About the Contributor(s): Margaret B. Adam is an Affiliate Research and Teaching Fellow at the University of Glasgow.

Synopsis: Contemporary literature has, for several decades and in various guises, been dominated by questions of identity and the self. It has been forgotten that, until the Enlightenment, theological reflection emphasized the close connectedness of the self with God; knowledge of God is essential to knowledge of the self; and vice-versa, correct knowledge of the self is a necessary correlate to true knowledge of God. This has been called the double knowledge. Writing God and the Self examines two literary texts and lives as representative of two antithetical positions. The first, represented...

Synopsis: Colin Gunton argued that Augustine bequeathed to the West a theological tradition with serious deficiencies. According to Gunton, Augustine's particular construal of the doctrine of God led to fundamental errors and problems in grasping the relationship between creation and redemption, and in rightfully construing a truly Christian ontology. Bradley G. Green's close reading of Augustine challenges Gunton's understanding. Gunton argued that Augustine's supposed emphasis of the one over the many severed any meaningful link between creation and redemption (contra the theological...

The human imagination is a reflection of and a participation in the divine imagination; so mused the romantic poet, philosopher and theologian Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His thinking was intuitive, dense, obscure, brilliant, and deeply influenced by German philosophy. This book explores the development of his philosophical theology with particular reference to the imagination, examining the diverse streams that contributed to the originality of his thought. The second section of this book extrapolates his thinking into areas into which Coleridge did not venture. If God is intrinsically...

About the Contributor(s): Timothy J. Furry (PhD, University of Dayton) is Instructor of Religion and Philosophy and Chaplain at Cranbrook Kingswood Upper School, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He is coeditor of Ecclesiology and Exclusion (2012) and author of multiple theological essays, book chapters, and reviews.

Synopsis: The cross of Christ is undeniably central to the Christian faith. But, how can the cruelty and brutality of a two-thousand-year-old Roman cross touch base with a hedonistic world that has been so desensitized towards violence? Within the postmodern setting of a body-obsessed culture, Christianity urgently requires an innovative and stimulating way of understanding the cross and its atoning significance. At the heart of this book is the Naked Christ--an emblem through which the author draws on the rich resources of the Christian tradition in its portrayal of the cross. He explores...

Parables--used by Jesus to reveal to us the kingdom of God, used to move us from being bystanders to active recipients of Gods work of revelation--are constantly at risk of being buried as "mummies of prose," as George MacDonald puts it. We become so familiar with the language of Scripture that Jesus parables no longer work on us in this revelatory and transforming way.

George MacDonald, the Victorian poet and theologian, observed this very process at work in Victorian society. It was a culture saturated with Christian jargon but often devoid of a profound understanding of the gospel for...