|
Showing 1 - 2 of
2 matches in All Departments
Since the middle of the last century, the emergence and development
of fields as diverse as artificial intelligence, evolutionary
science, cognitive linguistics, and neuroscience have led to a
greater understanding of the ways in which humans think. One of the
major discoveries involves what researchers refer to as conceptual
mapping. According to theories of conceptual mapping, human thought
is profoundly shaped by the ability to make connections. Simply
put, human thinking is metaphorical all the way down. This insight
has revolutionized the way in which scientists and philosophers
think about the mind/body problem, the formation and function of
language, and even the development of scientific progress itself.
Until recently however, this research has gone largely unnoticed
within Christian theology. But this revolution in understanding
human cognition calls for broader and richer engagement with
theology and religious studies: How does this new insight into
human meaning-making bear on our understanding of religious
meaning-making? And how might Christian theology interpret and
respond to this new understanding of the development of human
thought? This edited volume offers an introduction to conceptual
mapping that is accessible to those with no previous knowledge of
the field, and demonstrates the substantial resources this
interdisciplinary research has for thinking about a variety of
theological questions. The book begins with a chapter introducing
the reader to the basics of conceptual mapping. The remaining
chapters apply these insights to a variety of theological topics
including anthropology, sacramental theology, biblical studies,
ecumenical theology, and ethics.
The two-fold task of A Symphony of Distances is to provide an
overview of Hans Urs von Balthasar's use of distance imagery with
regard to personal distinctions in the Holy Trinity and to offer a
critical analysis of him as a modern Catholic theologian. A
metaphor of "distance" integrates all of Balthasar's theological
thought as a primary cipher for the many symbols through which he
reads the Christian theological tradition in a trinitarian and
eschatological mode. The book follows a chronological, four-stage
development of Balthasar's trinitarianism through the lens of this
distance metaphor as it occurs across representative texts. The
critical analysis employs the conceit of a symphony of four musical
movements that correspond to four varieties of theological
distance. These distances show certain correspondences of God's
creation and redemption of the world-marked by the first two
"distances"-with the relations of the divine persons to each other
in the economy of salvation and in the eternal Trinity
itself-marked by the third and fourth distances. "Listening" to the
four movements of Balthasar's theological distances enables his
readers to "hear" the themes of all four movements in the ascending
order of richness, complexity, and inclusivity over the long
development of his thought. This fundamentally positive approach of
A Symphony of Distances allows for a thorough critique of the
internal consistency of Balthasar's applied method, of the
controversial use of gendered trinitarian notions in his
speculations on divine pathos, and of his adequacy to the tasks of
modern theology. The final judgment is that Balthasar's theology of
distance can be accepted, with reservations, as a positive element
of his contribution to contemporary trinitarian theology. The book
can thus serve as a critical reference for readers who find
Balthasar's notion of trinitarian distance, and indeed his
trinitarianism as a whole, to be compelling, confusing, or
frustrating.
|
|