Download or read book Cavell Companionship and Christian Theology written by Peter Dula and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-01-13 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, theologians and philosophers of religion have engaged in a vigorous debate concerning the status and nature of ecclesiology. Throughout this debate, they have found resources for their arguments in concepts of political philosophy, particularly communitarianism and political liberalism. In this groundbreaking study, Peter Dula turns instead to the work of philosopher Stanley Cavell, examining the ways in which Cavell's understanding of companionship contributes to the debate over church and community.Since the 1960s, Stanley Cavell has been the most category-defying philosopher in North America, as well as one of the least understood. Philosophers did not know what to make of his deep engagement with literature and film, or, stranger yet, with his openness to theological concerns. In this, the first English study of Cavell and theology, Dula places Cavell in conversation with some of the philosophers most influential in contemporary theology: Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum and John Rawls. He then examines Cavell's relationship to Christian theology, shedding light on the repeated appearances of the figure of Christ in Cavell's writings.Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology finds in Cavell's account of skepticism and acknowledgment a transformative resource for theological discussions - not just of ecclesiology, but of sin, salvation and the existence of God.
Download or read book Stanley Cavell Religion and Continental Philosophy written by Espen Dahl and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-05 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Impressive . . . a gifted theologian . . . manages to place Cavell in conversation with continental thought as productively as anyone before him.” —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews The American philosopher Stanley Cavell (b. 1926) is a secular Jew who by his own admission is obsessed with Christ, yet his outlook on religion in general is ambiguous. Probing the secular and the sacred in Cavell’s thought, Espen Dahl explains that Cavell, while often parting ways with Christianity, cannot dismiss it either. Focusing on Cavell’s work as a whole, but especially on his recent engagement with Continental philosophy, Dahl brings out important themes in Cavell’s philosophy and his conversation with theology. “It is undoubtedly tricky business writing a book about Stanley Cavell and any book enterprising enough to bring him into conversation with Christian theology should be additionally commended, especially one as likable as Espen Dahl’s.” —Modern Theology “Clearly, concisely, and powerfully shows Cavell’s frequent and deep links to and engagements with religion and religious themes and with (so-called) Continental philosophy . . . Dahl has also written a highly accessible book on Cavell, and yet one which in no way ‘waters down’ or dilutes Cavell’s thinking. There ought to be more books of this kind on Cavell.” —International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion “In making such a convincing case for claiming that religion is Stanley Cavell’s pervasive, hence invisible, business, Espen Dahl also puts Cavell’s writings into sustained and productive dialogue with the work of Levinas and Girard in ways other commentators have not previously managed.” —Stephen Mulhall, Oxford University
Download or read book The Matter of High Words written by Robert Chodat and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-18 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world of matter, how can we express what matters? When the explanations of the natural sciences become powerfully precise and authoritative, what is the status of our highest words, the languages that articulate our norms and orient our lives? The Matter of High Words examines a constellation of American writers who in the decades since World War II have posed these questions in distinctive ways. Walker Percy, Marilynne Robinson, Ralph Ellison, Stanley Cavell, and David Foster Wallace are all self-consciously post-WWII authors, attuned to the fragmentation and skepticism that have defined so much of the literary and critical culture of the last century and more. Yet they also attempt to reach back to older forms of thought and writing that are often thought to have dried up-the traditions of prophecy, of wisdom literature, of the sage. Working within this dual inheritance, these authors are drawn equally to both art and argument, “showing” and “telling,” shifting continually between narrative and discursive genres. In their essays they act as moralists, promoting the broad, abstract concepts that might inspire action in the face of naturalistic reduction: community, family, courage, fraternity, marriage, friendship, temperance, judgment. In their narratives, they offer particular lives in particular settings, thick descriptions that give flesh to such high words. Rarely do these movements between genres generate a tidy equilibrium; where their essays speak of cooperation and redemption, their narratives display alienation, loss, and failure. But in pursuing such risky, unorthodox strategies, these postwar sages are not only able to challenge some of the dominant naturalistic theories of the last several decades: cognitive science, neo-Darwinian theory, social science, the fact-value divide in analytic philosophy. Through five chapters of detailed analysis and close reading, Chodat explores the question of whether vocabularies of ought and ought-not can still emerge today, and how these concepts might be embodied, and whether such ideas might be found in things.
Download or read book Renegotiating Power Theology and Politics written by Rick Elgendy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-10-21 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together established and rising scholars to revitalize political theology by examining conceptions of power that work beyond sovereign power. The hope is to reexamine the character of authority by attending to the multiple, various, but often under-appreciated ways that power is exercised in the contemporary world.
Download or read book Encountering Religion written by Tyler T. Roberts and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tyler Roberts encourages scholars to abandon rigid conceptual oppositions between "secular" and "religious" to better understand how human beings actively and thoughtfully engage with their worlds and make meaning. The artificial distinction between a self-conscious and critical "academic study of religion" and an ideological and authoritarian "religion," he argues, only obscures the phenomenon. Instead, Roberts calls on intellectuals to approach the field as a site of "encounter" and "response," illuminating the agency, creativity, and critical awareness of religious actors. To respond to religion is to ask what religious behaviors and representations mean to us in our individual worlds, and scholars must confront questions of possibility and becoming that arise from testing their beliefs, imperatives, and practices. Roberts refers to the work of Hent de Vries, Eric Santner, and Stanley Cavell, each of whom exemplifies encounter and response in their writings as they traverse philosophy and religion to expose secular thinking to religious thought and practice. This approach highlights the resources religious discourse can offer to a fundamental reorientation of critical thought. In humanistic criticism after secularism, the lines separating the creative, the pious, and the critical themselves become the subject of question and experimentation.
Download or read book Foucault and Theology written by Jonathan Tran and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-06-16 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Near the end of his life, Michel Foucault turned his attention to the early church Fathers. He did so not for anything like a return to God but rather because he found in those sources alternatives for re-imaging the self. And though Foucault never seriously entertained Christianity beyond theorizing its aesthetic style one might argue that Christian practices like confession or Eucharist share family resemblances to Foucaultian sensibilities. This book will explain how to do theology in light of Foucault, or more precisely, to read Foucault as if God mattered. Therefore, it will seek to articulate practices like confession, prayer, and so on as techniques for the self, situate "the church as politics" within present constellations of power, disclose theological knowledges as modes of critical intervention, or what Foucault called archaeology, and conceptualize Christian existence in time through mnemonic practices of genealogy.
Download or read book The Hermeneutics of Tradition written by Craig Hovey and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hermeneutics of Tradition presents the latest scholarship on tradition as a concept and reality in the development of Christian cultures. One aim is to show that traditions are upheld, communicated, and developed within a recognizable set of interpretive guidelines (or rules) and that analysis of these sets both requires and reveals a "hermeneutics of tradition." The work of the authors included here presents the precarious integrity of traditions and the often tenuous hold upon those traditions exercised by the hermeneutics that drive dynamics of preservation and change. As scholars and religious worshippers continue ancient traditions of receiving strangers with generous hospitality, the coherence of tradition serves conversations about where our true differences lie.
Download or read book Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies written by Richard Eldridge and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-09-22 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguably no other living philosopher has done as much as Stanley Cavell to show the common cause shared by literature and philosophy. Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies is not only timely but, indeed, long past due. As the discipline of literary studies struggles to move beyond the suspicious skepticisms and anti-humanisms that have dominated the field, but without lapsing into sentimentality and naïveté, Cavell's writings and ideas will only become more pertinent.
Download or read book Philosophy and the Patience of Film in Cavell and Nancy written by Daniele Rugo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy and the Patience of Film presents a comparative study of the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Stanley Cavell. It discusses the effect of their philosophical engagement with film, and proposes that the interaction between philosophy and film produces a power of patience capable of turning our negation of the world into a relation with it. Through detailed readings of cinematic works ranging from Hollywood classics to contemporary Iranian cinema, this book describes the interaction between film and philosophy as a productive friction from which the concept of patience emerges as a demand for thinking. Daniele Rugo explains how Nancy and Cavell's relationship with film demands the surrendering of philosophical mastery, and that it is precisely this act in view of the world that brings Cavell and Nancy to the study of film. While clarifying the nature of their engagement with film this book suggests that film does not represent the world, but 'realizes' it. This realization provides a scene of instruction for philosophy.
Download or read book Donald MacKinnon s Theology written by Andrew Bowyer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew Bowyer presents the first comprehensive examination of Donald MacKinnon's theology in relation to his moral philosophy. He offers an original and creative reading of MacKinnon's methodology, and important insights into the key influences and core questions which stood at the heart of his work. Bowyer outlines MacKinnon's contributions to Anglican theology in the aftermath of the Second World War, highlighting the “therapeutic” nature of his approach in as far as it combined a call for intense self-awareness with a commitment to moral realism. As one of the most influential Anglican theologians in the mid-twentieth century, MacKinnon's writings reveal him as a restive and unsystematic thinker. However, Bowyer argues that a series of reoccurring questions – 'obsessions' might better honour the memory of MacKinnon's temperament –appear throughout his work, relating to the tensions between the realism and idealism, the call to be “morally serious”, the nature of theological truth claims, and the perennially disruptive presence of Christ. Bowyer examines the key influences on MacKinnon's thought, the centrality of Christology to his project, his engagement with literature and literary criticism, as well as his response to Wittgenstein's later philosophy. This volume offers an appreciation of his contribution and a critique of his legacy.
Download or read book Becoming Who We Are written by Andrew Norris and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While much literature exists on the work of Stanley Cavell, this is the first monograph on his contribution to politics and practical philosophy. As Andrew Norris demonstrates, though skepticism is Cavell's central topic, Cavell understands it not as an epistemological problem or position, but as an existential one. The central question is not what we know or fail to know, but to what extent we have made our lives our own, or failed to do so. Accordingly, Cavell's reception of Austin and Wittgenstein highlights, as other readings of these figures do not, the uncanny nature of the ordinary, the extent to which we ordinarily fail to mean what we say and be who we are. Becoming Who We Are charts Cavell's debts to Heidegger and Thompson Clarke, even as it allows for a deeper appreciation of the extent to which Cavell's Emersonian Perfectionism is a rewriting of Rousseau's and Kant's theories of autonomy. This in turn opens up a way of understanding citizenship and political discourse that develops points made more elliptically in the work of Hannah Arendt, and that contrasts in important ways with the positions of liberal thinkers like John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas on the one hand, and radical democrats like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on the other.
Download or read book Augustine and the Economy of Sacrifice written by Joshua Nunziato and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides the first book-length treatment of what Augustinian thought has to offer contemporary economic theory.
Download or read book Comparative Theology and the Problem of Religious Rivalry written by Hugh Nicholson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-08 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In theological discourse, argues Hugh Nicholson, the political goes "all the way down." One never reaches a bedrock level of politically neutral religious facts, because all theological discourse - even the most sublime, edifying, and "spiritual"--is shot through with polemical elements. Liberal theologies, from the Christian fulfillment theology of the nineteenth century to the pluralist theology of the twentieth, have assumed that religious writings attain spiritual truth and sublimity despite any polemical elements they might contain. Through his analysis and comparison of the Christian mystical theologian Meister Eckhart and his Hindu counterpart ÍaSkara, Nicholson arrives at a very different conclusion. Polemical elements may in fact constitute the creative source of the expressive power of religious discourses. Wayne Proudfoot has argued that mystical discourses embody a set of rules that repel any determinate understanding of the ineffable object or experience they purport to describe. In Comparative Theology and the Problem of Religious Rivalry, Nicholson suggests that this principle of negation is connected, perhaps through a process of abstraction and sublimation, with the need to distinguish oneself from one's intra- and/or inter-religious adversaries. Nicholson proposes a new model of comparative theology that recognizes and confronts one of the most urgent cultural and political issues of our time: namely, the "return of the political" in the form of anti-secular and fundamentalist movements around the world. This model acknowledges the ineradicable nature of an oppositional dimension of religious discourse, while honoring and even advancing the liberal project of curtailing intolerance and prejudice in the sphere of religion.
Download or read book With the World at Heart written by Thomas A. Carlson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the role of love in opening and sustaining the temporal worlds we inhabit? One of the leading scholars in philosophy and the history of religious thought, Thomas A. Carlson here traces this question through Christian theology, twentieth-century phenomenological and deconstructive philosophy, and nineteenth-century individualism. Revising Augustine’s insight that when we love a place, we dwell there in the heart, Carlson also pointedly resists lines of thought that seek to transcend loss and its grief by loving all things within the realm of the eternal. Through masterful readings of Heidegger, Derrida, Marion, Nancy, Emerson, and Nietzsche, Carlson shows that the fragility and sorrow of mortal existence in its transience do not, in fact, contradict love, but instead empower love to create a world.
Download or read book Approaching the End written by Stanley Hauerwas and published by SCM Press. This book was released on 2015-02-17 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Stanley Hauerwas explores the significance of eschatological reflection for helping the church negotiate the contemporary world. In Part One, ‘Theological Matters’, Hauerwas directly addresses his understanding of the eschatological character of the Christian faith. In Part Two, ‘Church and Politics’, he deals with the political reality of the church in light of the end, addressing such issues as the divided character of the church, the imperative of Christian unity, and the necessary practice of sacrifice.
Download or read book American Aesthetics written by Walter B. Gulick and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although there are distinctly American artists—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Grandma Moses, Thomas Hart Benton, and Andy Warhol, for example—very little attention has been devoted to formulating any distinctively American characteristics of aesthetic judgment and practice. This volume takes a step in this direction, presenting an introductory essay on the possibility of such a distinctly American tradition, and a collection of essays exploring particular examples from a variety of angles. Some of the essays in this collection extend pragmatist and process insights about the important place aesthetics has in molding and assessing experience. Other essays examine the place of American aesthetics in relation to such particular forms of art as painting, literature, music, and film. Three essays attend to the aesthetic aspects of a flourishing life. In each of the essays, American aesthetics is understood to arise out of deeply felt personal, historical, and cultural backgrounds. Consequently, not only are such relatively abstract notions as harmony, fit, elegance, proportion, and the like involved in aesthetic judgment, but also religious, political, and social factors become embroiled in aesthetic discernment. Thus the ongoing pattern of American aesthetics is shown to be distinguishable from such other varieties of aesthetic thought as analytic aesthetics, New Criticism, and postmodern approaches to aesthetics.
Download or read book Writing Religion written by Markus Dressler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Markus Dressler tells the story of how a number of marginalized socioreligious communities, traditionally and derogatorily referred to as Kizilbas (''Redhead''), captured the attention of the late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish nationalists and were gradually integrated into the newly formulated identity of secular Turkish nationalists.
