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Covering Up Luther
How Barth's Christology Challenged the Deus Absconditus that Haunts Modernity
by Rustin E. Brian
Part 9 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
Karl Barth's Christology provides a key to out-narrating the Deus absconditus, which, as Rustin Brian contends, is in fact the god of modernity. Included in this is the rejection of the logical and philosophical systems that allow for the modern understanding of God as the Deus absconditus, namely, dialectics and nominalism. This rejection is illustrated, interestingly enough, in Barth's decision to literally cover up, with a rug, Martin Luther's works in his personal library. Surely this was more than a decorative touch.
The reading of Barth's works that results from this starting point challenges much of contemporary Barth scholarship and urges readers to reconsider Barth. Through careful examination of a large body of Barth's writings, particularly in regard to the issues of the knowledge or knowability of God, as well as Christology, Brian argues that contemporary Barth scholarship should be done in careful conversation with the finest examples of both Protestant and, especially, Roman Catholic theology. Barth's paradoxical Christology thus becomes the foundation for a dogmatic ecumenicism. Barth's Christology, then, just might be able to open up possibilities for discussion and even convergence, within a church that is anything but one.
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Wagner's Parsifal
An Appreciation in the Light of His Theological Journey
by Richard H. Bell
Part 10 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
Parsifal, Wagner's final opera, is considered by many to be one of the greatest religious musical works ever composed; but it is also one of the most difficult to understand and many have questioned whether it can be considered a Christian work at all. Added to this is the furious debate that has surrounded the composer as an anti-Semite, racist, and inspiration for Hitler. Richard Bell addresses such issues and argues that despite any personal failings Wagner makes a fundamental theological contribution through his many writings and ultimately in Parsifal which, he argues, preaches Christ crucified in a way that can never be captured by words alone. He argues that Wagner offers a vision of the divine and a theology of Good Friday that can both function as profound therapy and address current theological controversies.
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Gift and the Unity of Being
by Antonio López
Part 11 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
Starting from both our original experience of being given to ourselves and Jesus Christ's archetypal self-donation, Gift and the Unity of Being elucidates the sense in which gift is the form of being's unity, while unity itself constitutes the permanence of the gift of being. In dialogue with ancient and modern philosophers and theologians, Lopez offers a synthetic, rather than systematic, account of the unity proper to being, the human person, God, and the relations among them. The book shows how contemplation of the triune God of Love through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit allows us to discover the eternal communion that being is and to which finite being is called. It also illustrates the sense in which God's gratuitousness unexpectedly offers the human person the possibility to recognize and embrace his origin and destiny, and thus he is given to see and taste in God's light the ever-fruitful, dramatic, and mysterious positivity of being.
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The Role of Death in Life
A Multidisciplinary Examination of the Relationship between Life and Death
by John Behr
Part 15 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
The relation between life and death is a subject of perennial relevance for all human beings–and indeed, the whole world and the entire universe, in as much as, according to the saying of ancient Greek philosophy, all things that come into being pass away. Yet it is also a topic of increasing complexity, for life and death now appear to be more intertwined than previously or commonly thought. Moreover, the relation between life and death is also one of increasing urgency, as through the twin phenomena of an increase in longevity unprecedented in human history and the rendering of death, dying, and the dead person all but invisible, people living in the industrialized and post-industrialized Western world of today have lost touch with the reality of death. This radically new situation, and predicament, has implications--medical, ethical, economic, philosophical, and, not least, theological–that have barely begun to be addressed. This volume gathers together essays by a distinguished and diverse group of scientists, theologians, philosophers, and health practitioners, originally presented in a symposium sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.
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Things Seen and Unseen
The Logic of Incarnation in Merleau-Ponty's Metaphysics of Flesh
by Orion Edgar
Part 17 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty was developing into a radical ontology when he died prematurely in 1961. Merleau-Ponty identified this nascent ontology as a philosophy of incarnation that carries us beyond entrenched dualisms in philosophical thinking about perception, the body, animality, nature, and God.
What does this ontology have to do with the Catholic language of incarnation, sacrament, and logos on which it draws? In this book, Orion Edgar argues that Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is dependent upon a logic of incarnation that finds its roots and fulfillment in theology, and that Merleau-Ponty drew from the Catholic faith of his youth. Merleau-Ponty's final abandonment of Christianity was based on an understanding of God that was ultimately Kantian rather than orthodox, and this misunderstanding is shared by many thinkers, both Christian and not. As such, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy suggests a new kind of natural theology, one that grounds an account of God as ipsum esse subsistens in the questions produced by a phenomenological account of the world. This philosophical ontology also offers to Christian theology a route away from dualistic compromises and back to its own deepest insight.
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Seeing Things as They Are
G. K. Chesterton and the Drama of Meaning
by Duncan Reyburn
Part 18 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
The jovial journalist, philosopher, and theologian G. K. Chesterton felt that the world was almost always in permanent danger of being misjudged or even overlooked, and so the pursuit of understanding, insight, and awareness was his perpetual preoccupation. Being sensitive to the boundaries and possibilities of perception, he was always encouraging his audience to find a clear view of things. His belief was that it really is possible, albeit in a limited way, to see things as they are. This book, which marries Chesterton's unique perspective with the discipline of philosophical hermeneutics, aims to outline what Chesterton can teach us about reading, interpreting, and participating in the drama of meaning as it unfolds before us in words and in the world.
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Being the Body of Christ in the Age of Management
by Lyndon Shakespeare
Part 19 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
"The church needs effective leaders." "We must be more missional." "Better organization is required." Such sentiments are commonplace among Christians concerned with the health and sustainability of their local church as well as the church universal. Over the past thirty years, the desire for more efficiently run, effectively led, and organizationally sound churches has contributed to an approach to thinking about the church in terms uncritically assumed from the business and management sector. This has given rise to treating the church as if it were just another social body in need of better organization. The question is, what happens when we apply the logic of management techniques to an organization that identifies as the body of Christ? Drawing on organizational theory, theological anthropology, and sacramental theology, this book navigates a path for Christians that avoids reducing the church to just another organization, while providing a vision for the church as the social body where all are invited to connect and be made members of Christ and each other. Such a vision provides an alternative to the social categorization that would define the church by its organizational character rather than its eschatological destiny.
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Owen Barfield
Philosophy, Poetry, and Theology
by Michael Vincent Di Fuccia
Part 20 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
In this book Michael Di Fuccia examines the theological import of Owen Barfield's poetic philosophy. He argues that philosophies of immanence fail to account for creativity, as is evident in the false shuttling between modernity's active construal and postmodernity's passive construal of subjectivity. In both extremes subjectivity actually dissolves, divesting one of any creative integrity. Di Fuccia shows how in Barfield's scheme the creative subject appears instead to inhabit a middle or medial realm, which upholds one's creative integrity. It is in this way that Barfield's poetic philosophy gestures toward a theological vision of poiēsis proper, wherein creativity is envisaged as neither purely passive nor purely active, but middle. Creativity, thus, is not immanent but mediated, a participation in being's primordial poiēsis.
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The Fellowship of the Beatific Vision
Chaucer on Overcoming Tyranny and Becoming Ourselves
by Norm Klassen
Part 22 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer asks a basic human question: How do we overcome tyranny? His answer goes to the heart of a revolutionary way of thinking about the very end of human existence and the nature of created being. His answer, declared performatively over the course of a symbolic pilgrimage, urges the view that humanity has an intrinsic need of grace in order to be itself. In portraying this outlook, Chaucer contributes to what has been called the "palaeo-Christian" understanding of creaturely freedom. Paradoxically, genuine freedom grows out of the dependency of all things upon God.
In imaginatively inhabiting this view of reality, Chaucer aligns himself with that other great poet-theologian of the Middle Ages, Dante. Both are true Christian humanists. They recognize in art a fragile opportunity: not to reduce reality to a set of dogmatic propositions but to participate in an ever-deepening mystery. Chaucer effectively calls all would-be members of the pilgrim fellowship that is the church to behave as artists, interpretively responding to God in the finitude of their existence together.
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Human and Divine Being
A Study on the Theological Anthropology of Edith Stein
by Donald Wallenfang
Part 23 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
Nothing is more dangerous to be misunderstood than the question, "What is the human being?" In an era when this question is not only being misunderstood but even forgotten, wisdom delivered by the great thinkers and mystics of the past must be recovered. Edith Stein (1891-1942), a Jewish Carmelite mystical philosopher, offers great promise to resume asking the question of the human being. In Human and Divine Being, Donald Wallenfang offers a comprehensive summary of the theological anthropology of this heroic martyr to truth. Beginning with the theme of human vocation, Wallenfang leads the reader through a labyrinth of philosophical and theological vignettes: spiritual being, the human soul, material being, empathy, the logic of the cross, and the meaning of suffering. The question of the human being is asked in light of divine being by harnessing the fertile tension between the methods of phenomenology and metaphysics. Stein spurs us on to a rendezvous with the stream of "perennial philosophy" that has watered the landscape of thought since conscious time began. In the end, the meaning of human being is thrown into sharp relief against the darkness of all that is not authentically human.
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Ever-Moving Repose
A Contemporary Reading of Maximus the Confessor's Theory of Time
by Sotiris Mitralexis
Part 24 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
Sotiris Mitralexis offers a contemporary look at Maximus the Confessor's (580-662 CE) understanding of temporality, logoi, and deification, through the perspective of contemporary philosopher and theologian Christos Yannaras, as well as John Zizioulas and Nicholas Loudovikos. Mitralexis argues that Maximus possesses both a unique theological ontology and a unique threefold theory of temporality: time, the Aeon, and the radical transformation of temporality and motion in an ever-moving repose. With these three distinct modes of temporality, a Maximian theory of time can be reconstructed, which can be approached via his teaching on the logoi and deification. In this theory, time is not merely measuring ontological motion, but is more particularly measuring a relationship, the consummation of which effects the transformation of time into a dimensionless present devoid of temporal, spatial, and generally ontological distance--thereby manifesting a perfect communion-in-otherness. In examining Maximian temporality, the book is not focusing on only one aspect of Maximus' comprehensive Weltanschauung, but looks at the Maximian vision as a whole through the lens of temporality and motion.
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Maximus the Confessor as a European Philosopher
by Sotiris Mitralexis
Part 25 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
The study of Maximus the Confessor's thought has flourished in recent years: international conferences, publications and articles, new critical editions and translations mark a torrent of interest in the work and influence of perhaps the most sublime of the Byzantine Church Fathers. It has been repeatedly stated that the Confessor's thought is of eminently philosophical interest. However, no dedicated collective scholarly engagement with Maximus the Confessor as a philosopher has taken place--and this volume attempts to start such a discussion. Apart from Maximus' relevance and importance for philosophy in general, a second question arises: should towering figures of Byzantine philosophy like Maximus the Confessor be included in an overview of the European history of philosophy, or rather excluded from it--as is the case today with most histories of European philosophy? Maximus' philosophy challenges our understanding of what European philosophy is. In this volume, we begin to address these issues and examine numerous aspects of Maximus' philosophy--thereby also stressing the interdisciplinary character of Maximian studies.
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Love, Friendship, Beauty, and the Good
Plato, Aristotle, and the Later Tradition
by Kevin Corrigan
Part 26 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
This book tells a compelling story about love, friendship, and the Divine that took over a thousand years to unfold. It argues that mind and feeling are intrinsically connected in the thought of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus; that Aristotle developed his theology and physics primarily from Plato's Symposium (from the "Greater" and "Lesser Mysteries" of Diotima-Socrates' speech); and that the Beautiful and the Good are not coincident classes, but irreducible Forms, and the loving ascent of the Symposium must be interpreted in the light of the Republic, as the later tradition up to Ficino saw. Against the view that Platonism is an escape from the ambiguities of ordinary experience or opposed to loving individuals for their own sakes, this book argues that Plato dramatizes the ambiguities of ordinary experience, confronts the possibility of failure, and bequeaths erotic models for the loving of individuals to later thought. Finally, it examines the Platonic-Aristotelian heritage on the Divine to discover whether God can love us back, and situates the dramatic development of this legacy in Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Dionysius the Areopagite.
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The Social Philosophy of Gillian Rose
by Andrew Brower Latz
Part 27 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
Gillian Rose was one of the most important social philosophers of the twentieth century. This is the first book to present her social philosophy as a systematic whole. Based on new archive research and examining the full range of Rose's sources, it explains her theory of modern society, her unique version of ideology critique, and her views on law and mutual recognition. Brower Latz relates Rose's work to numerous debates in sociology and philosophy, such as the relation of theory to metatheory, emergence, and the relationship of sociology and philosophy. This book makes clear not only Rose's difficult texts but the entire structure of her thought, making her complete social theory accessible for the first time.
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Love and the Postmodern Predicament
Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth
by D. C. Schindler
Part 28 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
The computer has increasingly become the principal model for the mind, which means our most basic experience of "reality" is as mediated through a screen, or stored in a cloud. As a result, we are losing a sense of the concrete and imposing presence of the real, and the fundamental claim it makes on us, a claim that Iris Murdoch once described as the essence of love. In response to this postmodern predicament, the present book aims to draw on the classical philosophical tradition in order to articulate a robust philosophical anthropology, and a new appreciation of the importance of the "transcendental properties" of being: beauty, goodness, and truth.
The book begins with a reflection on the importance of metaphysics in our contemporary setting, and then presents the human person's relation to the world under the signs of the transcendentals: beauty is the gracious invitation into reality, goodness is the self-gift of freedom in response to this invitation, and truth is the consummation of our relation to the real in knowledge. The book culminates in an argument for why love is ultimately a matter of being, and why metaphysical reason in indispensable in faith.
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Embracing Our Finitude
Exercises in a Christian Anthropology between Dependence and Gratitude
by Stephan Kampowski
Part 29 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
Memento mori--remember death--this is how the medieval monks exhort us. Our life, given in birth and taken by death, is radically marked by finitude, which can be a source of great fear and anguish. Our finitude, however, does not in itself need to be something negative. It confronts us with the question of our life's meaning and spurs us on to treasure our days. Our contingency, as evidenced in our birth and death, reminds us that we have not made ourselves and that there is nothing necessary about the marvelous fact that we exist. Particularly from a Judeo-Christian perspective, embracing our finitude will mean gratefully accepting life as a completely gratuitous gift and living one's days informed by a sense of this gratitude.
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The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being
On the Threshold between the Aesthetic and the Religious
by William Desmond
Part 30 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
This book gathers a set of reflections on the gift of beauty and the passion of being. There is something surprising about beauty that we receive and that moves the passion of being in us. The book takes issue with an ambiguous attitude to beauty among some who proclaim their advanced aesthetic authenticity. Beauty seems bland and lacks the more visceral thrill of the ugly, indeed the excremental. We crave what disrupts and provokes us, not what gives delight or even consoles. By contrast, attention is given to how beauty arouses enigmatic joy in us, and we enjoy an elemental rapport with it as other. Surprised by beauty, our breath is taken away, but we are more truly there with the beautiful when we are taken outside of ourselves. We are first receivers of the gift of surprise and only then perceivers and conceivers. My attention to the passion of being stresses a patience, a receptivity to what is other. What happens is not first our construction. There is something given, something awakening, something delighting, something energizing, something of invitation to transcendence. The theme is amplified in diverse reflections: on life and its transient beauty; on soul music and its relation to self; on the shine on things given in creation; on beauty and Schopenhauer's dark origin; on creativity and the dynamis in Paul Weiss's creative ventures; on redemption in Romanticism in the thought of Stanley Cavell; on theater as a between or metaxu; on redeeming laughter and its connection with the passion of being.
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Notes on Bergson and Descartes
Philosophy, Christianity, and Modernity in Contestation
by Charles Péguy
Part 34 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
Charles Peguy (1873-1914) was a French religious poet, philosophical essayist, publisher, social activist, Dreyfusard, and Catholic convert. There has recently been a renewed recognition of Peguy in France as a thinker of unique significance, a reconsideration inspired in large part by Gilles Deleuze's Difference et repetition, which ranked him with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. In the English-speaking world, however, access to Peguy has been hindered by a scarcity of translations of his work. This first complete translation of one of his most important prose works, with accompanying interpretive introduction and notes, will introduce English-speaking readers to a new voice, which speaks in a powerful and original way to a modern West in a condition of cultural and spiritual crisis. The immediate circumstance of the writing of this last prose essay, unfinished at the time of Peguy's early death, was the placing of Henri Bergson's philosophical works on the Catholic Index, and Peguy's undertaking to defend his former teacher from his critics, both Catholic and secular. But the subject of Bergson is also a springboard for the exploration of the perennial themes--philosophical, theological, and literary--most central to Peguy's thought.
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Cosmology Without God?
The Problematic Theology Inherent in Modern Cosmology
by David Alcalde
Part 35 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
Is God a superfluous hypothesis for modern cosmology? According to the normal understanding of modern science, the answer should be affirmative because modern science is supposed to be free of metaphysical and theological presuppositions. However, despite its self-proclaimed neutrality regarding metaphysics and theology, modern science is full of metaphysical and theological presuppositions. These can be summarized as a mechanistic understanding of nature, a reduction of God to an external agent in competition with natural processes, and creation to a worldly mechanism. These presuppositions are deficient and untenable, and they remain unconscious for the most part in the dialogue between science and theology, making it intellectually impossible because of the reduced notions of God, nature, and creation assumed. Using the coherent and unreduced image of God and nature provided by the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo, Fr. David Alcalde intends to uncover and criticize the incoherent theological assumptions inherent in a concrete branch of modern science, which is modern cosmology. The author points out the presence of these inadequate theological presuppositions in both the theologians who use modern cosmology to offer scientific proof for the existence of God and the atheistic cosmologists who use their science to reject the idea of God.
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Hide and Seek
The Sacred Art of Indirect Communication
by Benson P. Fraser
Part 36 of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
As bearers of the divine image, all of us are storytellers and artists. However, few people today believe in truth that is not empirically knowable or verifiable, the sort of truth often trafficked through direct forms of communication. Drawing on the works of Soren Kierkegaard, Benson P. Fraser challenges this penchant for direct forms of knowledge by introducing the indirect approach, which he argues conveys more than mere knowledge, but the capability to live out what one takes to be true.
Dr. Fraser suggests that stories aimed at the heart are powerful instruments for personal and social change because they are not focused directly on the individual listener; rather, they give the individual room or distance to reconsider old meanings or ways of understanding. Indirect communication fosters human transformation by awaking an individual to attend to images or words that carry deep symbolic force and that modify or replace one's present ways of knowing, and ultimately make one capable of embodying what he or she believes. Through an examination of the indirect approach in Kierkegaard, Jesus, C. S. Lewis, and Flannery O'Connor, Fraser makes a strong case for the recovery of indirect strategies for communicating truth in our time.
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Finitude's Wounded Praise
Responses To Jean-louis Chrétien
by Various Authors
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
The late Jean-Louis Chretien's responsorial and polyphonic style of thinking is nothing less than a performance of gratitude, which manifests the many ways and manners that our wounded finitude is graced and blessed along the peregrine path of human existence. Finitude's Wounded Praise: Responses to Jean-Louis Chretien is a receptive celebratory response to the immense fecundity and potential of Chretien's "thank you" of gratitude. This volume gathers leading Chretien scholars and thinkers to explicate, explore, think with, and commemorate his thought. The essays in the volume engage Chretien's work from three primary fields: phenomenological, literary/poetic, and theological. Finitude's Wounded Praise is a diverse, exploratory, and impressive testament to the expansive and enduring richness of Chretien's oeuvre.
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An Analytic Theology of Evangelism
A Classical Theist's Approach
by Tyler Dalton Mcnabb
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
An Analytic Theology of Evangelism clarifies and defends the Gospel and our call to evangelize. At the same time, the volume acts as an ecumenical work in theology. It not only bridges gaps between Catholic and Protestant theology, the volume develops new roads of communication for Christianity among the world traditions.
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The End of the Law?
Law, Theology, and Neuroscience
by David W. Opderbeck
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
Does neuroscience show that all our ideas about law and ethics are false? David Opderbeck answers this question with a broad and deep survey of the relationship between theology, science, and ethics. He proposes that Christian theology, which narrates the humanity and divinity of Christ, in conversation with the new Aristotelianism in the philosophy of science, provides a path through secular and religious fundamentalisms alike.
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The Eschatological Person
Alexander Schmemann and Joseph Ratzinger in Dialogue
by Andrew T. J. Kaethler
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
Both Alexander Schmemann and Joseph Ratzinger insist that the human person remains shrouded in mystery without God's self-disclosure in the person of Jesus Christ. Like us, Jesus lived in a particular time and location, and therefore time and temporality must be part of the ontological question of what it means to be a human person. Yet, Jesus, the one who has time for us, ascended to the Father, and the bride of Christ awaits his return, and therefore time and temporality are conditioned by the eschatological. With this in mind, the ontological question of personhood and temporality is a question that concerns eschatology: how does eschatology shape personhood? Bringing together Schmemann and Ratzinger in a theological dialogue for the first time, this book explores their respective approaches and answers to the aforementioned question. While the two theologians share much in common, it is only Ratzinger's relational ontological approach that, by being consistently relational from top to bottom, consistently preserves the meaningfulness of temporal existence.
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Astonishment and Science
Engagements with William Desmond
by Various Authors
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
Science can reveal or conceal the breathtaking wonders of creation. On one hand, knowledge of the natural world can open us up to greater love for the Creator, give us the means of more neighborly care, and fill us with ever-deepening astonishment. On the other hand, knowledge feeding an insatiable hunger for epistemic mastery can become a means of idolatry, hubris, and damage. Crucial to world-respecting science is the role of wonder: curiosity, perplexity, and astonishment. In this volume, philosopher William Desmond explores the relation of the different modes of wonder to modern science. Responding to his thought are twelve thinkers across the domains of science, theology, philosophy, law, poetry, medicine, sociology, and art restoration.
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Will & Love
Shakespeare and the Motion of the Soul
by Darren Dyck
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
Will & Love examines four of Shakespeare's love plays (Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, and Antony and Cleopatra) in light of the Augustinian psychology at the heart of the theological romance tradition. This tradition, which Shakespeare inherits from medieval theologian-poets such as Boethius, Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer, issues from the idea, initially expressed by Augustine in his Confessions, that love functions as volitional weight, as a kind of magnetism or almost-gravitational force-that it moves the lover in mysterious ways yet without diminishing his or her agency. Will & Love highlights Shakespeare's conception of love in terms of motion and explores the metaphysical, ethical, psychological, and dramatic implications of his doing so.
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As It Is in Heaven
Some Christian Questions on the Nature of Paradise
by Caitlin Smith Gilson
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
The loss of a real and heartfelt belief in God-and by "real" I mean an experience that is both steady and moving, ethereal though down-to-earth, sentimental but never trite-comes from an earlier more foundational loss, namely that of an ardent and directed desire for heaven, and more specifically, that paradisal longing for the resurrected life. This book seeks to recover the neglected nature of heaven, degraded into something "out-there" and unknown, degraded further into a vague wish for immortality and the often-empty words of consolation. Or even worse, the almost comic book reduction of heaven to an earthly social(ist) paradise, the immanentization of the Christian eschaton. The vague "better place," which is meant well, often means nothing at all, or worse than that can hamper us when approaching and engaging the mystery of grief. This book will address and interrogate various questions about the nature of the afterlife-on the status of guilt, forgiveness, friendship, love, embodiment, sexuality-and propose various paths to answers. We are talking about that sacred innermost promise: the hope of paradisal reunion most secret and yet most universal, never abstract and shapeless, but embodied and individual. We must wonder whether our casual forgetting of this estuary of human hope, the resurrected life, has caused us to lose ourselves in such a way that we do not even know what we have lost.
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A Heart of Flesh
William Desmond and the Bible
by Various Authors
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
The Irish philosopher William Desmond is one of the most compelling and adventurous Christian thinkers of our time. The essays gathered here undertake a journey through the Bible with Desmond that ranges across biblical theology, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, political theory, and literary studies. Some of the essays examine the place of the Bible in Desmond's thought, considering his readings of the creation, the Abraham cycle, and the Beatitudes. Other essays bring Desmond's ideas to bear on broad questions that emerge from the Bible about philosophy and revelation, exegesis, theopoetics, eschatology, and tyranny. Still others bring Desmond into conversation with influential philosophers who engage (or conspicuously do not engage) the Bible, such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Tillich. Together, these essays show the rich possibilities of approaching the Bible with Desmond. All take their bearings from Desmond's "metaxological" approach, which does not seek to claim the final word, which attends to the text rather than simply imposing on it, and which allows for an ongoing dialogue.
Contributors: Ryan G. Duns, SJ / Caitlin Smith Gilson / Joseph K. Gordon / William Christian Hackett / Steven E. Knepper / Renee Kohler-Ryan / Andrew Kuiper / Brendan Thomas Sammon / Terence Sweeney / Ethan Vanderleek / Erik van Versendaal / Robert Wyllie.
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Exorcising Philosophical Modernity
Cyril O'Regan and Christian Discourse after Modernity
by Philip John Paul Gonzales
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
What should Christian discourse look like after philosophical modernity? In one manner or another the essays in this volume seek to confront and intellectually exorcise the prevailing elements of philosophical modernity, which are inherently transgressive disfigurations and refigurations of the Christian story of creation, sin, and redemption. To enact these various forms and styles of Christian intellectual exorcism the essays in this volume make appeal to, and converse with, the magisterial corpus of Cyril O'Regan. The themes of the essays center around the gnostic return in modernity, apocalyptic theology, and the question of the bounds and borders of Christian orthodoxy. Along the way diverse figures are treated such as: Hegel, Shakespeare, von Balthasar, Przywara, Ricouer, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and Kristeva. Exorcising Philosophical Modernity: Cyril O'Regan and Christian Discourse after Modernity is a veritable feast of post-modern Christian thought.
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The Foundations of Nature
Metaphysics of Gift for an Integral Ecological Ethic
by Michael Dominic Taylor
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
Will the ecological crises of our time be resolved using the same form of thought that has brought them about? Are technological prowess and political power the proper tools to address them? Is there not a deeper connection between our ecological crises and our human, social, political, economic, and ethical crises?
This book argues that the popular approaches to ecological, bioethical, and other human crises are not working because they fail to examine the problem in its full depth. This depth escapes us because we have abandoned true metaphysical reflection on the whole and substituted it unknowingly for a series of inadequate alternatives. Both the technocratic paradigm that views all of nature mechanistically and its antagonists--the eco-philosophies that argue for the realities of intrinsic value, relationality, and beauty--carry partial truths but are insufficient. This book presents a more radical alternative, rooted in the classical tradition yet fresh and vibrant. The metaphysics of gift, based in the giftedness of existence shared by all, offers a deeper and more satisfying vision of all things that can transform our relationship with nature and touches every aspect of human life: social, political, economic, technical, and ethical.
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Ethics Lost in Modernity
Reflections on Wittgenstein and Bioethics
by Matthew Vest
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
Ethics Lost in Modernity: Reflections on Wittgenstein and Bioethics turns to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein as a guide to understand the immense success--yet great danger--of bioethics. Matthew Vest traces the story of bioethics since its inception in the late 1960s as a way to uncover a number of hidden assumptions within modern ethics that relies upon scientific theorizing as the fundamental way of thinking. Autonomy and utilitarianism, in particular, are two nearly unquestioned goals of scientific theorizing that are easily accessible, but at what cost? Vest argues that such an ethics enacts a thin moral calculation that runs the risk of enslaving ethics to scientism. Far from the depth of religious ethos and practices of virtue, modern ethics is lost amidst thin ethical theories, enacting a language game that instrumentalizes ethics in service of technological, bureaucratic, and professional end goals. He proposes that true moral living is far from anti-science, but rather is envisioned best when ethics and science are balanced with keen insights from ancient sacred cosmology.
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Thinking About Thinking
Mind and Meaning in the Era of Techno-Nihilism
by James D. Madden
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
Thinking About Thinking: Mind and Meaning in the Era of Techno-Nihilism addresses our existential crisis by reminding us of the conditions for meaning that have been obscured by the modern technological mentality. Madden weaves together disparate insights from Wittgenstein, Hegel, Aristotle, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Sophocles, and others in an attempt to account for our mindedness in terms of its inextricable connection to a world capable of inspiring our care. The mind is not a discrete entity locked behind the skull or withdrawn into a ghostly realm, but a participation in an inheritance (biological and cultural) held in common with other participants, and taking responsibility for that world is crucial for the meaning. The ever-increasing technological mediation of our lives undermines this worldliness. We are subsequently "losing our minds," and as our mindedness fades, so goes our sense of dignity and value. Madden makes this case deploying insights from phenomenology, analytic philosophy, Aristotelianism, neuroscience, and cognitive science, and along the way confronts the mind-body problem, freedom, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and nihilism. More importantly, he invites the reader into an accessible dialogue concerning issues of grave importance to the meaning of our lives.
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By Way of Obstacles
A Pathway through a Work
by Emmanuel Falque
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
In By Way of Obstacles, Emmanuel Falque revisits the major themes of his work-finitude, the body, and the call for philosophers and theologians to "cross the Rubicon" by entering into dialogue-in light of objections that have been offered. In so doing, he offers a pathway through a work that will offer valuable insights both to newcomers to his thought and to those who are already familiar with it. For it is only after one has carved out one's pathway that one may see more clearly where one has been and where one might be going.
Here readers will discover the profound relation between Falque's emphasis on the human experience of the world and his desire for philosophy and Christian theology to enter into conversation. For only by speaking within the human horizon of finitude can Christianity be credible for human beings, and it is because Christian theology teaches that God entered into our finitude that it can also teach us something of what it is to be human. Contemporary phenomenology, Falque warns, over-privileges an encounter with the infinite that cannot be originary. Calling us back to finitude, he calls us to a deeper understanding of our humanity.
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Sensing the Sacred
Recovering a Mystagogical Vision of Knowledge and Salvation
by Hanna J. Lucas
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
This book offers a theological vision of learning informed by the mystagogical homilies of Ambrose of Milan, Cyril of Jerusalem, John Chrysostom, and Theodore of Mopsuestia. In dialogue with these four mystagogues, Hanna Lucas walks through the rites and liturgy surrounding baptism and the eucharist in order to establish a theological epistemology that sees knowledge as part of the "capacitation" of our nature for heavenly mysteries and union with God. The sacraments of initiation teach us that even the mundane aspects of knowledge, including the rudiments of matter and sensation, fit into a larger divine gift of capacitation. This book offers a holistic and integrated theory of knowledge that envisions one all-encompassing divine pedagogy that orients toward union with God. This union is experienced fully in the eschaton, but it breaks into time through the sacraments of the church, and it echoes down through the ordinary modes of knowing we encounter in daily life. Mundane knowledge beckons the knower to become capable of a sublime intelligence: to become capable of union with the divine. This integrative, unitive, and eschatologically oriented vision of knowledge stands in stark contrast to modern and postmodern epistemologies. Sensing the Sacred positions mystagogy as a timely remedy for the "incapacitations" that modernity offers us.
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Wealth of Persons
Economics with a Human Face
by John McNerney
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century initiated a great debate not just about inequality but also regarding the failures found in the economic models used by theoreticians and practitioners alike. Wealth of Persons offers a totally different perspective that challenges the very terms of the debate. The Great Recession reveals a great existential rift at the core of certain economic reflections, thereby showing the real crisis of the crisis of economics. In the human sciences we have created a kind of "Tower of Babel" where we cannot understand each other any longer. The "breakdowns" occur equally on the personal, social, political, and economic levels. There is a need for an "about-face" in method to restore harmony among dissociated disciplines.
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The Truth is the Way
Kierkegaard's Theologia Viatorum
by Christopher Ben Simpson
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
In The Truth Is the Way, Christopher Ben Simpson presents Kierkegaard's work as a theologia viatorum, a theology to guide one on life's way. This truth that is the way is at once existential, metaphysical, and theological - the highest truth is a living in accord with reality that is revealed to us and enabled in us by Jesus Christ. This picture of Kierkegaard's thought, drawing on the whole of his published corpus, presents his perspectives (by way of prolegomena) on the nature of truth, of communication and of faith and (more substantially) his guiding vision of the world, God, humanity, and Christ, culminating in Kierkegaard's understanding of the manner of life lived in light of this vision - of a journey walked in the virtues of patience, faith, hope, and love toward a life of joy in the midst of suffering, of communion with oneself, with God, with others.
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The Roots of the World
The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton
by Duncan Reyburn
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
During his career, the metaphysically minded journalist G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) made a number of remarkable predictions about the future, many of which have come true. He had no science of history or theory of progress, and he vehemently denied that what he was foretelling was inevitable in any way. Yet he was still able to imagine with impressive clarity so much of what has come to pass. This raises an obvious question: How was Chesterton able to be so prescient? In this book, Duncan Reyburn offers an answer by arguing that Chesterton's gift for prophecy resulted from his unique awareness of formal causation, which differs from the typical modern focus on efficient causes and effects. To understand Chesterton's attunement to the formal cause, his work is refracted through the lenses provided by four thinkers: Plato, Aristotle, Marshall McLuhan, and William Desmond. These fit together to create a philosophical-theological telescope that we can look through to better see the astonishing world in which we live; as well as, perhaps, some of what might happen next.
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God and Phenomenology
Thinking with Jean-Yves Lacoste
by Various Authors
Part of the Veritas (Wipf and Stock Publishers) series
God and Phenomenology: Thinking with Jean-Yves Lacoste provides a starting point for scholars who seek to familiarize themselves with the work of this French phenomenologist and theologian. Thirteen international scholars comment on Lacoste's work. In conclusion the volume offers an unpublished essay by Lacoste on the topic of eschatology.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Thinking with Jean-Yves Lacoste by Joeri Schrijvers and Martin Koci
Part I Critiques
1. "'Children of the World': A Note on Jean-Yves Lacoste," by Kevin Hart
2. "Lacoste on Appearing and Reduction," by Steven DeLay
3. "Reduction Without Appearance: The Non-Phenomenality of God," by Robert C. Reed
4. "Only Metaphysics Sustains Phenomenology," by John Milbank
Part II Commentaries
5. "Canonical Texts," by Oliver O'Donovan
6. "Reading Prayerfully Before God: Jean-Yves Lacoste's Treatment of Lectio Divina as an Instance of Existence Coram Deo," by Christina M. Gschwandtner
7. "Affection, Mood, and Poetry: Overcoming Mentalism,"
by Joseph Rivera
8. "Rejecting the Wrong Questions: Jean-Yves Lacoste's Resistance to a Philosophical-Theological Divide," by Stephanie Rumpza
Part III Explorations
9. "For the Love of Revelation: Open and Relational Theology in Light of Lacoste," by Jason W. Alvis
10. "Right Use, Right Thinking," by William C. Hackett
11. "The Beautiful Life of Faith: A Liturgical Reading of Fear and Trembling," by Amber Bowen
12. "In the Footsteps of Henri de Lubac and Gregory of Nyssa: Jean-Yves Lacoste on Human Becoming, Historical and Eternal," by Stephen E. Lewis
13. "Kenosis and Transcendence: Jean-Yves Lacoste and Soren Kierkegaard on the Phenomenality of God," by Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere
In Conclusion
14. "The Final Word: Prolegomena to Eschatology," by Jean-Yves Lacoste
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