Theology, Music and Time shows ways in which music can deepen our understanding of the Christian God and his involvement with the world. Without assuming any specialist knowledge of music, the author explores rhythm, meter, resolution, repetition and improvisation, and through them opens up some of the central themes of the Christian faith--creation, salvation, eschatology, time and eternity, eucharist, election and ecclesiology. He shows that music can refresh theology, giving it new ways of coming to terms with God.

This book discusses the Christian doctrine of sin in relation to sexual abuse of children and the Holocaust, allowing these pathological situations to illuminate and question our understanding of sin. Taking seriously the explanatory power of secular discourses for analyzing and regulating therapeutic action in relation to such situations, the book asks whether the theological language of sin can offer further illumination by speaking of God and the world together. The book is unusual in discussing the Holocaust in relation to Christian doctrine.

This book cuts new ground in bringing together traditional Christian theological perspectives on truth and reality with a contemporary philosophical view of the place of language in both divine and wordly reality. Patterson seeks to reconcile the requirements that Christian theology should both take account of postmodern insights concerning the inextricability of language and world as well as taking God's truth to be absolute for all reality. Yet it is not simply about theological language and truth as such. Instead Patterson asks: where does language fit in divine and human reality?...

How can human discourse refer meaningfully to a transcendent God? Paul Janz's book reconfigures this fundamental problem of Christian thinking as a twofold demand for integrity--integrity of reason and integrity of transcendence. It centers around an original yet faithful re-reading of Kant's empirical realism. Drawing on MacKinnon, Bonhoeffer, Barth and Marion, Janz challenges recent rushes to obscurantism and radicalization and culminates in a convergence between Christology and epistemology within empirical reality.

What has Washington to do with Jerusalem? In the raging debates about the relationship between religion and politics, no one has explored the religious benefits and challenges of public engagement for Christian believers - until now. This book defends and details Christian believers' engagement in contemporary pluralistic public life not from the perspective of some neutral 'public', but from the particular perspective of Christian faith, arguing that such engagement enriches both public life and Christian citizens' faith themselves. As such it offers not a 'public theology', but a 'theology...

How can theology think and talk about history? Building on the work of the major twentieth-century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar as well as entering into sharp critical debate with him, this book sets out to examine the value and the potential of a 'theodramatic' conception of history. By engaging in dialogue not only with theologians and philosophers like von Balthasar, Hegel and Barth, but with poets and dramatists such as the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the book makes its theological principles open and indebted to literary forms, and seeks to show how such...

How can we live together in the midst of our differences? This is one of the most pressing questions of our time. Tolerance has been the bedrock of political liberalism, while proponents of agonistic political thought and radical democracy have sought an answer that allows a deeper celebration of difference. Kristen Deede Johnson describes the move from tolerance to difference, and the accompanying move from epistemology to ontology, within political theory. Building on this 'ontological turn', in search of a theological answer to the question, she puts Augustine into conversation with recent...