Browse

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.

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 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.

In the face of globalized ecological and economic crises, how do religion, the postsecular, and political theology reconfigure political theory and practice? As the planet warms and the chasm widens between the 1 percent and the global 99, what thinking may yet energize new alliances between religious and irreligious constituencies? This book brings together political theorists, philosophers, theologians, and scholars of religion to open discursive and material spaces in which to shape a vibrant planetary commons. Attentive to the universalizing tendencies of “the common,” the contributors seek to reappropriate the term in response to the corporate logic that asserts itself as a universal solvent. In the resulting conversation, the common returns as an interlinked manifold, under the ethos of its multitudes and the ecology of its multiplicity. Beginning from what William Connolly calls the palpable “fragility of things,” Common Goods assembles a transdisciplinary political theology of the Earth. With a nuance missing from both atheist and orthodox religious approaches, the contributors engage in a multivocal conversation about sovereignty, capital, ecology, and civil society. The result is an unprecedented thematic assemblage of cosmopolitics and religious diversity; of utopian space and the time of insurrection; of Christian socialism, radical democracy, and disability theory; of quantum entanglement and planetarity; of theology fleshly and political.

In recent decades, comparative theology has emerged as a method of thinking as an adherent to a particular religious tradition, through deep and focused conversation with another tradition. This discipline has the potential to enrich Christian systematic theology and, by extension, theological education, at its foundations. For this purpose, Comparing Faithfully: Insights for Systematic Theological Reflection reconsiders five central areas of Christian doctrinal reflection in light of focused interreligious readings, as a resource for pastors and theology students. The dialogical format of the book creates conversations about the doctrine of God, theodicy, humanity, Christology, and soteriology. The comparative essays span examples from Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Jain, and Confucian traditions, Aztec theology, and contemporary “spiritual but not religious” thought, to offer exciting new perspectives on Christian doctrine.

This book asks, on behalf of individuals with profound intellectual disabilities, what it means to be human. That question has traditionally been answered with an emphasis on an intellectual capacity—the ability to employ concepts or to make moral choices—and has ignored the value of individuals who lack such intellectual capacities. The book suggests, rather, that human beings be understood in terms of participation in relationships of mutual responsiveness, which includes but is not limited to intellectual forms of communicating. The book supports its argument by developing a phenomenology of how an individual with a profound intellectual disability relates, drawn from clinical experience as a physical therapist. The book thereby demonstrates that these individuals participate in relationships of mutual responsiveness, though in nonsymbolic, bodily ways. To be human, to image God, it argues, is to respond to the world around us in any number of ways, bodily or symbolically. Such an understanding does not exclude people with intellectual disabilities but rather includes them among those who participate in the image of God.

This book brings together process and postmodern theologians to reflect on the crucial topic of energy, asking: What are some of the connections between energy and theology? How do ideas about humanity and divinity interrelate with how we live our lives? Its chapters address energy in at least three distinct ways. First, in terms of physics, the discovery of dark energy in 1998 uncovered a mysterious force that seems to be driving the expansion of the universe. Here cosmology converges with theological reflection about the nature and origin of the universe. Second, the social and ecological contexts of energy use and the current energy crisis have theological implications insofar as they are caught up with ultimate human meanings and values. Finally, in more traditional theological terms of divine spiritual energy, we can ask how human conceptions of energy relate to divine energy in terms of creative power. The book sketches out a fresh eco-theology of energy, and proposes new ways to think about the relationship between science and religion.

This book is the first systematic discussion of the bodhisattva path in Māhayāna Buddhism from the perspective of Christian comparative theology. With the increasing interest and participation of Christians in Buddhist practice, many are seeking a deeper exploration of this topic, and of the way the two traditions and their teachings might interface. Crucified Wisdom provides important scholarly background material for this discussion, as well as a constructive proposal for Christian engagement. The text combines a rich exposition of the bodhisattva path with detailed reflection on it in connection with specific Christian convictions. The description of bodhisattva teachings centers on Śāntideva’s classic work the Bodicaryāvatāra and its interpretation by Tibetan commentators. The book argues that Christian theology can take direct instruction from Buddhism in three respects: developing an understanding of a “no-self” dimension in all creatures, recognizing an unvarying nondual dimension of divine immanence in the world, and appreciating that both of these are constituent dimensions in Christ’s incarnation and human redemption. The writer argues that Christians rightly remain committed to the value of novelty in history, the enduring significance of human persons, and the Trinitarian reality of God. A notable feature of the book is its exploration of the tensions around the crucifixion of Jesus in Buddhist-Christian interpretation. This work will be of particular value for those interested in “dual belonging” in connection to these traditions.

This book probes the ethico-political possibility harbored in the Western philosophical and theological thought for addressing the collective experience of suffering, socio-political trauma, and colonial violence. To this end, it rethinks the mystical figure of the abyss in philosophical and theological literature by rethinking its meaning from a wider, socio-political perspective. Theologically, the abyss denotes the blurring of boundaries between creaturely finitude and divine potency as reflected in the writings of certain Neoplatonic and medieval mystics. The book carves the channel of a constructive conversation by examining the ethico-political meaning of the abyss as the book locates its trace within the trajectory of continental philosophy by way of Schelling and Hegel. With the end of exploring an emergent socio-political meaning of the abyss beyond the Eurocentric vision, it further extends the conversation to the twentieth-century Afro-Caribbean decolonial thinkers who employ the trope of the abyss in order to articulate the historical/political trauma. By reading the abyss as an all-pervading ontological groundlessness of being that involves an insurmountable material and political devastation, this book re-invents a new idiom for articulating the ethico-political possibility that the mystical thought opens up for the historically marginalized communities.

This book raises the question of what it means to engage in theological reflection in an authentic way in the present context of global coloniality. In response to the historical manifestations of the coloniality of power on the levels of being, knowledge, and eschatology, it searches for a decolonized image of salvation that can unsettle historical structures of coloniality. The book starts by analyzing modern/colonial structures that shape the present context and the ways Christian theology is entangled in these structures. I then argues that the theological work of Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino points to the theoretical possibility of a theology that contests the patterns of domination that continue after political decolonization. Using the work of Ellacuría and Sobrino, it turns to the ways Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin responded to colonial modernity by exposing idols and revealing illusionary notions of stasis in light of alternative commitments to orientations of decolonial love. This decolonial love, and the ways it is historicized in praxis, is perceived as violent from the perspective of Western modernity. This book argues that the orientations of decolonial from which Fanon and Baldwin operate break open cracks in Western modernity and make salvation present in history. Decolonial love thus becomes theologically pedagogic—that is, it provides a source from which to make theological claims. Decolonial love offers one way of doing theology and one way of shaping the content of a decolonized image of salvation.

This anthology gathers the work of three generations of Latina/o theologians and philosopher who have taken up the task of transforming their respective disciplines from the standpoint of liberation and what has been called the “decolonial turn” in social theory, theology, and philosophy. This collection is focuses on the different ways in which Latina/o thinkers, activists, and public intellectuals are producing knowledge that addresses the unique social location of Latinas/os in the US. Instead of continuing to be represented, this group of scholars show the unsuspecting and original ways in which Latina/o locations in the US can be generative places for the development of new matrixes of knowledge. The book, thus, articulates a new point of departure for the self-understanding of not simply Latina/os, but also US citizens in this new age of post-colonialism and globalization.

A turn to the animal is underway in the humanities, most obviously in such fields as philosophy, literary studies, cultural studies, and religious studies. One important catalyst for this development has been the remarkable body of animal theory issuing from such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway. What might the resulting interdisciplinary field, commonly termed animality studies, mean for theology, biblical studies, and other cognate disciplines? Is it possible to move from animal theory to creaturely theology? This volume is the first full-length attempt to grapple centrally with these questions. It attempts to triangulate philosophical and theoretical reflections on animality and humanity with theological reflections on divinity. If the animal–human distinction is being rethought and retheorized as never before, then the animal–human–divine distinctions need to be rethought, retheorized, and retheologized along with it. This is the task that the multidisciplinary team of theologians, biblical scholars, philosophers, and historians assembled in this volume collectively undertakes. They do so frequently with recourse to Derrida's animal philosophy and also with recourse to an eclectic range of other relevant thinkers, such as Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Emmanuel Levinas, Gloria Anzaldua, Helene Cixous, A. N. Whitehead, and Lynn White Jr. The result is a volume that will be essential reading for religious studies audiences interested in ecological issues, animality studies, and posthumanism, as well as for animality studies audiences interested in how constructions of the divine have informed constructions of the nonhuman animal through history.

This book makes the case for a God of enjoyment who passionately suffers and yearns because of love, and permeably intermingles with the cosmos, loving intensely, and becoming like a divine silhouette of so “good a lover” that grotesquely incarnates the many, even if appearing improper. The thematic development invites the reader to journey through paths of excess of the intemperate kind initially drawn from the insights of St. Thomas Aquinas on the ecstatic love of God, and encountered in the erotic poetry of mystics like St. Teresa de Avila, whose delectable arrows provide an opening for passage and divine transfiguration of God in the manifold shapes of the cosmos. Comfortably locating itself in postmodern and process theological and philosophical discourse, and culminating with hospitable images of banqueting, fiesta, and the carnival, drawn mainly from the work of assorted Spanish and Latin American thinkers, the book progressively grants a flesh of pain mixed with joy to God’s affect.

This book poses critical questions and suggests constructive possibilities regarding the extent to which trinitarian and pluralist discourses can be put into fruitful conversation with one another. On the one hand, the book interrogates the possibilities of trinitarian theology and its ethical promise with regard to divine and creaturely relationality by putting it into specific engagement with discourses of pluralism, diversity, and multiplicity. It asks how trinitarian conceptions of divine multiplicity might open the Christian tradition to increasingly more creative and affirming visions of creaturely identities, difference, and relationality—including the specific difference of religious plurality. Alternatively, where can the triadic patterning evident in the Christian theological tradition be seen to have always exceeded the boundaries of Christian thought and experience, inhabiting and determining other religious traditions' conceptions of divine and/or creaturely reality in ways internal to their own distinctive histories? On the other hand, the book interrogates the possibilities of various discourses on pluralism by putting them in a very particular and concrete pluralist context. Religious pluralists, comparative theologians, and scholars of religious studies are place alongside and put into conversation with theological and doctrinal work carried out within the (albeit broadly conceived) normative thread of the Christian trinitarian tradition. To what extent can pluralist discourse collect within itself a convergent diversity of orthodox, heterodox, postcolonial, process, poststructuralist, liberationist, and feminist sensibilities while avoiding irruptions of conflict, competition, or the logic of mutual exclusion?

We hope—even as we doubt—that the environmental crisis can be controlled. Public awareness of our species' self-destructiveness as material beings in a material world is growing—but so is the destructiveness. The practical interventions needed for saving and restoring the earth will require a collective shift of such magnitude as to take on a spiritual and religious intensity. This transformation has in part already begun. Traditions of ecological theology and ecologically aware religious practice have been preparing the way for decades. Yet these traditions still remain marginal to society, academy, and church. This book probes the possibility of a green shift radical enough to permeate the ancient roots of our sensibility and the social sources of our practice. From new language for imagining the earth as a living ground to current constructions of nature in theology, science, and philosophy; from environmentalism's questioning of postmodern thought to a garden of green doctrines, rituals, and liturgies for contemporary religion, these chapters explore and expand our sense of how to proceed in the face of an ecological crisis that demands new thinking and acting.

Historically speaking, theology can be said to operate “materiaphobically.” Protestant Christianity in particular has bestowed upon theology a privilege of the soul over the body and belief over practice, in line with the distinction between a disembodied God and the inanimate world “He” created. Like all other human, social, and natural sciences, religious studies imported these theological dualisms into a purportedly secular modernity, mapping them furthermore onto the distinction between a rational, “enlightened” Europe on the one hand and a variously emotional, “primitive,” and “animist” non-Europe on the other. The “new materialisms” currently coursing through cultural, feminist, political, and queer theories seek to displace human privilege by attending to the agency of matter itself. Far from being passive or inert, they show us that matter acts, creates, destroys, and transforms—and, as such, is more of a process than a thing. Entangled Worlds examines the intersections of religion and new and old materialisms. Calling upon an interdisciplinary throng of scholars in science studies, religious studies, and theology, it assembles a multiplicity of experimental perspectives on materiality: What is matter, how does it materialize, and what sorts of worlds are enacted in its varied entanglements with divinity? While both theology and religious studies have over the past few decades come to prioritize the material contexts and bodily ecologies of more-than-human life, Entangled Worlds sets forth the first multivocal conversation between religious studies, theology, and the body of “the new materialism.” Here disciplines and traditions touch, transgress, and contaminate one another across their several carefully specified contexts. And in the responsiveness of this mutual touching of science, religion, philosophy, and theology, the growing complexity of our entanglements takes on a consistent ethical texture of urgency.

Three of the most influential Catholic theologians of the twentieth century—Bernard Lonergan, John Courtney Murray, and Karl Rahner—were all born in 1904, at the height of the Catholic Church's most militant rhetoric against all things modern. In this culture of suspicion, Lonergan, Murray, and Rahner grew in faith to join the Society of Jesus and struggled with the burden of antimodernist policies in their formation. By the time of their mature work in the 1950s and 1960s, they had helped to redefine the critical dialogue between modern thought and contemporary Catholic theology. After the détente of the Second Vatican Council, they brought Catholic tradition into a closer relationship to modern philosophy, history, and politics. The original chapters in this book celebrate the legacies of Lonergan, Murray, and Rahner after a century of theological development. Offering a broad range of perspectives on their lives and works, the chapters blend personal and anecdotal accounts with incisive critical appraisals. Together, they offer an insight into the distinctive character of three great thinkers and how their work shapes the way Catholics think and talk about God, Church, and State.

What are the religious justifications for the historical development and maintenance of hierarchy as the model of ecclesiastical organization in Orthodox Christianity? Beginning with its Christian coinage by Dionysius the Areopagite in the early sixth century, this book explores the theological development of ecclesiastical “hierarchy” in Byzantium. By presenting case studies of historically disparate Byzantine theologians who draw upon Dionysius’s hierarchic conception and engage it theoretically, liturgically, and pragmatically—Maximus the Confessor, Niketas Stethatos, and Nicholas Cabasilas—this book suggests a common tradition of constructing authentic ecclesiastical hierarchy as foremost that which communicates divinity. It is by this conception that each author is able to affirm the divinizing potential of church order and sacramental validity even while negating the authority of those that may fail to function in a divinely imitative way. For all four Byzantine authors, including Dionysius, this interpretation of hierarchy relies on an underlying assumption that only divine power is believed to be authentic and only divinely reflective authority is legitimate. The authors suggest that true power is recognized paradoxically by humble service and kenotic self-giving. Constructing power, authority, and hierarchy in these ways has resonances in other genres within the tradition of Orthodox Christianity. The theological trajectory posited by the study of the four Byzantine authors reshapes several issues of spiritual leadership and ecclesial organization within contemporary Orthodoxy, provides insight for historians, and prompts rethinking the ways both secular and religious power are understood by modern theorists.

How To Do Comparative Theology contributes to the maturation of method in the field of comparative theological studies, learning across religious borders, by bringing together essays drawing on different Christian traditions of learning, Judaism and Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, the wisdom of senior scholars, and also insights from a younger generation of scholars who have studied theology and religion in new ways, and are more attuned to the language of the “spiritual but not religious.” The essays in this volume show great diversity in method, and also—over and again and from many angles—coherence in intent, a commitment to one learning from the other, and a confidence that one’s home tradition benefits from fair and unhampered learning from other and very different spiritual and religious traditions. It therefore shows the diversity and coherence of comparative theology as an emerging discipline today.

There are two lines of argument in the book. The first, supported by some current and previous scholarship, develops the idea that ancient Hellenic and Roman cultures did not have and would not have recognized a concept of “religion” as a distinct or separate sphere of experience and cultural practice, and that the nouns thrēskeia and religio (usually translated as “religion”) had a range of culturally specific meanings very distinct from our “religion.” The second argument is that understanding the array of meanings of these words enables us to see connections and patterns within these cultures easily occluded by the imposition of our notions of “religion.”