Download or read book A Genealogy of Marion s Philosophy of Religion written by Tamsin Jones and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tamsin Jones believes that locating Jean-Luc Marion solely within theological or phenomenological discourse undermines the coherence of his intellectual and philosophical enterprise. Through a comparative examination of Marion's interpretation and use of Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory of Nyssa, Jones evaluates the interplay of the manifestation and hiddenness of phenomena. By placing Marion against the backdrop of these Greek fathers, Jones sharpens the tension between Marion's rigorous method and its intended purpose: a safeguard against idolatry. At once situated at the crossroads of the debate over the turn to religion in French phenomenology and an inquiry into the retrieval of early Christian writings within this discourse, A Genealogy of Marion's Philosophy of Religion opens up a new view of the phenomenology of religious experience.
Download or read book Degrees of Givenness written by Christina M. Gschwandtner and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-22 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Beautifully written . . . advances scholarship on Marion, and offers a sustained and critical analysis of two weaknesses in Marion’s phenomenology.” —Tamsin Jones, author of A Genealogy of Marion’s Philosophy of Religion The philosophical work of Jean-Luc Marion has opened new ways of speaking about religious convictions and experiences. In this exploration of Marion’s philosophy and theology, Christina M. Gschwandtner presents a comprehensive and critical analysis of the ideas of saturated phenomena and the phenomenology of givenness. She claims that these phenomena do not always appear in the excessive mode that Marion describes and suggests instead that we consider degrees of saturation. Gschwandtner covers major themes in Marion’s work—the historical event, art, nature, love, gift and sacrifice, prayer, and the Eucharist. She works within the phenomenology of givenness, but suggests that Marion himself has not considered important aspects of his philosophy. “Christina M. Gschwandtner has established herself as a valued reader of contemporary French philosophy in general and of Marion’s writings in particular. She was the first to consider at length Marion’s extensive reflections on Descartes and to evaluate their theological importance, and she has translated two of Marion’s books from the French. This new study, Degrees of Givenness, extends her contribution to our understanding of this fecund philosopher.” —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Download or read book The Play of Goodness written by Jacob Benjamins and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the enduring claims in the Christian tradition is that creation is good. Given the diversity of experience and the abundance of suffering in the world, however, such an affirmation is not always straightforward. The Play of Goodness provides a phenomenology of creation’s goodness that clarifies the ongoing relevance of the doctrine today. It argues that what is “good” about creation is not synonymous with a confession of faith and does not require an overly optimistic disposition, but instead appears within diverse and often surprising circumstances. Alongside original contributions to French phenomenology and creation theology, The Play of Goodness counterbalances a tendency in continental philosophy to focus on negative phenomena. By developing the philosophical concept of a prelinguistic experience of goodness, the book identifies a quality of goodness that is integral to the place in which we find ourselves. It also articulates shared points of contact among people in an increasingly polarized world, while demonstrating that distinctly theological concepts do not need to be presented in opposition to secular, agnostic, or atheist perspectives in order to be relevant. Benjamins develops an account of creation’s goodness that has the potential to animate an abiding affection for one’s place, accentuate our reasons to care for it, and confirm that what happens in our lives is of genuine significance.
Download or read book 7 Ways of Looking at Religion written by Benjamin Schewel and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious scholar’s lucid analysis of religion’s shifting place in the modern world. Western intellectuals have long theorized that religion would undergo a process of marginalization and decline as the forces of modernity advanced. Yet recent events have disrupted this seductively straightforward story. As a result, while religion has somehow evolved from its tribal beginnings up through modernity and into the current global age, there is no consensus about what kind of narrative of religious change we should alternatively tell. Seeking clarity, Benjamin Schewel organizes and evaluates the prevalent narratives of religious history that scholars have deployed over the past century and are advancing today. He argues that contemporary scholarly discourse on religion can be categorized according to seven central narratives: subtraction, renewal, transsecular, postnaturalist, construct, perennial, and developmental. Examining the basic logic, insights, and limitations of each of these narratives, Schewel ranges from Martin Heidegger to Muhammad Iqbal, from Daniel Dennett to Charles Taylor, to offer an incisive, broad, and original perspective on religion in the modern world. “The book should be a widely read guide to the ideas that structure many of the debates scholars are having today about the meaning of postsecularism and future of religion.” —Geoffrey Cameron, Review of Faith and International Affairs "What is the future of religion and how should we narrate its past? For all readers interested in these questions, this balanced and concise book is a must read.” —Hans Joas, Humboldt University, Berlin, and University of Chicago
Download or read book A Celebration of Living Theology written by Justin Mihoc and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-03-13 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together an international range of world-class scholars to engage with Andrew Louth's work and its influence on modern Theology. Andrew Louth is well known and influential in the English-speaking circles but also in the non-English Orthodox world, especially across Eastern Europe. The interaction between these theological groups remains sparse and intermittent. By drawing together scholars from the three main branches of Christianity and from around the world, this volume helps to increase our knowledge and exposure between these different spheres. This volume comprises of articles on Patristics, Byzantine Fathers, Latin Fathers, Modern Christianity, Theology as Life and the reception of Louth's work outside the English-speaking world. The papers are written by the leading scholars, such as Lewis Ayres, John Milbank, Kallistos Ware and Thomas Graumann.
Download or read book The Postmodern Saints of France written by Colby Dickinson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the mid to the late 20th century various French thinkers have at times toyed wth the label of 'the saint', applying it to friends, colleagues, the revered nd even the worshipped such as Genet, Sartre, Camus or Foucault. Despite this profaning of the term, however, here are many subtle truths which emerge from its usage among such writers. This volume is devoted to exploring certain varied notions of 'the saint' in recent French philosophical and literary thought from within a theological context, offering insights and valuable contributions toward how we understand sainthood in cultural, philosophical and religious terms. Each essay focuses on the convergence of a particular author's work and their various (re)formulations of 'saintliness' in their writings, whether this concept is directly expressed in their writings or not. In general, the aim of the volume is to develop a critical engagement between each authors' philosophical worldview and historical notions of sainthood, such that we are capable of providing new understandings of what a 'saint' could be said to be in our world today.
Download or read book Evil and Givenness written by Brian W. Becker and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-02-23 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evil and Givenness: The Thanatonic Phenomenon provides a phenomenological study of evil in its conceptual integrity.Describing a phenomenological situation exclusive to evil in its distinct mode of givenness and manners of manifestation, the account of evil in this book centers on the thanatonic as that phenomenality proper to evil. Although situated within a phenomenology of givenness via Jean-Luc Marion, the thanatonic is distinguished from saturated phenomena by giving itself in a parasitic mode. Brian W. Becker identifies four figures as displaying characteristics of this parasitic givenness—trauma, evil eye, foreign-body, and abject—each expressing a dimension of the thanatonic and paralleling the four figures of the saturated phenomenon. Like the four horsemen who serve as heralds for the destruction of the world, these figures beckon the destruction of our lifeworld, diminishing the self who encounters them. Upon losing the will to bear the excess of saturated phenomena, the receding of horizons, and the loss of singularity, this impoverished self misrecognizes itself in a manner that begins to resemble the metaphysical ego and, in doing so, becomes a vector for retransmitting the thanatonic’s suffering unto others.
Download or read book Taste and See written by J. W. Olson and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2023 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J.W. Olson addresses the Christian doctrine of revelation by asking how theological truth claims can possibly be rooted in God's incarnational self-communication. Engaging with the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, Olson offers an interpretation of the Eucharist that grounds Christian knowledge in an embodied understanding of the sacrament.
Download or read book Reading the Church Fathers written by Morwenna Ludlow and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-04-28 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading the corpus of texts written by the Fathers of the Church has always been a core area in Christian theology. However, scholars and academics are by no means united in the question how these important but difficult authors should be read and interpreted. Many of them are divided by implicit (but often unquestioned) assumptions about the best way to approach the texts or by underlying hermeneutical questions about the norms, limits and opportunities of reading Ancient Christian writers. This book will raise profound hermeneutical questions surrounding the reading of the Fathers with greater clarity than it has been done before. The contributors to this volume are theologians and historians who have used contemporary post-modern approaches to illuminate the Ancien corpus of texts. The chapters discuss issues such as What makes a 'good' reading of a church Father? What constitutes a 'responsible' reading? Is the reading of the Fathers limited to a specialist audience? What can modern thinkers contribute to our reading of the Fathers?
Download or read book Unsaying God written by Aydogan Kars and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-26 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What cannot be said about God, and how can we speak about God by negating what we say? Traveling across prominent negators, denialists, ineffectualists, paradoxographers, naysayers, ignorance-pretenders, unknowers, I-don't-knowers, and taciturns, Unsaying God: Negative Theology in Medieval Islam delves into the negative theological movements that flourished in the first seven centuries of Islam. Aydogan Kars argues that there were multiple, and often competing, strategies for self-negating speech in the vast field of theology. By focusing on Arabic and Persian textual sources, the book defines four distinct yet interconnected paths of negative speech formations on the nature of God that circulated in medieval Islamic world. Expanding its scope to Jewish intellectuals, Unsaying God also demonstrates that religious boundaries were easily transgressed as scholars from diverse sectarian or religious backgrounds could adopt similar paths of negative speech on God. This is the first book-length study of negative theology in Islam. It encompasses many fields of scholarship, and diverse intellectual schools and figures. Throughout, Kars demonstrates how seemingly different genres should be read in a more connected way in light of the cultural and intellectual history of Islam rather than as different opposing sets of orthodoxies and heterodoxies.
Download or read book Maximus the Confessor as a European Philosopher written by Sotiris Mitralexis and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book God Sexuality and the Self written by Sarah Coakley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-29 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: God, Sexuality and the Self is a new venture in systematic theology. Sarah Coakley invites the reader to re-conceive the relation of sexual desire and the desire for God and - through the lens of prayer practice - to chart the intrinsic connection of this relation to a theology of the Trinity. The goal is to integrate the demanding ascetical undertaking of prayer with the recovery of lost and neglected materials from the tradition and thus to reanimate doctrinal reflection both imaginatively and spiritually. What emerges is a vision of human longing for the triune God which is both edgy and compelling: Coakley's théologie totale questions standard shibboleths on 'sexuality' and 'gender' and thereby suggests a way beyond current destructive impasses in the churches. The book is clearly and accessibly written and will be of great interest to all scholars and students of theology.
Download or read book A Theology of Conversation written by Stephen Okey and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2018-10-10 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sometimes described as “a theologian’s theologian,” David Tracy’s scholarship has impacted countless thinkers around the globe. The complexity of his thought, however, has often made engaging his work into a daunting challenge. Combining analysis of the most influential features of Tracy’s theology (theological method, the religious classic, public theology) with a retrieval of his more overlooked interests (Christology, God), Stephen Okey presents the essential themes of Tracy’s career in accessible and insightful prose.
Download or read book Giving Beyond the Gift written by Elliot R. Wolfson and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the co-dependency of monotheism and idolatry by examining the thought of several prominent twentieth-century Jewish philosophers—Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas. While all of these thinkers were keenly aware of the pitfalls of scriptural theism, to differing degrees they each succumbed to the temptation to personify transcendence, even as they tried either to circumvent or to restrain it by apophatically purging kataphatic descriptions of the deity. Derrida and Wyschogrod, by contrast, carried the project of denegation one step further, embarking on a path that culminated in the aporetic suspension of belief and the consequent removal of all images from God, a move that seriously compromises the viability of devotional piety. The inquiry into apophasis, transcendence, and immanence in these Jewish thinkers is symptomatic of a larger question. Recent attempts to harness the apophatic tradition to construct a viable postmodern negative theology, a religion without religion, are not radical enough. Not only are these philosophies of transcendence guilty of a turn to theology that defies the phenomenological presupposition of an immanent phenomenality, but they fall short on their own terms, inasmuch as they persist in employing metaphorical language that personalizes transcendence and thereby runs the risk of undermining the irreducible alterity and invisibility attributed to the transcendent other. The logic of apophasis, if permitted to run its course fully, would exceed the need to posit some form of transcendence that is not ultimately a facet of immanence. Apophatic theologies, accordingly, must be supplanted by a more far-reaching apophasis that surpasses the theolatrous impulse lying coiled at the crux of theism, an apophasis of apophasis, based on accepting an absolute nothingness—to be distinguished from the nothingness of an absolute—that does not signify the unknowable One but rather the manifold that is the pleromatic abyss at being’s core. Hence, the much-celebrated metaphor of the gift must give way to the more neutral and less theologically charged notion of an unconditional givenness in which the distinction between giver and given collapses. To think givenness in its most elemental, phenomenological sense is to allow the apparent to appear as given without presuming a causal agency that would turn that given into a gift.
Download or read book Dialectical Anatomy of the Eucharist written by Donald Wallenfang and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, Christian theology has understood the Eucharist in terms of metaphysics or in protest against it. Today an opening has been made to imagine the sacrament through the method of phenomenology, bringing about new theological life and meaning. In Dialectical Anatomy of the Eucharist, Donald Wallenfang conducts a sustained analysis of the Eucharist through the aperture of phenomenology, yet concludes the study with poetic and metaphysical twists. Engaging the work of Jean-Luc Marion, Paul Ricoeur, and Emmanuel Levinas, Wallenfang proposes pioneering ideas for contemporary sacramental theology that have vast implications for interfaith and interreligious dialogue. By tapping into the various currents within the Judeo-Christian tradition--Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant--a radical argument is developed that leverages the tension among them all. Several new frontiers are explored: dialectical theology, a fourth phenomenological reduction, the phenomenology of human personhood, the poetics of the Eucharist, and a reinterpretation of the concept of gift as conversation. On the whole, Wallenfang advances recent debates surrounding the relationship between phenomenology and theology by claiming an uncanny way out of emerging dead ends in philosophical theology: return to the fray.
Download or read book Essays in Analytic Theology written by Michael C. Rea and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first of two volumes collecting together Michael C. Rea's most substantial work in analytic theology. This volume considers the nature of God and our ability to talk and discover truths about God, whereas the companion volume focuses on theological questions about humanity and the human condition. The chapters in the first part of Volume I explore issues pertaining to discourse about God and the authority of scripture. Part two focuses on divine attributes, while part three discusses doctrine of the trinity and related issues.
Download or read book What Is the Bible written by Matthew Baker and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The patristic doctrine of Scripture is an understudied topic. Recent scholars, however, have shown considerable interest in patristic exegetical strategies and methods—from rhetoric and typology, to theory and method; far less attention, though, has been paid to the early Christian understanding of the nature of Scripture itself. This volume explores the patristic vision of the Bible—the understanding of Scripture as the word of life and salvation, the theological, liturgical, and ascetical practice of reading—and is anchored by keynote essays from Fr. John McGuckin, Paul Blowers, and Michael Legaspi. The purpose is to reopen a consideration of the doctrine of Scripture for contemporary theology, rooted in the tradition of the Church Fathers (Greek, Latin, and Oriental), an endeavor inspired by the theological vision of the twentieth century’s foremost Orthodox Christian theologian, Fr. Georges Florovsky. Our interest is not in mere description of historical uses of Scripture or interpretive methods, but rather in the very nature of Scripture itself and its place within the whole economy of creation, revelation, and salvation.
