n this book George Pattison seeks to address the contemporary crisis of theology, asking what future there can be in a situation of intellectual pluralism for an academic discipline that is rooted in the life and teaching of the Christian church. It is argued that theology can only justify its place in the academy if it is willing to dialogue with other disciplines which are also concerned with questions of religion and the meaning of human life. In this dialogue theology must give up its past claims to special privileges. Dialogue is not just a strategy for survival, however. It also...

This book looks at Kierkegaard with a fresh perspective shaped by the history of ideas, framed by the terms romanticism and modernism. 'Modernism' here refers to the kind of intellectual and literary modernism associated with Georg Brandes, and such later nineteenth and early twentieth century figures as J. P. Jacobsen, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Ibsen (all often associated with Kierkegaard in early secondary literature), and the young Georg Lukacs. This movement, currently attracting increasing scholarly attention, fed into such varied currents of twentieth century thought as Bolshevism (as in...

Synopsis: Kierkegaard's Pastoral Dialogues takes a selection of Kierkegaard's most insightful spiritual writings and transforms them into a series of dialogues between two friends, a believer and a nonbeliever. In this way, some of Kierkegaard's complex religious thought is made accessible to a wider readership, so as to provide a resource for individual or group study in pastoral, counseling, or spiritual direction contexts. Each dialogue is accompanied by a commentary and questions to help discussion by groups or application by individuals. Finally, there are three responses from,...

About the Contributor(s): George Pattison is Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford. He is the author of many books on theology and philosophy of religion, including works on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and the visual arts.

George Pattison provides a bold and innovative reassessment of Kierkegaard's neglected Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses and reading of his work as a whole. The first full length assessment of the discourses in English, this volume will be essential reading for philosophers and theologians, and anyone interested in Kierkegaard and the history of philosophy.

The standing of the Danish philosopher and religious thinker Soren Kierkegaard has gone up in recent years. Yet because he regarded communication as being as much about self-concealment as about self-revelation, he can still seem a forbidding and difficult figure. The deliberate ambiguity of Kierkegaard, in which he set out to repel as much as to attract his readers, is here explored by George Pattison, who gives full attention to the scandalous element of the philosopher's work, and does not shy away from his ambivalent attitudes towards sexuality, the body, marriage, and the family. This...

Starting from the assumption that "time is the horizon of the meaning of Being" (Heidegger), Eternal God / Saving Time attempts to discover what the central religious idea of eternity or of God as "the Eternal" might mean today. Negotiating ideas of divine timelessness and sempiternity (everlastingness) as well as the attempts of some philosophers to develop the idea of a temporal God, Professor George Pattison surveys a range of positions from analytic philosophy and from the continental tradition from Spinoza through Hegel to the present. Intellectual and cultural forces have tended to...

Paul Tillich's Philosophical Theology takes up the challenge as to whether his thought remains relevant fifty years after his death. In opposition to those who believe that his writings have little to say to us today, this book argues that his thought is largely exemplary of open theological engagement with the contemporary intellectual situation.

This book situates Kierkegaard in the nineteenth-century debates which influenced him and discusses his relevance to contemporary Christian theology.

These readings of Kierkegaard begin with a series of reflections on the background to his thought and writings, examining Romanticism, German Idealism and Danish intellectual history in the early 19th century. The author analyzes the role of indirect communication in Kierkegaard's authorship.