Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart considered problems inherent to speaking of God, exploring how religious language might compromise God's transcendence or God's immanence ultimately hindering believers in their journey of faith seeking understanding. Going beyond ordinary readings of Aquinas and building a foundation for further insights into the works of both theologians, this book draws out the implications of the thought of Eckhart and Aquinas for contemporary issues, including ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue, liturgy and prayer, and religious inclusivity. Reading Aquinas and Eckhart in light of each other reveals the profound depth and orthodoxy of both of these scholars and provides a novel approach to many theological and practical religious issues.

Today's biblical scholars and dogmaticians are giving a significant amount of attention to the topic of theological exegesis. A resource turned to for guidance and insight in this discussion is the history of interpretation, and Karl Barth's voice registers loudly as a helpful model for engaging Scripture and its subject matter. Most readers of Barth's theological exegesis encounter him on the level of his New Testament exegesis. This is understandable from several different vantage points. Unfortunately, Barth's theological exegesis of the Old Testament has not received the attention it deserves. This book seeks to fill this lacuna as it encounters Barth's theological exegesis of Isaiah in the Church Dogmatics. From the Church's inception, Isaiah has been understood as Christian Scripture. In the Church Dogmatics we find Barth reading Isaiah in multi-functional and multi-layered ways as he seeks to hear Isaiah as a living witness to God's triune revelation of himself in Jesus Christ.

Around the globe religion is under attack. Humanists, secularists and atheists depict believers as deluded and dangerous. The aim of this book is to challenge this perception. Sensible Religion defends the validity and emphasises the excitement of the religious quest across the faiths. It demonstrates that the practice of sensible religion is often a courageous path pitted against religious extremism and secularism. Written by committed believers from the major world's faiths, the book endorses the term 'sensible' as expressing religious reasonableness as well as sensitivity to criticism and new insights. Followers of the different traditions live ordinary lives in the mainstream of the world. This volume therefore addresses beliefs and the manner in which these convictions relate to social, political and ethical action. Countering the argument that religion is at root extremist and irrational, Sensible Religion brings together thoughtful and critical reflections by leading thinkers about humanity's spiritual quest.

Answering the question 'How is fruitful discussion possible?', this book addresses the central philosophical issue of how reason shall be understood and how it is limited. This study argues that the understanding of discussion according to which it necessarily starts from putative universal norms and rules for argumentation is problematic, among other reasons since such rules are unfruitful in contexts where there are vast disagreements such as religion. Inspired by Wittgensteinian ideas, Strandberg develops instead a new way of understanding discussion, truth and rationality which escapes these problems, and shows how this solution can be used to answer the accusation against Wittgensteinian philosophy for being conservative and resulting in fideism.

Recent dissatisfaction with individualism and the problems of religious pluralism make this an opportune time to reassess the way in which we define ourselves and conduct our relationships with others. The philosophical writings of John Macmurray are a useful resource for performing this examination, and recent interest in Macmurray's work has been growing steadily. A full-scale critical examination of Macmurray's religious philosophy has not been published and this work fills this gap, sharing his insistence that we define ourselves through action and through person-to-person relationships, while critiquing his account of the ensuing political and religious issues. The key themes in this work are the concept of the person and the ethics of personal relations.

Twentieth Century Christian Responses to Religious Pluralism begins with the recognition that the traditional three-fold typology adopted by Christians in responding to other living world religions is no longer adequate and offers a much more sophisticated and developed approach. This is accomplished with particular reference to ten key Twentieth Century theologians, each of whom had significant influence in the field of inter-religious studies, both during their lifetime and beyond. The author rejects the exclusivism and triumphalism of traditional Christian approaches and argues strongly and persuasively that the future for inter-religious relationships lies in what he describes as 'classical pluralism', and in an understanding of the importance of difference for inter-faith dialogue. Presenting an accessible introduction to the contemporary issues and challenges facing all those engaged in the further development of inter-faith relationships, dialogue and partnership between the world religions, Pitman argues that the future of world peace and prosperity depends on the outcome.

Exploring the philosophical concerns of the nature of self, this book draws from two of the most influential Indian masters, Sankara and Santideva. Todd demonstrates that an ethics of altruism is still possible within a metaphysics which assumes there to be no independent self. A new ethical model based on the notions of 'flickering consciousness' and 'constructive altruism' is proposed. By comparing the metaphysics and ethics of Sankara and Santideva, Todd shows that the methodologies and aims of these Buddhist and Hindu masters trace remarkably similar cross-cutting paths. Treating Buddhism and Hinduism with equal respect, this book compares and reinterprets the Indian material so as to engage with contemporary Western debates on self and to show that Indian philosophy is indeed a philosophy of dialogue.

The Theology of Louis-Marie Chauvet provides a much needed accessible introduction to the philosophical and theological foundations of Chauvet's sacramental theology. Particular attention is given to his appropriation of Heidegger and use of the Social Sciences to elucidate the nature of the symbolic exchange that lies at the heart of the sacramental tradition. This book highlights the prophetic, deconstructive and even iconoclastic message for contemporary society and the church implicit in the Eucharistic liturgy. Common conceptions of God's presence and sacrifice are critically analyzed and the connection between sacramental worship and ethics is emphasized.

Aristotle in Coimbra is the first book to cover the history of both the College of Arts in Coimbra and its most remarkable cultural product, the Cursus Conimbricensis, examining early Jesuit pedagogy as performed in one of the most important colleges run by the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth century. The first complete philosophical textbook published by a Jesuit college, the Cursus Conimbricensis (1592-1606) was created by some of the most renowned early Jesuit philosophers and comprised seven volumes of commentaries and disputations on Aristotle's writings, which had formed the foundation of the university philosophy curriculum since the Middle Ages. In Aristotle in Coimbra, Cristiano Casalini demonstrates the connection between educational practices in a sixteenth-century college and the structure of a scholastic philosophical commentary, providing insight into this particular form of late-scholastic Aristotelianism through historiographical discourse. This book provides both a narrative of the historical background behind the publication of the Cursus and an analysis of the major philosophical and educational issues addressed by its seven volumes. It is valuable reading for all those interested in intellectual history, the history of education and the history of philosophy.

Arguments between those who hold religious beliefs and those who do not have been at fever pitch. They have also reached an impasse, with equally entrenched views held by believer and atheist - and even agnostic - alike. This collection is one of the first books to move beyond this deadlock. Specially commissioned chapters address major areas that cut across the debate between the two sides: the origin of knowledge, objectivity and meaning; moral values and the nature of the human person and the good life; and the challenge of how to promote honest and fruitful dialogue in the light of the wide diversity of beliefs, religious and otherwise. Under these broad headings leading figures in the field examine and reflect upon: Secular and religious humanism The idea of the sacred The vexed issue of science in both religious and secular accounts of knowledge Spirituality for the godless Non-western perspectives on the atheism/theism debate. A key feature of the collection is a dialogue between Raymond Tallis and Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury. Religion and Atheism: Beyond the Divide will interest anyone who is concerned about the clash between the religious and the secular and how to move beyond it, as well as students of ethics, philosophy of religion and religious studies.

Exploring Kierkegaard's complex use of the Bible, the essays in this volume use source-critical research and tools ranging from literary criticism to theology and biblical studies, to situate Kierkegaard's appropriation of the biblical material in his cultural and intellectual context. The contributors seek to identify the possible sources that may have influenced Kierkegaard's understanding and employment of Scripture, and to describe the debates about the Bible that may have shaped, perhaps indirectly, his attitudes toward Scripture. They also pay close attention to Kierkegaard's actual hermeneutic practice, analyzing the implicit interpretive moves that he makes as well as his more explicit statements about the significance of various biblical passages. This close reading of Kierkegaard's texts elucidates the unique and sometimes odd features of his frequent appeals to Scripture. This volume in the series devotes one tome to the Old Testament and a second tome to the New Testament. Tome I considers the canonically disputed literature of the Apocrypha. Although Kierkegaard certainly cited the Old Testament much less frequently than he did the New, passages and themes from the Old Testament do occupy a position of startling importance in his writings. Old Testament characters such as Abraham and Job often play crucial and even decisive roles in his texts. Snatches of Old Testament wisdom figure prominently in his edifying literature. The vocabulary and cadences of the Psalms saturate his expression of the range of human passions from joy to despair. The essays in this first tome seek to elucidate the crucial rhetorical uses to which he put key passages from the Old Testament, the sources that influenced him to do this, and his reasons for doing so.

Michael Sudduth examines three prominent objections to natural theology that have emerged in the Reformed streams of the Protestant theological tradition: objections from the immediacy of our knowledge of God, the noetic effects of sin, and the logic of theistic arguments. Distinguishing between the project of natural theology and particular models of natural theology, Sudduth argues that none of the main Reformed objections is successful as an objection to the project of natural theology itself. One particular model of natural theology - the dogmatic model - is best suited to handle Reformed concerns over natural theology. According to this model, rational theistic arguments represent the reflective reconstruction of the natural knowledge of God by the Christian in the context of dogmatic theology. Informed by both contemporary religious epistemology and the history of Protestant philosophical theology, Sudduth''s examination illuminates the complex nature of the project of natural theology and its place in the Reformed tradition.

Advocacy for religious freedom has become a global project while religion, and the management of religion, has become of increasing interest to scholars across a wider range of disciplines. Rather than adopting the common assumption that religious freedom is simply incompletely realized, the authors in this book suggest that the starting point for understanding religion in public life today should be religious establishment. In the hyper-globalized world of the politics of religious freedom today, a focus on establishments brings into view the cultural assumptions, cosmologies, anthropologies, and institutions which structure religion and religious diversity. Leading international scholars from a diverse range of disciplines explore how countries today live with religious difference and consider how considering establishments reveals the limitations of universal, multicultural, and interfaith models of religious freedom. Examining the various forms religion takes in Tunisia, Canada, Taiwan, South Africa, and the USA, amongst others, this book argues that legal protections for religious freedom can only be understood in a context of socially and culturally specific constraints.

In The Moral Psychology of Clement of Alexandria, Kathleen Gibbons proposes a new approach to Clement's moral philosophy and explores how his construction of Christianity's relationship with Jewishness informed, and was informed by, his philosophical project. As one of the earliest Christian philosophers, Clement's work has alternatively been treated as important for understanding the history of relations between Christianity and Judaism and between Christianity and pagan philosophy. This study argues that an adequate examination of his significance for the one requires an adequate examination of his significance for the other. While the ancient claim that the writings of Moses were read by the philosophical schools was found in Jewish, Christian, and pagan authors, Gibbons demonstrates that Clement's use of this claim shapes not only his justification of his authorial project, but also his philosophical argumentation. In explaining what he took to be the cosmological, metaphysical, and ethical implications of the doctrine that the supreme God is a lawgiver, Clement provided the theoretical justifications for his views on a range of issues that included martyrdom, sexual asceticism, the status of the law of Moses, and the relationship between divine providence and human autonomy. By contextualizing Clement's discussions of volition against wider Greco-Roman debates about self-determination, it becomes possible to reinterpret the invocation of "free will" in early Christian heresiological discourse as part of a larger dispute about what human autonomy requires.

Where are the dead? What are they doing? What kind of a process is dying? What relationships exist among the dead themselves, and between the dead and those in the world they have left behind? Modern philosophers argue that the idea of disembodied survival - to which many believers pay lip service - is incoherent, and that there can be evidence neither for nor against something incoherent. By contrast, this book argues, the idea of an embodied survival (albeit a form of embodiment differing from our present embodiment) makes perfect sense in itself and fits much better with the alleged evidence for post-mortem survival. Exploring post-mortem survival, Where are the Dead? uses a variety of empirical data, alongside mythological, legendary and purely fictional material, to illustrate how the less familiar idea of embodied post-mortem survival might actually 'work' in some real afterlife environment. By asking questions about the nature and whereabouts of the afterlife, and about what it might be like to be dead, the book explores themes nowadays relatively neglected even in disciplines explicitly concerned with ideas about death, dying and life after death.

This book examines the significance of religion in the work of the twentieth century philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Exploring Bakhtin's contribution to debates on methodology in the study of religion, this book argues that his use of religious terminology is derived from his source material in philosophy of religion and not from his confessional commitment to Russian Orthodox Christianity. Critiquing Gavin Flood's important work Beyond Phenomenology, Hilary Bagshaw explains how Bakhtin's work on 'outsideness' presents invaluable insights for scholars of religion, particularly pertinent to the contemporary insider/outsider debate.

In the belief that all the great religions have similarities that confirm and differences that enrich peoples' spiritual outlook on the world, the editors inaugurated a series which they hoped would bring out the essential tenets of religion in what they perceived to be an age of doubt. The series was originally published in the 1950s and consisted of three kinds of books: translations of imaginative, devotional and philosophic works, with an introduction or commentary; reproductions of masterpieces of religious art; and background books showing the environment in which this literature and art arose and developed. The books overlap each other: Both Eastern and Western religious art often illustrates a religious text and many of the books seek the common ground in their cultural view of religion or philosophy.

The philosophy of religion and theology are related to the culture in which they have developed. These disciplines provide a source of values and vision to the cultures of which they are part, while at the same time they are delimited and defined by their cultures. This book compares the ideas of two contemporary philosophers, John Hick and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, on the issues of religion, religions, the concept of the ultimate reality, and the notion of sacred knowledge. On a broader level, it compares two world-views: the one formed by Western Christian culture, which is religious in intention but secular in essence; the other Islamic, formed through the assimilation of traditional wisdom, which is turned against the norms of secular culture and is thus religious both in intention and essence.

In Black Life Matter, Biko Mandela Gray offers a philosophical eulogy for Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, and Sandra Bland that attests to their irreducible significance in the face of unremitting police brutality. Gray employs a theoretical method he calls "sitting-with"-a philosophical practice of care that seeks to defend the dead and the living. He shows that the police who killed Stanley-Jones and Rice reduced them to their bodies in ways that turn black lives into tools that the state uses to justify its violence and existence. He outlines how Bland's arrest and death reveal the affective resonances of blackness, and he contends that Sterling's physical movement and speech before he was killed point to black flesh as unruly living matter that exceeds the constraints of the black body. These four black lives, Gray demonstrates, were more than the brutal violence enacted against them; they speak to a mode of life that cannot be fully captured by the brutal logics of antiblackness.

First published in 1990, East of Existentialism was written to explore new perspectives on eternal questions such as 'Who am I?', 'Why am I here?', and 'Where am I going?'. The book brings together insights from existentialism in the West and Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism in the East, and presents practical case studies throughout to show the student how apparently abstruse themes relate to real-life situations. Divided into three parts, the first considers major Western contributions to the themes of human nature and destiny. The central section examines the connection between existentialism in the West and dominant philosophical schools in India and China. The last three chapters explore the relevance of Eastern ideas to Western thought, not only to provide philosophical theory but also to offer a greater understanding of moral and social dilemmas and of practical living. A full glossary explains the technical terms used in the book. East of Existentialism will appeal to those with an interest in philosophy and religious studies.

Originally published in 1958 and authored by one of the foremost liberal Catholic theologians of the 20th Century, this book recognizes the need for a greater unity of understanding among all faiths and explores these common grounds with insight and sympathy, bringing to Catholics and non-Catholics alike a full measure of the author's inspiration and judgement.

This wide ranging and challenging book explores the relationship between subjectivity and mortality as it is understood by a number of twentieth-century French philosophers including Sartre, Lacan, Levinas and Derrida. Making intricate and sometimes unexpected connections, Christina Howells draws together the work of prominent thinkers from the fields of phenomenology and existentialism, religious thought, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, focussing in particular on the relations between body and soul, love and death, desire and passion. From Aristotle through to contemporary analytic philosophy and neuroscience the relationship between mind and body (psyche and soma, consciousness and brain) has been persistently recalcitrant to analysis, and emotion (or passion) is the locus where the explanatory gap is most keenly identified. This problematic forms the broad backdrop to the work's primary focus on contemporary French philosophy and its attempts to understand the intimate relationship between subjectivity and mortality, in the light not only of the 'death' of the classical subject but also of the very real frailty of the subject as it lives on, finite, desiring, embodied, open to alterity and always incomplete. Ultimately Howells identifies this vulnerability and finitude as the paradoxical strength of the mortal subject and as what permits its transcendence. Subtle, beautifully written, and cogently argued, this book will be invaluable for students and scholars interested in contemporary theories of subjectivity, as well as for readers intrigued by the perennial connections between love and death.

This book examines in rich detail the neglected topic of female ascetics. Based on field research, it documents the social forces which facilitated the establishment of an Order of Ascetics for women, defying tradition in many respects. It describes the subtle methods by which the individual is transformed into a full member of the Order, and how hierarchy and purity are indeed integral to the process.

Excellently organised and written, this is a thorough examination of how philosophy interacts with religion. The chapters were originally presented as the Hibbert Lectures in 1931 at University College London and the University of Manchester. The texts are expanded and elaborated to present a cohesive text, first published in 1937. Exploring free rational thinking, the book encourages reflection on the principals on which religion rests and addresses themes such as knowledge and experience, evolution, positivism, mystical experience, divine immanence, beauty and morality.

The original essays in this collection chronicle the transformation of Arnold Schoenberg's works from music as pure art to music as a vehicle of religious and political ideas, during the first half of the twentieth century. This interdisciplinary volume includes contributions from musicologists, music theorists, and scholars of German literature and of Jewish studies.