This is the first volume of Robert Cumming Neville's magnum opus, Theology as Symbolic Engagement. Neville is the premier American systematic theologian of our time. His work is profoundly influenced by Paul Tillich, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and the American pragmatists John Dewey and Charles Sanders Pierce. From Tillich he takes the notion of religion, art, and morality as symbol, and the notion that religion is the substance of culture and culture the form of religion. Thus, theology is symbolic engagement with cultural forms, and Neville explores the ways that such engagement occurs among various religious traditions. One of the most important tasks in theology is to devise ways of testing, correcting, or affirming claims that we had been unable to question before. This book will argue that "system" in theology is not merely correlating assertions, but rather building perspectives from which we can render the various parts of theology vulnerable for assessment. In fact, one of the unique features of this book is its engagement with other religions. Such dialogue has been a feature of Neville's work from the beginning. Theology as Symbolic Engagement breaks the boundaries of systematic theology and moves away from the static character that characterizes such enterprises from Barth onward. Instead, Neville's book showcases the dynamic character of all theology. The hallmark of this entire project is its effort to show theology to be hypothetical and to make it vulnerable to correction.

This is the first volume of Robert Cumming Neville's magnum opus, Theology as Symbolic Engagement. Neville is the premier American systematic theologian of our time. His work is profoundly influenced by Paul Tillich, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and the American pragmatists John Dewey and Charles Sanders Pierce. From Tillich he takes the notion of religion, art, and morality as symbol, and the notion that religion is the substance of culture and culture the form of religion. Thus, theology is symbolic engagement with cultural forms, and Neville explores the ways that such engagement occurs among various religious traditions. One of the most important tasks in theology is to devise ways of testing, correcting, or affirming claims that we had been unable to question before. This book will argue that "system" in theology is not merely correlating assertions, but rather building perspectives from which we can render the various parts of theology vulnerable for assessment. In fact, one of the unique features of this book is its engagement with other religions. Such dialogue has been a feature of Neville's work from the beginning. Theology as Symbolic Engagement breaks the boundaries of systematic theology and moves away from the static character that characterizes such enterprises from Barth onward. Instead, Neville's book showcases the dynamic character of all theology. The hallmark of this entire project is its effort to show theology to be hypothetical and to make it vulnerable to correction.

A Philosophy of Sacred Nature introduces Robert Corrington's philosophical thought, "ecstatic naturalism," which seeks to recognize nature's self-transforming potential. Ecstatic naturalism is a philosophical-theological perspective, deeply seated in a semiotic cosmology and psychosemiosis, and it radically and profoundly probes into the mystery of nature's perennial self-fissuring of nature natured and nature naturing. Edited by Leon Niemoczynski and Nam T. Nguyen, this collection aims to allow readers to see what can be done with ecstatic naturalism, and what directions, interpretations, and creative uses that doing can take. A thorough exploration of the prospects of ecstatic naturalism, this book will appeal to scholars of Continental philosophy, religious naturalism, and American pragmatism.

In this new book, Ms. Delza, the leading proponent in the United States of the Wu Style, offers succinct and illuminating comments from her viewpoint as both teacher and practitioner.

This book provides a cross-cultural analysis of how religious symbols function from a theological and philosophical perspective. Showing how religious symbols can be true in various qualified senses, Neville presents a theory of religious symbolism in the American pragmatic tradition extending and elaborating Tillich's claim that religious symbols participate in the divine realities to which they refer and yet must be broken in order not to be idolatrous or demonic.

Religion in Late Modernity runs against the grain of common suppositions of contemporary theology and philosophy of religion. Against the common supposition that basic religious terms have no real reference but are mere functions of human need, the book presents a pragmatic theory of religious symbolism in terms of which the cognitive engagement of the Ultimate is of a piece with the cognitive engagement of nature and persons. Throughout this discussion, Neville develops a late-modern conception of God that is defensible in a global theological public.

Against the common supposition that religion is on the retreat in late modernity except in fundamentalist forms, the author argues that religion in our time is a stimulus to religiously oriented scholarship, a civilizing force among world societies, a foundation for obligation in politics, a source for healthy social experimentation, and the most important mover of soul.

This is a philosophic study of some aspects of spiritual development, broadly defined. Professor Neville has been influenced significantly by comparison between several of the world's great spiritual traditions, and he has tried to be faithful to experiences in those traditions. Readers whose interest in spiritual development come out of non-Western traditions will find this book congenial. But this is a philosophical study, and the book puts forward a philosophical theory of spiritual development, paying attention to personal, social, and metaphysical concerns, and analyzing three central images of spiritual "heroism." The central contribution attempted here is a way of understanding the quest for spiritual liberation or perfection through the models of the spiritual soldier, the sage, and the saint. At times the argument aims, not just to understand, but to promote spiritual liberation, and to do so through philosophic understanding.

Focusing on what makes Jesus important in Christianity, Robert Cummings Neville, a leading philosophical theologian, presents and illustrates a theory of religious symbols wherein God is directly engaged in symbolically shaped thinking and practice. Moreover, Christian symbolism is shown to be entirely compatible with a late-modern scientific world view. This major work may affect belief in Jesus, and will be of value to students, academics, clergy with theological training, and others grappling with the meaning and importance of religious symbols in our age.

Focusing on what makes Jesus important in Christianity, Robert Cummings Neville, a leading philosophical theologian, presents and illustrates a theory of religious symbols wherein God is directly engaged in symbolically shaped thinking and practice. Moreover, Christian symbolism is shown to be entirely compatible with a late-modern scientific world view. This major work may affect belief in Jesus, and will be of value to students, academics, clergy with theological training, and others grappling with the meaning and importance of religious symbols in our age.

Dialogue among religions has always been challenging. Today, the questions are becoming more fundamental: are the various traditions - Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Tao - even talking about the same thing when they speak of Nature, or God, Emptiness or Brahman? The Divine Matrix represents a bold scholarly attempt to provide a framework for discussing theseand other - questions that will keep the interreligious dialogue project from grinding to a halt. In The Divine Matrix philosopher and theologian Joseph Bracken first locates the Infinite as transcendent source and goal of human activity as the notion common to virtually all the major world religions. He suggests that the Infinite is prototypically experienced not as an entity but as an ongoing activity - the principle of activity for all beings (God included). This idea is consistent with the notion of eternal and continuous motion in Aristotle, with the "act of being" (actus essendi) in the theology of Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckert, and with the ground of being of Shelling and Heidegger, as well as with Whitehead's definition of "creativity". Bracken goes on to show that this idea is implicit in descriptions of Brahman in the Hindu Upanishads, in the experience of pratitya-samutpada ("dependent co-arising") in classical Buddhism, and in descriptions of the Tao in Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu.