Nicholas Boyle's latest work begins with an observation--from theologian and medievalist Father Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P.--that the Bible should be seen as a divinely ordained mediation between human culture and divine truth. But how far can we say that the Bible is 'literature'? Chenu is surely right that God is revealed in Scripture not through a system of ideas, but through a vivid historical narrative of people and places. But the Bible is also a sacred book. Expanding on this central dilemma, Boyle demonstrates that biblical scholarship and literary criticism must work together in the...

This title provides a comprehensive analytical overview of public dialogue among 19th century American Protestant intellectuals who struggled with the theory of organic evolution. Arguments over the scientific merits of Darwin's theory gave way to discussions of its theological implications.

Examines the profound changes that have occurred over the centuries in Catholic moral teaching on freedom of conscience, leading for a profit, slavery, and divorce.

This work shows that the collapse of the post-reformation confessional state was more the result of religious dissent from within, much of it orthodox, than attacks of an anti-religious Enlightenment. In sharp contrast to the Reformation-era religious conflicts which tended to pit Protestant and Catholic confessions and states against each other, the 18th century religious conflicts described in this work took place within the various confessional establishments and states that founded and maintained them, such as Russian Orthodoxy in the East and the Anglican Establishment in England and...

Many of the critical political issues of our time - from the 1992-1995 Balkan Wars to the continuing crisis in the Middle East to the role of Muslim immigrants in Western Europe - revolve around issues of religion and tolerance. The predominant approach to these concerns is to espouse the doctrines of liberal humanistic virtue. These doctrines, however, fail to resonate in communities that maintain more traditional religious definitions of self and society. Modest Claims, which features essays by Seligman and dialogues between scholars representing the three monotheistic faiths, provides the...

The contributors address such fundamental copies as the sufficiency of "reason" for a full life, the adequacy of our methods of describing and analyzing religion, the degree to which any serious confrontation with the religious experiences of others will challenge our own, and whether there can be a pluralism that does not dissolve into universal relativism.