Kalos

Humans are made in the image of God, and authentically coming to be human means to become like him. This work pursues a robust and renewed theology of grace in conversation with the patristic traditions of Irenaeus, the Cappadocian Fathers, and Augustine, the medieval theology of Maximus and Aquinas, and such modern interlocutors as Soren Kierkegaard, Bernard Lonergan, John Milbank, and John Behr. It thereby regrounds our interpretation of Scripture in the wide tradition of the church. By doing so, it argues that Christ's incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection form the only possible point of reference by which we can understand the universe, as God creates it and works in it to bring us into union with himself.

Could it be that we have lost touch with some basic human realities in our day of high-tech efficiency, frenetic competition, and ceaseless consumption? Have we turned from the moral, the spiritual, and even the physical realities that make our lives meaningful? These are metaphysical questions--questions about the nature of reality--but they are not abstract questions. These are very down to earth questions that concern power and the collective frameworks of belief and action governing our daily lives. This book is an introduction to the history, theory, and application of Christian metaphysics. Yet this book is not just an introduction, it is also a passionately argued call for a profound change in the contemporary Christian mind. Paul Tyson argues that as Western culture's Christian Platonist understanding of reality was replaced by modern pragmatic realism, we turned not just from one outlook on reality to another, but away from reality itself. This book seeks to show that if we can recover this ancient Christian outlook on reality, reframed for our day, then we will be able to recover a way of life that is in harmony with human and divine truth.

Many contemporary writers misunderstand early Christian views on philosophy because they identify the critical stances of the ante-Nicene fathers toward specific pagan philosophical schools with a general negative stance toward reason itself. Dariusz Karłowicz's Socrates and Other Saints demonstrates why this identification is false. The question of the extent of humanity's natural knowledge cannot be reduced to the question of faith's relationship to the historical manifestations of philosophy among the Ancients. Karłowicz closely reads the writings of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and others to demonstrate this point. He also builds upon Pierre Hadot's thesis that ancient philosophy is not primarily theory but a "way of life" taught by sages, which aimed at happiness through participation in the divine. The fact that pagan philosophers falsely described humanity's telos did not mean that the spiritual practices they developed could not be helpful in the Christian pilgrimage. As it turns out, the ancient Christian writers traditionally considered to be enemies of philosophy actually borrowed from her much more than we think--and perhaps more than they admitted.

One can know something without being able to prove it to others. For what does one acquire by proving to others what one already knew aside from the fact that one already indeed knew what one did? And so it is with knowledge of God. Proving to others that God exists has nothing to do with knowing him. One could spend a whole lifetime attempting to prove God to others and yet never know him for oneself. Knowing God, which is a personal knowledge, a knowledge by acquaintance, means pressing deeper into the life he has ordained. This unusual book, Kierkegaardian in tone, is a continuation of previous works and an essential addition to DeLay's ongoing effort to revive Christian existentialism into a living philosophy through the "theological turn" of phenomenology.

The Seven cycles of poetry--rooted in each of Christ's Seven Last Words--intend a unified philosophical and theological dwelling. Here, the poet begins from the irresistible force of finality, the very wager of existence itself, and makes herself dialogic magnet, working to draw in and draw out the core of the human and divine relationship. On Good Friday, we are taught the poetry of our Lord. It is an inlaying of our words imbedded in the Word, a submersion into the delectation, anguish, thirst, neediness, ecstasy, and the surrender of the dying God. If that first and often lasting invitation into faith, not faith in general but this faith and this Person, Christ, is given to us through Beauty, it is the monumental task of the artist to help us experience the Beautiful, to recover Beauty in our lives. Each of the cycles of poems pertaining to the Seven Last Words will be accompanied by art by co-author and artist Carol Scott. Here, the unabashedly Beautiful reanimates those lost wells of experience so that we can, once again, feel the poetizing Word enfleshed, Word made flesh, the Word of our flesh human and divine.

This work is a meditation on the integral mystery of forgiveness as both impossible to achieve and yet necessary for salvation. We must forgive, yet we cannot. Through themes of loss, sin, love, and virtue in literature, art, poetry, and theology, Caitlin Smith Gilson shows us how the need for forgiveness is a universal longing that directs us to the very hope for eternal life. At the core of forgiveness resides the heart of Christ who alone can complete what is lacking in us yet so desired. In Christ, forgiveness becomes the impossible possibility.

This book offers an intelligent but accessible recovery of the Christian hope for heaven and the resurrected life. Our ideas of heaven often need rescuing from the well-meaning but often empty sense of a "better-place." It is more fruitful, the author argues, to orientate ourselves by St. Paul's words: "For this world is not our permanent home; we are looking forward to a home yet to come." Each of us desires Eden while struggling to make good out of evil. The things we cherish have their goodness diluted and drained of life. Through it all, we cannot quite picture heaven and our eternal happiness. It feels remote and unreal. Yet the recovery of paradise in our hearts and minds is the crucial act of our lives. Through it we can understand the meaning behind the greatest commandment: "Love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind."

The deepest words are the most prosaic. They are enriched by everybody's voice, and only through them are our joys, sufferings, doubts, and choices illuminated and shared. This book's brief meditations lend an ear to ten of them, from breath to wound, from way to abandonment, from attention to peace. The lesson of poets, the wisdom of saints, and the teaching of philosophers with these simple words afford innumerable pathways. To gather ourselves, letting the weight of these essential words sink into us, is to catch our breath silently, rendering its rhythm fuller and stronger. Yet what is the point, if we were to stand pat? The price of the highest breath can only be to give itself without reserve, until we lose our breath. A contribution to the venerable tradition of lectio divina, Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One's Breath invites its reader to embark on a contemplative journey led by an author who was one of France's most prolific and profound philosophers in generations.

This is a book of letters, letters to Julian of Norwich concerning her Revelations of Divine Love. It is an attempt to search for my life by giving myself heart and soul to the teaching of a text and it is about the possibilities of transformation that ensue. Julian makes extreme claims about the love of God revealed in the body of Christ on the cross. She claims that in love the human self can truly flourish and in the end that "all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." I need to know if these claims are true. Thus, I write letters, ask questions, and look for answers as to how to indwell the vision given to Julian, while engaging the limits of my personhood and the modern paradigms that constrain my thoughts. I bring my whole being to the correspondence, I am changed, and I do find my life.

In critical yet appreciative dialogue with four different art critics who demonstrated theological sensitivities, Adam Edward Carnehl traces an ongoing religious conversation that ran through nineteenth-century aesthetics. In Carnehl's estimation, this critical conversation between John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde, culminated in the brilliant approach of G. K. Chesterton, who began his journalistic career with a series of insightful works of art criticism. By conducting a close reading of these largely neglected works, Carnehl demonstrates that Chesterton developed a theological aesthetic that focuses on the revelation of God's image in every human being. In Chesterton's eyes, only those made in God's image can produce images themselves, and only those who receive a revelation of truth are able to reveal truths for others. Art is therefore a rich and symbolic unveiling of the truth of humanity which finds its origin and purpose in God the Divine Artist.

The Unthinkable Sacrifice provides a brief and accessible account of early fatherhood using the tools of phenomenological philosophy. Mickel takes up the phenomenological task of describing the father's experience of his child's soul. Drawing on the work of the thinkers associated with France's "theological turn," especially Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Levinas, he speaks of the child's soul as a phenomenon that appears most of all through the child's face and that issues a call for the father's attention and responsibility. Mickel then explores the unique challenges the late modern world presents for heeding the call of the child's soul. The book reaches its crescendo with an exploration of fatherly sacrifice, those places where the child's finitude and the father's finitude meet, those sites of communion in which the father gives himself all the way to the seeming limits of his love, refusing to leave the child alone at the mercy of the sufferings he or she will inevitably undergo as a human person. This voluntary exposure to whatever existential conditions the child finds him- or herself in, Mickel argues, is precisely the highest calling of the father's love.