This book examines the thinking of two nineteenth-century existentialist thinkers, Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Its focus is on the radically different ways they envisioned a joyful acceptance of life - a concern they shared. For Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling, joyful acceptance flows from the certitude of faith. For Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, joyful acceptance is an acceptance of the eternal recurrence of life, and is ultimately a matter of will. This book explores the relationship between these opposed visions.

The subject of this book is the relationship and the difference between the temporal everlasting and the atemporal eternal. This book treats the difference between a temporal postmortem life and eternal life. It identifies the conceptual tension in the religious idea of eternal life and offers a resolution of that tension.

This book is a collection of papers presented and discussed at the 1992 Claremont Conference. Its contributing authors come from various disciplines that share a concern with models and criteria for inter-religious understanding, including religious studies, philosophy of religion, theology, comparative studies, and feminist philosophy.