In this work, Jobling argues that religious sensibility in the Western world is in a process of transformation, but that we see here change, not decline, and that the production and consumption of the fantastic in popular culture offers an illuminating window onto spiritual trends and conditions. She examines four major examples of the fantastic genre: the "Harry Potter" series (Rowling), "His Dark Materials" (Pullman), "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (Whedon) and the "Earthsea cycle" (Le Guin), demonstrating that the spiritual universes of these four iconic examples of the fantastic are actually marked by profoundly modernistic assumptions, raising the question of just how contemporary spiritualities (often deemed postmodern) navigate philosophically the waters of truth, morality, authority, selfhood and the divine. Jobling tackles what she sees as a misplaced disregard for the significance of the fantasy genre as a worthy object for academic investigation by offering a full-length, thematic, comparative and cross-disciplinary study of the four case-studies proposed, chosen because of their significance to the field and because these books have all been posited as exemplars of a 'postmodern' religious sensibility. This work shows how attentiveness to spiritual themes in cultural icons can offer the student of theology and religions insight into the framing of the moral and religious imagination in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries and how this can prompt traditional religions to reflect on whether their own narratives are culturally framed in a way resonating with the 'signs of the times'.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

In The Names of God, as in his previous study, Toward a Grammar of Biblical Poetics (OUP, 1992), Herbert Brichto continues to argue against the atomistic readings of the Hebrew Bible by the currently dominant schools of Biblical scholarship. He maintains, that despite the repetitions and self contradictions found in the Five Books of Moses, the Pentateuch possesses an aesthetic and ideological wholeness. Its harmonious blend of stories and structures inform one another as they give shape and meaning to the relationship and expectations between a benevolent God and recalcitrant humankind. In particular, Bichto focuses his "poetic" reading on the Book of Genesis. He uses the methods of contemporary literary criticism to examine one of the greatest inconsistencies within Genesis, the alternating use of Yahweh (the Lord) and Elohim (God) as names for the Deity. Often cited as the proof of multiple authorship, Brichto shows, instead, that this "inconsistency" serves as a device for a single author, using the specific name that is appropriate to each specific story. Brichto then proceeds to overturn other multiple-author proofs, including variations in genealogies, eponyms, and chronologies. He shows that their variety, ingenuity, and imaginative whimsy serve a vital poetic function in the structure of the text as a whole. Finding a unity in this diversity of genres, styles, and devices, Brichto overturns many of the assumptions of current scholarship as he solidifies his thesis of single authorship.

This book offers help for dealing with the practical issues of life most people struggle with daily. The approach of the author is to make perceptive insights, and to offer control steps and redeeming responses, most of which are based on sound biblical teaching. No matter what is your status in life, whether from the perspectives of financial strength or weakness or official position or authority rank and power, or otherwise, you cannot escape life's struggles. Therefore, this book is for you. Here are some of the issues analyzed for your benefit: Honor Marriage Create your Future Pursue God's Goals Let God take Charge Take Eight Great Steps Understand Happiness Rise above Peer Pressure Have a Positive Mind-set Perceive God's Objectives Face death with Confidence The author challenges cuttingly and comprehensively -- everyone. He writes so that whatever might be the nature of your 'tough times' there are strategies, he shows, based on sound principles of spirituality and integrity, for succeeding in struggling victoriously.

Frederick G. Lawrence is the authoritative interpreter of the work of Bernard Lonergan and an incisive reader of twentieth-century continental philosophy and hermeneutics. The Fragility of Consciousness is the first published collection of his essays and contains several of his best known writings as well as unpublished work. The essays in this volume exhibit a long interdisciplinary engagement with the relationship between faith and reason in the context of the crisis of culture that has marked twentieth- and twenty-first century thought and practice. Frederick G. Lawrence, with his profound and generous commitment to the intellectual life of the church, has produced a body of work that engages with Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas, Ricoeur, Strauss, Voegelin, and Benedict XVI among others. These essays also explore various themes such as the role of religion in a secular age, political theology, economics, neo-Thomism, Christology, and much more. In an age marked by social, cultural, political, and ecclesial fragmentation, Lawrence models a more generous way - one that prioritizes friendship, conversation, and understanding above all else.

This text explores the unacknowledged psychological element in Maimonides' work, one which prefigures the latter insights of Freud. It also looks at Maimonidean mysticism and much more.

What does "death" really mean? Is there life after death? Is that idea even intelligible? Despite our constant confrontation with death there has been little serious philosophical reflection on the meaning of death and even less on the classical question of immortality. Popular books on "death and dying" abound, but they are largely manuals for dying with composure, or individual "near death" experiences of light at the end of the tunnel. This lively conversation includes various views on these matters, from John Lachs's gentle but firm insistence that the notion of immortality is philosophically unintelligible, to Jurgen Moltmann's brave and careful examination of various arguments for what happens to us when we die. David Roochnik searches the Platonic dialogues for a metaphorical immortality which might satisfy the human longing for some meaning which does not die with us. Aaron Garrett traces the naturalization of the idea of immortality from Scotus to Locke in the history of Western philosophy, and David Schmidtz offers autobiographical reflections in shaping his philosophy of life's meaning. David Eckel takes us through a synopsis of Buddhist ideas on these issues, and Brian Jorgensen offers a response. Rita Rouner uses the poems she wrote after the death of her son to chronicle a survivor's struggle with life and death. Peter Gomes casts a critical eye on our death rituals, and defends a classical Christian view of death and immortality, while Wendy Doniger examines the literature on those who were offered immortality by the gods and chose instead to remain mortal.

This rhetorical study of the various language strategies and competing worldviews involved in the 140-year argument between Biblical creationists and Darwinian evolutionists focuses on the 1860 Huxley/Wilberforce debate, the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, and the 1981 Arkansas Creation-Science Trial. When Darwin published his Origins of Species in 1859, he initiated a debate about the origin of human life and the role of God in human affairs scarcely equalled in world history. Smout traces the response of Biblical creationists to Darwinian evolutionists. Looking carefully at the stories told and the tactics used by both sides, he analyzes all available accounts of the original debate culminating in the 1860 Huxley/Wilberforce debate, the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, and the 1981 Arkansas Creation-Science Trial. Professor Smout argues that both sides in the controversy use various language strategies to persuade the culture as a whole to see the world that they see and to enact their position as public policy. As Smout illustrates, the problem is that both sides rely on an inadequate conception of language as a namer of timeless realities rather than as an instrument used by human communities to achieve their goals. He attempts to articulate a better view of language and to show how it might help solve intractable arguments such as this. He argues that we should see language as a tool that shapes what we see, and definitions of terms as political acts rather than statements of fact made by disciplinary experts. An important analysis for students and scholars in rhetoric, history, religion, and sociology.

Norgate assesses the way in which the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation for all other Christian doctrines, especially the Christian understanding of salvation. He investigates in detail the approach of the German Lutheran theologian, Isaac A. Dorner (1809-1884) to this question. Analysis of his arguments concerning the priority of the doctrine of God for Christian belief and dogmatics is given. It examines the form of his doctrine of God's triunity, and gives an extensive study of how Dorner's particular account of God's triune identity informs the Christian conception of God's relation to the world, first, as Creator and, second, as Saviour. In this process, it seeks to refocus attention on Dorner as a major figure in the development of modern theology. The relationship between Dorner's doctrines of the triune God and salvation is assessed. Dorner's positive reconstruction of the Christian idea of God as Trinity provides helpful resources in delineating a non-competitive account of God's relation to the world. This means that God is not confused with nor distant from the world. The eternal vitality of God's immanent personality is the basis of His vital economic activity, which culminates in the incarnation of the Son. We follow the main tributaries of Dorner's arguments in System of Christian Faith, beginning with an analysis of his doctrine of God, via his development of the doctrines of creation, humanity, and the incarnation of the God-man. An assessment is given of those doctrines which pertain to the way in which God brings salvation through Jesus Christ: sin, Jesus, and atonement. Norgate concludes by comparing Dorner's achievements with those found in more recent theologies of atonement. "T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology" is a series of monographs in the field of Christian doctrine, with a particular focus on constructive engagement with major topics through historical analysis or contemporary restatement.

Religious poetry has often been regarded as minor poetry and dismissed in large part because poetry is taken to require direct experience; whereas religious poetry is taken to be based on faith, that is, on second or third hand experience. The best methods of thinking about "experience" are given to us by phenomenology. Poetry and Revelation is the first study of religious poetry through a phenomenological lens, one that works with the distinction between manifestation (in which everything is made manifest) and revelation (in which the mystery is re-veiled as well as revealed). Providing a phenomenological investigation of a wide range of "religious poems", some medieval, some modern; some written in English, others written in European languages; some from America, some from Britain, and some from Australia, Kevin Hart provides a unique new way of thinking about religious poetry and the nature of revelation itself.

Overviewing what makes the intersection between emotion and ethics so confusing, this book surveys an older wisdom in how to manage it, using a range of Christian theologians and sources. More important even than 'managing', we begin to see a vision for a better set of affections to grow within and among us. In this vision emerges a practical and nuanced account of what the Christian tradition sometime summarises as 'love'. How may we recover a deep affection for what matters, both within ourselves and together in groups? This book also dialogues with a new movement in moral psychology, 'social intuitionism'. Cameron argues that researchers in this discipline have interests and conclusions that sometimes overlap with Christian sources, even where their respective lenses differ. In this way, the book overviews recent trends in moral psychology against a recent historical and contemporary cultural backdrop, whilst assaying major sources in Christian theology that offer guidance on moral psychology.

The first part of the book is grounded in biblical issues and in historical and philosophical theology. It seeks to establish several schemes of death theology related, for example, to early Christianity's Jewish cultural milieu, to belief in Christ's resurrection and to Christology, to issues of millennial belief and to an emergent liturgical practice. The rise of notions of the soul in relation to medieval thought and practice and the place of death in Reformation theology are both covered, as is the role of the nineteenth century and twentieth century. Finally the rise of biblical theology is considered, especially in the twentieth century. The second part of the book takes up several contemporary models of the theology of death. The first pursues a traditional acceptance of an other-worldly afterlife, the second explores worldly analysis of eternal life as a quality of contemporary existence devoid of any future state. The third develops the worldly model and considers a wider sense of self as a part of an ecological view of the world as a divine creation and explores the meaning of birth, life and death amidst a divine environment. "The Theology of Death" aims to offer some sharply defined schemes to focus thought in a Christian environment in which death, hell and heaven have almost lost their place. The topic of hope is a key element and the book explores the birth and fostering of hope within Christian traditions.

For the first time classic readings on Jesus from outside of Christianity have been brought together in one volume. Jesus Beyond Christianity: The Classic Texts features significant passages on Jesus from Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. The fifty-six selections span two millennia of thought, including translated extracts from the Talmud and the Qur'an, and writings by Mahatma Gandhi and the 14th Dalai Lama.
The volume features fresh translations of important texts, 'Key-Issues' introductions, questions for discussion and guides for further reading. Importantly, each set of readings ends with an entirely fresh reflection from a leading scholar in the field. Every care has been taken to present these often controversial passages in a manner consistent with the aims of their authors; accompanying notes directly address challenging issues.
This unique collection of readings promises to become an essential resource in the study of the world's religions, providing rich guidance for anyone seeking to understand the central convergences and debates between religious traditions.

This book explores the roots and relevance of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s approach to black suffering. King's conviction that "unearned suffering is redemptive" reflects a nearly 250-year-old tradition in the black church going back to the earliest Negro spirituals. From the bellies of slave ships, the foot of the lynching tree, and the back of segregated buses, black Christians have always maintained the hope that God could "make a way out of no way" and somehow bring good from the evils inflicted on them. As a product of the black church tradition, King inherited this widespread belief, developed it using Protestant liberal concepts, and deployed it throughout the Civil Rights Movement of the 50's and 60's as a central pillar of the whole non-violent movement. Recently, critics have maintained that King's doctrine of redemptive suffering creates a martyr mentality which makes victims passive in the face of their suffering; this book argues against that critique. King's concept offers real answers to important challenges, and it offers practical hope and guidance for how beleaguered black citizens can faithfully engage their suffering today.

Since the early 1980s there has been a philosophical turn to the analysis of Christian doctrines. This has been stimulated by the renewal of the Philosophy of Religion in the 1960s and 1970s by figures like Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, William Alston, Anthony Flew, Alistair MacIntyre, Marilyn Adams, Robert Adams and others. This new literature is usually dubbed 'philosophical theology', and has a wide range of application to particular doctrines, theological method, and the work of particular theologians in the past, such as Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Louis de Molina, Jonathan Edwards and Karl Barth. Yet there are very few (if any) textbooks devoted to this new work.The renewal of philosophical theology is of interest to theologians as well as philosophers. This textbook on the subject fosters this cross-disciplinary interest and make a literature that has developed in the professional journals and a number of monographs accessible to a much wider readership - particularly a student readership.It fills an important gap in the market, and should have a wide appeal for teachers at University and Seminary level education, as well as to postgraduate courses.