The Ark of Speech investigates the interplay of speech and silence in the dialogue between God and human beings, and human beings and the world. Ranging from the Old Testament and its depiction of God's creative word to the New Testament and its focus on the life and words of Jesus as the Word of the Father, the book shows how important it is for the believer to listen to God and to others in silence and devotion.

The Ark of Speech investigates the interplay of speech and silence in the dialogue between God and human beings, and human beings and the world. Ranging from the Old Testament and its depiction of God's creative word to the New Testament and its focus on the life and words of Jesus as the Word of the Father, the book shows how important it is for the believer to listen to God and to others in silence and devotion.

In the aptly titled The Call and the Response, renowned philosopher and theologian Jean-Louis Chretien revisits a favorite theme: how human life is shaped by the experience of call and response, explored with art as the context. For Chretien, art is about acts in response to what the artist sees or hears and how these acts provoke responses from viewers. Deeply spiritual and intellectual without being academic, his arguments are unique, both in style and content.

A leading philosopher and theologian, Jean-Louis Chretien uses poetry and painting to explore a theme that runs through all of his work: how human life is shaped by the experience of call and response. For Chretien, we live by responding to the call of experience with words, gestures, expressions, and silence. In luminous meditations on Rembrandt, Delacroix, Manet, Verlaine, Keats, and other artists, Chretien shows how "talking hands of painters" and the "secretly lucid" voices of poets confront the finitude of the human body. Hand to Hand is a deeply cultured renewal of art in all its provocative, transforming, spiritual presence.

Chretien's essays on reading sacred scripture are enriched by his immersion in the classics of ancient philosophy and theology, as well as his poetic sensibility. He is as likely to quote Claudel as Aquinas or Origen. His intimate acquaintance with Patristic writings combines with a sympathetic understanding of such Protestant sources as Luther, Calvin, and Barth to yield an admirably ecumenical perspective.
The book's title refers to James 1:23-24, which portrays the Word of God as a mirror into which one gazes. The concomitant notion of not only examining the text but also being examined by the Word is a fruitful one for learning how to be more fully nourished by one's study of the Bible.

In the aptly titled The Call and the Response, renowned philosopher and theologian Jean-Louis Chrétien revisits a favorite theme: how human life is shaped by the experience of call and response, explored using art as a context. For Chrétien, art is about acts in response to what the artist sees or hears and how these acts provoke responses from viewers. Deeply spiritual and intellectual without being academic, his arguments are unique, in both style and content.

A leading philosopher and theologian, Jean-Louis Chretien uses poetry and painting to explore a theme that runs through all of his work: how human life is shaped by the experience of call and response. For Chretien, we live by responding to the call of experience with words, gestures, expressions, and silence. In luminous meditations on Rembrandt, Delacroix, Manet, Verlaine, Keats, and other artists, Chretien shows how "talking hands of painters" and the "secretly lucid" voices of poets confront the finitude of the human body. Hand to Hand is a deeply cultured renewal of art in all its provocative, transforming, spiritual presence.

The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For is the first English translation of a work by Jean-Louis Chretien, one of France's leading phenomenologists. Chretien unfolds the ideas of memory and loss, of the immemorable, and of hope, in a manner that opens a phenomenological path to the heart of classical thought. This line of reflection places him in the company of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, and Michel Henry, in attempting to join philosophy and religion after Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

The extremities of time exceed our memory and expectation. For philosophy, beginning with Plato, the truth of being is immemorable and cannot be rediscovered except in passing through forgetfulness. How are we to understand this first forgetting? Modern analyses live from a denial of loss: everything would be unforgettable, and is always preserved in memory.

For Christian thought, to hope against all hope and to remember the origin are two essential acts of faith. Memory must die in order to be reborn, in order to purify itself of all nostalgia and become memory of the promise. Augustine and John of the Cross, after Philo the Jew, teach us what contemporary thought has begun to rediscover: only the Other is unforgettable, for it alone is unhoped for.

Chretien’s essays on reading sacred scripture are enriched by his immersion in the classics of ancient philosophy and theology, as well as his poetic sensibility. He is as likely to quote Claudel as Aquinas or Origen. His intimate acquaintance with Patristic writings combines with a sympathetic understanding of such Protestant sources as Luther, Calvin, and Barth to yield an admirably ecumenical perspective. The book’s title refers to James 1:23–24, which portrays the Word of God as a mirror into which one gazes. The concomitant notion of not only examining the text but also being examined by the Word is a fruitful one for learning how to be more fully nourished by one’s study of the Bible.