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This book offers in style and content an exciting new perspective on contemporary theology and its future in post-modern times. I welcome this new perspective. The style is agreeable, unpolemical, and enages in dialogue with the best of Barth and Bultmann, Ricoeur and Pannenberg, Cobb and Moltmann, showing what they havea to offer to the larger theological community and transferring it like a ferry boat into the post-modern age. The purpose is to offer an evangelical theology which is at the same time genuinely evangelical and relevant for post-modern ways of thinking. Wood writes with admirable clarity." --Jürgen Moltmann, University of Tübingen
Are mystical experiences formed by the mystic's cultural background and concepts, as ""constructivists"" maintain, or do mystics sometimes transcend language, belief, and culturally conditioned expectations? Do mystical experiences differ throughout the various religious traditions, as""pluralists"" contend, or are they somehow ecumenical? The contributors to this collection scrutinize a common mystical experience, the ""pure consciousness event""--The experience of being awake but devoid of intentional content--in order to answer these questions. Through the use of historical Hindu, Buddhist,
On Exceeding Determination and the Ideal of Reason: Immanuel Kant, William Desmond, and the Noumenological Principle examines the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, as it bears on theological principles. Focusing on the foundational ideas (of self, world, and God) that constitute Kant’s metaphysical system, Shaw argues that these ideal projections of the rational structures of the thinking subject only conceal and obfuscate the more robust sense of the real that exists behind all phenomenal appearances. This book aims to critically assess the theological content presented in the philosophy of Kant whilst reconstructing and developing some of Kant’s more obscure points on the epistemol...
This book arises out of a deep fascination with the relationship between human intelligence and rationality, and with how our fragile but uniquely human ability to be rational invariably affects our everyday lives as well as our involvement with faith, theology, and the spectacular scientific achievements of our time. After carefully analyzing the notion of rationality and examining how the skill of rationality is being challenged by postmodern culture, J. Wentzel van Huyssteen argues that it is precisely the problem of rationality that holds the key to understanding the complex forces shaping the radically different domains of religion and science today.
The problem of speaking about God arises from the presumed notion that God is utterly transcendent and is “wholly other” from human existence. Moreover, a profound sense of mystery is held to surround God’s being. Even so, Not Beyond Language maintains that it is still possible for human beings to express and describe God in words—that language can bring genuine disclosure and understanding of the divine. However, given that religious language is problematic because inadequate, those who engage in speaking about God must accept that the words they use cannot be pressed to yield precise definitions or complete explanations of the divine. The author proposes a nuanced approach to the use of religious language which revolves more around meaning and relevance of the discourse about divine reality, than objective claims about who or what God is.
Theology as Performance breaks new ground in the growing conversation between modern theology and philosophical aesthetics. Stoltzfus proposes that significant moments in the Western development of the concept of God, in particular as represented in the figures of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Karl Barth, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, have been deeply influenced by concepts and approaches borrowed from the discipline of musical aesthetics. Each thinker develops fundamentally different ways of writing about God that have in significant respects been derived from each one's reading and writing about music. The aesthetic implications of Schleiermacher's so-called subjectivist turn, Barth's objectivist r...
Children's human rights are regularly violated around the world. We hear about graphic examples including child soldiers, child prostitutes, and children sold into slavery, but hungry, sick, and orphaned children are equally at risk and more prevalent. In the United States, children suffer similar abuses, but some are unique to the U.S. justice system. Unlike most of the rest of the world, the U.S. is a well-developed western nation in which juvenile offenders can be tried as adults and sentenced to death. This book brings together a wide array of original essays from a variety of academic and practitioner perspectives on human rights and the status of children. The details are disturbing; the message, powerful: We must vigorously extend the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the most vulnerable humans of all—the children of the world, starting at home in the United States.
Lucy Tatman identifies the events and ideas that influenced the formation of a North american feminist paradigm. She explores the components of this paradigm, particularly the way in which they affect the understanding of knowledge. She then examines the representation of these elements in the theologies of three prominent feminist theologians in North America: Rosemary Radford Ruether, Carter Heyward, and Sallie McFague. From her discussion of these scholars, she proposes that a responsible feminist practice of epistemology requires participatory discernment.
It is a commonplace that while Asia is nondualistic, the West, because of its uncritical reliance on Greek-derived intellectual standards, is dualistic. Dualism is a deep-seated habit of thinking and acting in all spheres of life through the prism of binary opposites leads to paralyzing practical and theoretical difficulties. Asia can provide no assistance for the foreseeable future because the West finds Asian nondualism, especially that of Mahayana Buddhism, too alien and nihilistic. On the other hand, postmodern thought, which purports to deliver us from the dualisms embedded in modernity, turns out to be merely a pseudo-postmodernism. This book's novel idea is that the West already contains within one of its more marginalized roots, that of ancient Hebrew culture, a pre-philosophical form of nondualism which makes possible a new form of nondualism, one to which the West can subscribe. This new nondualism, inspired by Buddhism but not identical to it, is an epistemological, ontological, metaphysical, and praxical middle way both for the West and also between East and West.