Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Theology

• In this major reference work, a team of the world's leading theologians provides a powerful overview of modern theology
• Covers theology's relation to other disciplines, the history of theology, major themes, key figures and contemporary issues
• Can be used as the basis for an introductory course or as an essential reference source

Are we still secular? If not, what can one possibly mean by -post-secular-? The answers depend on what one considers secular as well as the people, societies, and institutions that one considers. Post-Secular Society argues for the experience of living in a secular world and a secular age and the experience of living without religion as a normal condition.

Religion in the Western world is often described as being marked to some degree by both innovation and disarray. The past couple of decades have seen the emergence of reformulated versions of theories of secularization,...

Like its ancient rivals, Stoic ethics was a form of virtue ethics, yet while the concept of virtue was clearly central to Stoic ethics, the concept of Stoic virtue has not yet been fully explored. Instead, the existing literature tends to impose on the Stoic material philosophically quite alien non-Aristotelian interpretations of virtue. According to Christoph Jedan, however, a thorough examination of the Stoic concept of virtue leads to a reassessment of our understanding of Stoic ethics.
This book emphasises in particular the theological underpinning of Stoic ethics, which Jedan...

Contributors to this volume consider the implications of 'the Age of Breath': a spiritual shift in human awareness to the needs of the other figured through breathing. Awareness of the breath allows us to attend to our bodies and the bodies of others, to animals, nature, other cultures, oppressed minorities, and the other of sexual difference. As a way to connect body and spirit, self and other, nature and culture, and East and West, breathing emerges as the significant theological and philosophical gesture of our time.

Philosophy has too often cut off metaphysical thought from this...

Deleuze's
relationship with theology is a complex one. Indeed, there seem to be many
possible objections to such an 'assemblage' taking place. In the first book of
its kind to engage with this seemingly problematic dialogue, Kristien Justaert
shows the ways in which Deleuze's thought can in fact advance issues in
political and liberation theology in particular, while also exploring the
important theological and spiritual aspirations contained in Deleuze's
philosophy itself, as part of his lifelong quest for the 'Absolute'.

Justaert examines the theological...

The New Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction is the first available introduction to the group of philosophers sometimes associated with the so-called 'theological turn' in contemporary French thought. This book argues that there has not been a 'turn' to theology in recent French phenomenology, but instead a decidedly philosophical reconsideration of phenomenology itself. Engaging the foundational works of Emmanuel Levinas and Michel Henry, as well as later works by Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Louis Chretien, the book explores how these thinkers offer a...

Timeless and contemplative sayings from the earliest Christian sages of desert spirituality can be a companion on your own spiritual journey.

The desert fathers and mothers were ordinary Christians living in solitude in the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Arabia who chose to renounce the world in order to deliberately and individually follow God's call. They embraced lives of celibacy, labor, fasting, prayer and poverty, believing that denouncing material goods and practicing stoic self-discipline would lead to unity with the Divine. Their spiritual practice...

Ricoeur lectured and wrote for over twenty years on negation ('Do I understand something better if I know what it is not, and what is not-ness?') and never published his extensive writings on this subject. Ricoeur concluded that there are multiple forms of negation; it can, for example, be the other person (Plato), the not knowable nature of our world (Kant), the included opposite (Hegel), apophatic spirituality (Plotinus on not being able to know God) and existential nothingness (Sartre). Ricoeur, working on Kant, Hegel and Sartre, decided that all these...

Ricoeur lectured and wrote for over twenty years on negation ('Do I understand something better if I know what it is not, and what is not-ness?') and never published his extensive writings on this subject. Ricoeur concluded that there are multiple forms of negation; it can, for example, be the other person (Plato), the not knowable nature of our world (Kant), the included opposite (Hegel), apophatic spirituality (Plotinus on not being able to know God) and existential nothingness (Sartre). Ricoeur, working on Kant, Hegel and Sartre, decided that all these...

The Christian faith has the allegiance of one third of the human race. It has succeeded in influencing civilization to such a degree that we now take its existence almost for granted. Yet it might all have been so different. Christianity began with the words and deeds of an obscure village carpenter's son who died a shameful criminal's death at the hands of the Roman occupiers of his country: itself an insignificant outpost of the powerful ruling Empire. The feverish land of biblical Palestine, awash with apocalyptic expectations of deliverance from its foreign overlords, was hardly short...

Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. In keeping with this dictum, taking ethics seriously means engaging with the real world where the human sense of right and wrong is daily tested. At their best, all faith traditions are challenged by such testing; and if faith-inspired ethics are thought to govern the whole of life, their guiding values need constantly to be interpreted by the believer to achieve a practical result. In the Muslim tradition, this is what the Qur'an really amounts to: a call to strive for belief with a social conscience. For fourteen...

This book offers a sustained reflection by leading Roman Catholic and Anglican writers on Mary's great song of praise and transformation, the Magnificat, in the context of contemporary struggles across the world and global inequalities. The different contributors relate the story of Mary to issues of international justice, regarding this as one of the key themes of mission and evangelism. In his sparkling essay on the implications of Mary's 'making space' for God, James Alison challenges the reader to 'make space' for an inclusive God.

From their very different perspectives, Linda...