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Who or what comes after God? In the wake of God, as the last fifty years of philosophy has shown, God comes back again, otherwise: Heidegger's last God, Levinas's God of Infinity, Derrida's and Caputo's tout autre, Marion's God without Being, and Kearney's God who may be. This book attempts to represent some of the most considered responses to Richard Kearney's recent writings on the philosophy of religion, in particular The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness. It brings together seventeen essays that share the common problematic of the otherness of the Other — seventeen different variations on the same theme: philosophy about God after God — that is to say, a way of thinking God otherwise than ontologically.

Over the past generation, considerable historical attention has been given to evangelical Christians who attacked modern evolutionary theories. This book, by contrast, sheds light on the under-studied story of twentieth-century Christians who remained theologically conservative, but refused to take up arms against modern science—those who sought to show the compatibility of biblical Christianity and the conclusions of mainstream science, including evolution. It focuses on the middle decades of the twentieth century, the same period in which creationism became a movement within evangelicalism, and on two groups of evangelical scientists, the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) and the UK-based Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship (RSCF, today Christians in Science). Drawing on published and unpublished sources, including conference papers, interviews, and private correspondence, this book shows how these organizations pursued a reconciliation of science and theology that contradicted the fundamentalist ethos of the period and denied the claims that creationism entailed antievolutionism.

Following allusions to Babylon in secular and religious discourse in the decade after 9.11, this book explores the complicated influence of the Bible on U.S. political thought. Babylon is a surprisingly multivalent symbol in U.S. culture and politics. This composite biblical figure—taken from interpretive traditions about Babylon, Babel, and the Whore of Babylon—is variously used to celebrate diversity and also to condemn it, to sell sexuality and to regulate it, to worry about homogeneous tyrannical imperialism and to galvanize the “war on terror” and the war in Iraq. Babylon becomes so much a site of admiration and an object of vilification that the United States can be said to have a Babylon complex. This book shows that the Babylon complex contends with anxieties about the loss of political sovereignty in economic globalization, while encouraging the very market forces that undermine sovereignty. Shifting and contradictory allusions to Babylon reveal a theopolitically motivated biopolitics that tries to balance the drive for U.S. dominance with the countervailing moral ideals and forms of political subjectivity that further economic globalization and control the distribution of wealth. The centering and decentering impulses of Babylon and Babel give the composite figure the biblical authority to manage this tension and sustain U.S. empire. The book interrogates the interpretive moves by which the Bible gains its political authority and proposes instead other modes of reading that take the figure of Babylon as a catalyst for a detranscendentalized, queer, sublime, radically democratic polity.

What is the proper relationship between human beings and the more-than-human world? This philosophical question, which underlies vast environmental crises, forces us to investigate the tension between our extraordinary powers, which seem to set us apart from nature, even above it, and our thoroughgoing ordinariness, as revealed by the evolutionary history we share with all life. The contributors to this volume ask us to consider whether the anxiety of unheimlichkeit, which in one form or another absorbed so much of twentieth-century philosophy, might reveal not our homelessness in the cosmos but a need for a fundamental belongingness and implacement in it.

How do Catholic intellectuals draw on faith in their work? And how does their work as scholars influence their lives as people of faith? In this book, ten leading figures explore the connections in their own lives between the private realms of faith and their public calling as teachers, scholars, and intellectuals. This last decade of Marianist Lectures brings together theologians and philosophers, historians, anthropologists, academic scholars, and lay intellectuals and critics. Here are Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., on the tensions between faith and theology in his career; Jill Ker Conway on the spiritual dimensions of memory and personal narrative; Mary Ann Glendon on the roots of human rights in Catholic social teaching; Mary Douglas on the fruitful dialogue between religion and anthropology in her own life; Peter Steinfels on what it really means to be a "liberal Catholic"; and Margaret O'Brien Steinfels on the complicated history of women in today's church. From Charles Taylor and David Tracy on the fractured relationship between Catholicism and modernity to Gustavo Gutierrez on the enduring call of the poor and Marcia Colish on the historic links between the church and intellectual freedom, these essays track a decade of provocative, illuminating, and essential thought.

This book provides philosophical grounds for an emerging area of scholarship: the study of religion and dance. In the first part, the book investigates why scholars in religious studies have tended to overlook dance, or rhythmic bodily movement, in favor of textual expressions of religious life. In close readings of Descartes, Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, the book traces this attitude to formative moments of the field in which philosophers relied upon the practice of writing to mediate between the study of “religion”, on the one hand, and “theology”, on the other. In the second part, the book revives the work of theologian, phenomenologist, and historian of religion Gerardus van der Leeuw for help in interpreting how dancing can serve as a medium of religious experience and expression. In so doing, it opens new perspectives on the role of bodily being in religious life, and on the place of theology in the study of religion.

This monograph explores the ethics and religious sensibilities of a group of the hibakusha (survivors) of 1945's atomic bombings. Although the atomic bombings of 1945 have been studied from the points of view of various disciplines, the survivors' ethic—not retaliation, but reconciliation—emerging from their experiences and supported by their religious sensibilities, has never been addressed sufficiently in academic discourse. Rather their ethic has been excluded from the atomic bomb discourse or nuclear ethics. In examining Hiroshima city's “secular” commemoration, Hiroshima's True Pure Land Buddhist understanding, and Nagasaki's Roman Catholic tradition, I argue that the hibakusha's ethic and philosophy, based upon critical self-reflection, could offer resources for the constructing ethics based upon memories, especially in the post-9–11 world. Thus, this monograph, responding to this lacuna in scholarship, invites readers to go beyond the mushroom cloud where they encounter actual hibakusha's ethical thoughts.

In an age of terrorism and other forms of violence committed in the name of religion, how can religion become a vehicle for peace, justice, and reconciliation? And in a world of bitter conflicts—many rooted in religious difference—how can communities of faith understand one another? these chapters address a fundamental question: how the three monotheistic traditions can provide the resources needed in the work of justice and reconciliation. Rabbis Irving Greenberg and Reuven Firestone each examine the relationship of Judaism to violence, exploring key sources and the history of power, repentance, and reconciliation. From Christianity, philosopher Charles Taylor explores the religious dimensions of “categorical” violence against other faiths, other groups, while Scott Appleby traces the emergence since Vatican II of nonviolence as a foundation of Catholic theology and practice. Mustafa Ceric, Grand Mufti of Bosnia, discusses Muslim support of pluralism and human rights, and Mohamed Fathi Osman examines the relationship between political violence and sacred sources in contemporary Islam. By focusing on the transformative powers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the chapters in this book provide new beginnings for people of faith committed to restoring peace among nations through peace among religions.

This book explores a new religious ideal within African American culture that emerges from humanistic assumptions and is grounded in religious naturalism. Identifying African American religiosity as the ingenuity of a people constantly striving to inhabit their humanity and eke out a meaningful existence for themselves amid culturally coded racist rhetoric and practices, it constructs a concept of sacred humanity and grounds it in existing hagiographic and iconic African American writings. The first part of the book argues for a concept of sacred humanity that is supported by the best available knowledge emerging from science studies, philosophy of religion, and the tenets of religious naturalism. With this concept, the book features capacious views of humans as dynamic, evolving, social organisms having the capacity to transform ourselves and create nobler worlds where all sentient creatures flourish, and as aspiring lovers of life and of each other. Within the context of African American history and culture, the sacred humanity concept also offers new ways of grasping an ongoing theme of traditional African American religiosity: the necessity of establishing and valuing blacks’ full humanity. In the second part, the book traces indications of the sacred humanity concept within select works of three major African American intellectuals of the early and mid-twentieth century: Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Dubois, and James Baldwin. The theoretical linkage of select ideas and themes in their writings with the concept of sacred humanity marks the emergence of an African American religious naturalism.

The Jesuit Relations, written by new world Jesuit missionaries from 1632 to 1673 back to their Superior in France, have long been a remarkable source of both historical knowledge and spiritual inspiration. They provide rich information about Jesuit piety and missionary initiatives, Ignatian spirituality, the Old World patrons who financed the venture, women's role as collaborators in the Jesuit project, and the early history of contact between Europeans and Native Americans in what was to become the northeastern United States and Canada. The Jesuits approached the task of converting the native peoples, and the formidable obstacles it implied, in a flexible manner. One of their central values was inculturation, the idea of coming in by their door, to quote a favorite saying of Ignatius, via a creative process of syncretism that blended aspects of native belief with aspects of Christian faith, in order to facilitate understanding and acceptance. The Relations thus abound with examples of the Jesuits' thoughtfully trying to make sense of native- and female-difference, rather than eliding it. The complete text of the Jesuit Relations runs to 73 volumes. This book makes selections from the Relations, some of which have never before appeared in print in English. These selections are chosen for their informative nature and for how they illustrate central tenets of Ignatian spirituality. Rather than provide close translations from 17th-century French that might sound stilted to modern ears, this book offers free translations that provide the substance of the Relations in an idiom immediately accessible to 21st-century readers of English. An introduction sets out the basic history of the Jesuit missions in New France and provides insight into the Ignatian tradition and how it informs the composition of the Relations. The volume is illustrated with early woodcuts, depicting scenes from Ignatius's life, moments in the history of the Jesuit missions, Jesuit efforts to master the native languages, and general devotional scenes.