On Christmas Eve in 1909, twenty-one-year-old Kagawa Toyohiko (1888-1960) rented a room in K be's worst slum where, apart from two years of study in the United States, he remained with his wife and co-worker Haru for more than ten years. They engaged in pastoral work, evangelism, social reform movements, and literary activities, founding numerous institutions that are still in operation today. After publishing a best-selling novel in 1920, Kagawa began to draw the attention of people from around Japan and the world. His literary output was prodigious, amounting to more than 300 books. Often...

Theology after Heidegger must take into account history and language as constitutive elements in the pursuit of meaning. Quite often, this prompts a hurried flight from metaphysics to an embrace of an absence at the center of Christian narrativity. In this book, Conor Sweeney explores the ""postmodern"" critique of presence in the context of sacramental theology, engaging the thought of Louis-Marie Chauvet and Lieven Boeve. Chauvet is an influential postmodern theologian whose critique of the perceived onto-theological constitution of presence in traditional sacramental theology has made big...

It is surely not coincidental that the term ""soul"" should mean not only the center of a creature's life and consciousness, but also a thing or action characterized by intense vivacity (""that bike's got soul ""). It also seems far from coincidental that the same contemporary academic discussions that have largely cast aside the language of ""soul"" in their quest to define the character of human mental life should themselves be so--how to say it?--bloodless, so lacking in soul. This volume arises from the opposite premise, namely that the task of understanding human nature is bound up with...

About the Contributor(s): Rev. Antonio Lopez, FSCB, is Provost/Dean and Associate Professor of Theology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, DC. He is author of the book Spirit's Gift: The Metaphysical Insight of Claude Bruaire."

About the Contributor(s): Richard Bell is Professor of Theology at the University of Nottingham, UK. He studied theoretical physics at University College London and theology at Oxford and Tubingen. He is author of Provoked to Jealousy (1994), No One Seeks for God (1998), The Irrevocable Call of God (2005), and Deliver us from Evil (2007)."

The jovial journalist, philosopher, and theologian G. K. Chesterton felt that the world was almost always in permanent danger of being misjudged or even overlooked, and so the pursuit of understanding, insight, and awareness was his perpetual preoccupation. Being sensitive to the boundaries and possibilities of perception, he was always encouraging his audience to find a clear view of things. His belief was that it really is possible, albeit in a limited way, to see things as they are. This book, which marries Chesterton's unique perspective with the discipline of philosophical hermeneutics,...

""The church needs effective leaders."" ""We must be more missional."" ""Better organization is required."" Such sentiments are commonplace among Christians concerned with the health and sustainability of their local church as well as the church universal. Over the past thirty years, the desire for more efficiently run, effectively led, and organizationally sound churches has contributed to an approach to thinking about the church in terms uncritically assumed from the business and management sector. This has given rise to treating the church as if it were just another social body in need of...

Sotiris Mitralexis offers a contemporary look at Maximus the Confessor's (580-662 CE) understanding of temporality, logoi, and deification, through the perspective of contemporary philosopher and theologian Christos Yannaras, as well as John Zizioulas and Nicholas Loudovikos. Mitralexis argues that Maximus possesses both a unique theological ontology and a unique threefold theory of temporality: time, the Aeon, and the radical transformation of temporality and motion in an ever-moving repose. With these three distinct modes of temporality, a Maximian theory of time can be reconstructed, which...

Nothing is more dangerous to be misunderstood than the question, ""What is the human being?"" In an era when this question is not only being misunderstood but even forgotten, wisdom delivered by the great thinkers and mystics of the past must be recovered. Edith Stein (1891-1942), a Jewish Carmelite mystical philosopher, offers great promise to resume asking the question of the human being. In Human and Divine Being, Donald Wallenfang offers a comprehensive summary of the theological anthropology of this heroic martyr to truth. Beginning with the theme of human vocation, Wallenfang leads the...