Download or read book Evil and the Augustinian Tradition written by Charles T. Mathewes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-06 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This explores the 'family biography' of the Augustinian tradition by looking at Augustine's work and its development in the writings of Hannah Arendt and Reinhold Niebuhr. Mathewes argues that the Augustinian tradition offers us a powerful, though commonly misconstrued, proposal for understanding and responding to evil's challenges. The book casts light on Augustine, Niebuhr and Arendt, as well as on the problem of evil, the nature of tradition, and the role of theological and ethical discourse in contemporary thought.
Download or read book The Augustinian Tradition written by Gareth B. Matthews and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Augustine, probably the single thinker who did the most to Christianize the classical learning of ancient Greece and Rome, exerted a remarkable influence on medieval and modern thought, and he speaks forcefully and directly to twentieth-century readers as well. The most widely read of his writings today are, no doubt, his Confessions—the first significant autobiography in world literature—and The City of God. The preoccupations of those two works, like those of Augustine's less well-known writings, include self-examination, human motivation, dreams, skepticism, language, time, war, and history—topics that still fascinate and perplex us 1,600 years later. The Augustinian Tradition, like a number of recent single-authored books, expresses a new interest among contemporary philosophers in interpreting Augustine freshly for readers today. These articles, most of them written expressly for the book, present Augustine's ideas in a way that respects their historical context and the long history of their influence. Yet the authors, among whom are some of the best philosophers writing in English today, make clear the relevance of Augustine's ideas to present-day debates in philosophy, literary studies, and the history of ideas and religion. Students and scholars will find that these essays provide impressive evidence of the persisting vitality of Augustine's thought.
Download or read book Overcoming Our Evil written by Aaron Stalnaker and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2006-07-26 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can people ever really change? Do they ever become more ethical, and if so, how? Overcoming Our Evil focuses on the way ethical and religious commitments are conceived and nurtured through the methodical practices that Pierre Hadot has called "spiritual exercises." These practices engage thought, imagination, and sensibility, and have a significant ethical component, yet aim for a broader transformation of the whole personality. Going beyond recent philosophical and historical work that has focused on ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, Stalnaker broadens ethical inquiry into spiritual exercises by examining East Asian as well as classical Christian sources, and taking religious and seemingly "aesthetic" practices such as prayer, ritual, and music more seriously as objects of study. More specifically, Overcoming Our Evil examines and compares the thought and practice of the early Christian Augustine of Hippo, and the early Confucian Xunzi. Both have sophisticated and insightful accounts of spiritual exercises, and both make such ethical work central to their religious thought and practice. Yet to understand the two thinkers' recommendations for cultivating virtue we must first understand some important differences. Here Stalnaker disentangles the competing aspects of Augustine and Xunxi's ideas of "human nature." His groundbreaking comparison of their ethical vocabularies also drives a substantive analysis of fundamental issues in moral psychology, especially regarding emotion and the complex idea of "the will," to examine how our dispositions to feel, think, and act might be slowly transformed over time. The comparison meticulously constructs vivid portraits of both thinkers demonstrating where they connect and where they diverge, making the case that both have been misunderstood and misinterpreted. In throwing light on these seemingly disparate ancient figures in unexpected ways, Stalnaker redirects recent debate regarding practices of personal formation, and more clearly exposes the intellectual and political issues involved in the retrieval of "classic" ethical sources in diverse contemporary societies, illuminating a path toward a contemporary understanding of difference.
Download or read book Evil and the God of Love written by J. Hick and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-04-09 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When first published, Evil and the God of Love instantly became recognized as a modern theological classic, widely viewed as the most important work on the problem of evil to appear in English for more than a generation. Including a foreword by Marilyn McCord Adams, this reissue also contains a new preface by the author.
Download or read book The Republic of Grace written by Charles Mathewes and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With The Republic of Grace Charles Mathewes aims to supply a primer of politics and the public square to help Christians in these dark times find hope in public life. He asks such questions as How should our Christian convictions lead us to see the world differently than those who do not share them? What are the categories that believers should use to act on the challenges of the world? Mathewes uses theological virtues best loved by Augustine faith, hope, and love to provide an analogical mirror for Christian citizenship in a post 9/11 American world. He examines not how religion has shaped our politics but rather how politics has shaped and mis-shaped our religious life and how we can begin to correct that shape. The Republic of Grace will help reignite and inform a fierce commitment to the common good of our society, caring concern for the least and most vulnerable, and the use of each person s gifts, power, and wealth as a force for good and justice in the world. In short, this book will enable readers to realize the sacramental possibilities of political life.
Download or read book Evil in Modern Thought written by Susan Neiman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether expressed in theological or secular terms, evil poses a problem about the world's intelligibility. It confronts philosophy with fundamental questions: Can there be meaning in a world where innocents suffer? Can belief in divine power or human progress survive a cataloging of evil? Is evil profound or banal? Neiman argues that these questions impelled modern philosophy. Traditional philosophers from Leibniz to Hegel sought to defend the Creator of a world containing evil. Inevitably, their efforts--combined with those of more literary figures like Pope, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Sade--eroded belief in God's benevolence, power, and relevance, until Nietzsche claimed He had been murdered. They also yielded the distinction between natural and moral evil that we now take for granted. Neiman turns to consider philosophy's response to the Holocaust as a final moral evil, concluding that two basic stances run through modern thought. One, from Rousseau to Arendt, insists that morality demands we make evil intelligible. The other, from Voltaire to Adorno, insists that morality demands that we don't.
Download or read book The Mestizo Augustine written by Justo L. González and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2016-11-06 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few thinkers have been as influential as Augustine of Hippo. His writings, such as Confessions and City of God, have left an indelible mark on Western Christianity. He has become so synonymous with Christianity in the West that we easily forget he was a man of two cultures: African and Greco-Roman. The mixture of African Christianity and Greco-Roman rhetoric and philosophy gave his theology and ministry a unique potency in the cultural ferment of the late Roman empire. Augustine experienced what Latino/a theology calls mestizaje, which means being of a mixed background. Cuban American historian and theologian Justo González looks at the life and legacy of Augustine from the perspective of his own Latino heritage and finds in the bishop of Hippo a remarkable resource for the church today. The mestizo Augustine can serve as a lens by which to see afresh not only the history of Christianity but also our own culturally diverse world.
Download or read book The Enchiridion on Faith Hope and Love written by Saint Augustine and published by Gateway Editions. This book was released on 1996-09 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work was written by St. Augustine late in his life with the intention of supplying a well-educated Roman layman with a brief but comprehensive exposition of the essential teachings of Christianity. It contains many of his most profound and mature definitions of his thoughts on sin, grace, and predestination, and is regarded as an indispensable guide to Augustinian Christianity.
Download or read book Augustinian and Ecclesial Christian Ethics written by D. Stephen Long and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the relationship between the command to love one’s enemies and the use of violence and/or other coercive political means? This work examines this question by comparing and contrasting two important contemporary approaches to Christian ethics, neoAugustinian and the ecclesial or neoAnabaptist. It traces the complicated conversation that has taken place since John Howard Yoder took on Reinhold Niebuhr’s interpretation of the Anabaptists in the 1940’s. It consists of three parts. The first part traces the development of the Augustinian-Niebuhrian approach to ethics from Niebuhr through those who have advanced his work including Paul Ramsey, Timothy Jackson, Charles Mathewes, Eric Gregory, and Jennifer Herdt. It also examines the Augustinian ethics of Oliver O’Donovan, John Milbank and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Along with tracing the Augustinian approach and its trajectories through agapism, theology and the interpretation of Augustine, it identifies fifteen criticisms that this approach brings against the neoAnabaptists. The second part traces the origin of the ecclesial or neoAnabaptist approach, and then examines its relationship to, and criticism of, agapism, what theological doctrines are central and its interpretation of Augustine. Its purpose is primarily constructive by explaining the role that ecclesiology, Christology and eschatology have among the neoAnabaptists. The third part addresses the criticisms levied by Augustinians against the neoAnabaptists by drawing on the constructive theology in the second part. It intends to show where the Augustinian critics are correct, where they have missed key theological teachings, and where they misrepresent. It also assesses the summons to the nationalist project the Augustinians put to the neoAnabaptists. If this work is successful, this third part will not be defensive. It will instead illumine the reasons for the criticisms and suggest means by which the conversation that began between Yoder and Niebuhr can continue and possibly bear fruit for theological ethics in both its ecclesial and nationalist projects for generations to come.
Download or read book On the Trinity written by Saint Augustine of Hippo and published by Aeterna Press. This book was released on with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The following dissertation concerning the Trinity, as the reader ought to be informed, has been written in order to guard against the sophistries of those who disdain to begin with faith, and are deceived by a crude and perverse love of reason. Now one class of such men endeavor to transfer to things incorporeal and spiritual the ideas they have formed, whether through experience of the bodily senses, or by natural human wit and diligent quickness, or by the aid of art, from things corporeal; so as to seek to measure and conceive of the former by the latter. Aeterna Press
Download or read book Encountering Cruelty The Fracture of the Human Heart written by Michael R. Trice and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-04-21 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on Nietzsche's challenge to the western tradition, this book is a theological exploration of cruelty in its personal, communal and institutional encounters in human life. Cruelty undermines care, trust, respect and justice, and its study opens a window into the theological possibility of reconciliation today.
Download or read book The Best Effect written by Ryan Darr and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For over two centuries, consequentialism has been among the most influential approaches to ethics and public policy in the Anglophone world. It is often seen as the paradigmatic rational and secular ethic. In The Best Effect, Ryan Darr reveals that a consequentialist approach to ethics is not, as is often assumed, self-evidently rational once religious morality is stripped away. Rather, consequentialist morality itself had to be invented. In this new account of the origins of consequentialism, Darr traces the development of this new consequentialist morality, revealing its decidedly theological history. The Best Effect portrays the emergence in the mid-seventeenth century of the consequentialist moral cosmology, a richly theological vision of a world created by a consequentialist Creator, through to its eventual breakdown in the early eighteenth century in the face of a new version of the theological problem of evil. The book concludes with an intervention in contemporary debates about consequentialism in both religious ethics and moral philosophy, arguing for an alternative approach to teleological ethics"--
Download or read book Evil and the Evidence for God written by R. Douglas Geivett and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 1995-08 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to reconcile the existence of evil with the belief in a benevolent God has long posed a philosophical problem to the system of Christian theism. This work redress this difficulty in modern terms.
Download or read book The Problem of Evil in the Western Tradition written by Joseph Francis Kelly and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evil presents a profound and eternal challenge to humanity - why do we do what we know to be wrong? Why does not an all-good and omnipotent God step in and put an end to evil? The Problem of Evil looks at people's efforts to deal with evil, starting with ancient Israel and moving through the great figures of the Western tradition to the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Moral Evil written by Andrew Michael Flescher and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-24 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of moral evil has always held a special place in philosophy and theology because the existence of evil has implications for the dignity of the human and the limits of human action. Andrew Michael Flescher proposes four interpretations of evil, drawing on philosophical and theological sources and using them to trace through history the moral traditions that are associated with them. The first model, evil as the presence of badness, offers a traditional dualistic model represented by Manicheanism. The second, evil leading to goodness through suffering, presents a theological interpretation known as theodicy. Absence of badness—that is, evil as a social construction—is the third model. The fourth, evil as the absence of goodness, describes when evil exists in lieu of the good—the "privation" thesis staked out nearly two millennia ago by Christian theologian St. Augustine. Flescher extends this fourth model—evil as privation—into a fifth, which incorporates a virtue ethic. Drawing original connections between Augustine and Aristotle, Flescher’s fifth model emphasizes the formation of altruistic habits that can lead us to better moral choices throughout our lives. Flescher eschews the temptation to think of human agents who commit evil as outside the norm of human experience. Instead, through the honing of moral skills and the practice of attending to the needs of others to a greater degree than we currently do, Flescher offers a plausible and hopeful approach to the reality of moral evil.
Download or read book The Problem of Evil written by Michael L. Peterson and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all the issues in the philosophy of religion, the problem of reconciling belief in God with evil in the world arguably commands more attention than any other. For over two decades, Michael L. Peterson’s The Problem of Evil: Selected Readings has been the most widely recognized and used anthology on the subject. Peterson's expanded and updated second edition retains the key features of the original and presents the main positions and strategies in the latest philosophical literature on the subject. It will remain the most complete introduction to the subject as well as a resource for advanced study. Peterson organizes his selection of classical and contemporary sources into four parts: important statements addressing the problem of evil from great literature and classical philosophy; debates based on the logical, evidential, and existential versions of the problem; major attempts to square God's justice with the presence of evil, such as Augustinian, Irenaean, process, openness, and felix culpa theodicies; and debates on the problem of evil covering such concepts as a best possible world, natural evil and natural laws, gratuitous evil, the skeptical theist defense, and the bearing of biological evolution on the problem. The second edition includes classical excerpts from the book of Job, Voltaire, Dostoevsky, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and Hume, and twenty-five essays that have shaped the contemporary discussion, by J. L. Mackie, Alvin Plantinga, William Rowe, Marilyn Adams, John Hick, William Hasker, Paul Draper, Michael Bergmann, Eleonore Stump, Peter van Inwagen, and numerous others. Whether a professional philosopher, student, or interested layperson, the reader will be able to work through a number of issues related to how evil in the world affects belief in God.
Download or read book The Problem of Evil written by Marion Le Roy Burton and published by . This book was released on 1909 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is not intended for the popular reader. It is a rather detailed and technical criticism of the philosophical basis of the Augustinian treatment of the problem of evil. The author does not presume to have fathomed this eternal mystery nor to have reformulated the doctrine of sin. If, however, he has set forth in a true light the historic theory which for centuries has dominated Christian thought, and has shown the absolute necessity of a reconstruction of the doctrine of sin, then in a measure he has realized his purpose. - Preface.
