Wagering on Transcendence PDF Download

Author: Phyllis Carey
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9781556129827
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Wagering on Transcendence explores the question of ultimate meaning in literature. Through essays, Mount Mary College professors from various disciplines analyze several pieces of literature from a variety of genres and authors to show how each depicts the human struggle to find meaning. The essays analyze concrete examples of spiritual journeys, the ways in which nature can be an avenue of transcendence, the transforming effect that the search for meaning can have on the individual, how transcendence can be experienced through community, the roles of language and story in the quest for transcendence, and the wager itself: how our bets about the existence of the Divine determine how we live our lives.

Author: Lieven Boeve
Publisher: Peeters Publishers
ISBN: 9789042916746
Category : Experience (Religion)
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
This volume consists of several contributions to a refined understanding of religious experience in view of contemporary theological epistemology. Diverse sample studies taken from the extensive field of religion, theology and religious studies reveal that 'religious experience' is today clearly a pivotal issue. More specifically, this is made evident in modern theological hermeneutics and in the anti-modern and/or post-modern reactions thereto, the theology of world religions and inter-religious dialogue, the contemporary resurgence of religiosity in Western society and culture, and the so-called turn to religion in contemporary continental philosophy. It would appear from such studies that the category of 'religious experience' is frequently called upon to clarify or explain the phenomenon of religion and religiosity on the one hand and to support and legitimise religious positions or the critique thereof on the other. Because of the loss of plausibility of tradition-bound religiosity and of foundational, so-called onto-theological schemes, 'religious experience' has come to constitute, for many, the last (or latest) point of departure and anchor for religion and religious thinking. This is certainly the case with respect to tendencies within contemporary Christian traditions and theological reflection. In a multitude of ways and from a variety of different perspectives, 'religious experience' and 'experience of transcendence' or 'of the divine' have gained a prominent place in philosophical and fundamental-theological conceptual schemes. In reaction to this, other authors have denied the very primacy given to religious experience in reflecting upon faith, pointing to the constitutive role of tradition and narrative without which there is no religious experience. From all this follows that the category of religious experience is in great need of reconceptualisation, not least from a theological point of view. On the one hand, religious experience is all too easily called upon to legitimise religious claims (often against 'tradition') and on the other hand, the category has become misleading in so far as it is tainted by the modern scientific understanding of experience - in reaction to which 'tradition' is then easily invoked to protect the core of religion. Both young scholars at the preceding junior conference and senior scholars during the conference's paper sessions presented from diverse perspectives new ways to conceive of religious experience in view of today's challenges of secularisation, religious plurality, the aestheticisation of religion, etc. The selected contributions have been arranged in four thematically oriented parts: 'Approaching Religious Experience in a Postmodern Age', 'Modern (re)Thinking of Religious Experience', 'Liberating Religious Experience', and 'Challenges for Spirituality'.

Author: Adam B. Seligman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400824699
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Adam Seligman, one of our most important social thinkers, continues the incisive critique of modernity he began in his previously acclaimed The Idea of Civil Society and The Problem of Trust. In this provocative new work of social philosophy, Seligman evaluates modernity's wager, namely, the gambit to liberate the modern individual from external social and religious norms by supplanting them with the rational self as its own moral authority. Yet far from ensuring the freedom of the individual, Seligman argues, "the fundamentalist doctrine of enlightened reason has called into being its own nemesis" in the forms of ethnic, racial, and identity politics. Seligman counters that the modern human must recover a notion of authority that is essentially transcendent, but which extends tolerance to those of other--or no--faiths. Through its denial of an authority rooted in an experience of transcendence, modernity fails to account for individual and collective moral action. First, deprived of a sacred source of the self, depictions of moral action are reduced to motives of self interest. Second, dismissing the sacred leaves the resurgence of religious movements unexplained. In this rigorous and imaginative study, Seligman seeks to discover a durable source of moral authority in a liberalized world. His study of shame, pride, collective guilt, and collective responsibility demonstrates the mutual relationship between individual responsibility and communal authority. Furthermore, Seligman restores the indispensable role of religious traditions--as well as the features of those traditions that enhance, rather than denigrate, tolerance. Sociologists, political theorists, moral philosophers, and intellectual historians will find Seligman's thesis enlightening, as will anyone concerned with the ethical and religious foundations of a tolerant society.

Author: Chris Doude van Troostwijk
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253034035
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
This anthology of fifteen essays provides a variety of critical perspectives on the influential ideas in Richard Kearney’s Anatheism. Blaise Pascal famously insisted that it was better to wager belief in God than to risk eternal damnation. More recently, the distinguished philosopher Richard Kearney has offered a wager of his own—the anatheistic wager, or return to God after the death of God. In this volume, an international group of contributors consider what Kearney’s spiritual wager means. This volume examines what is at stake with such a wager and what anatheism demands of the self and of others. The essays explore the dynamics of religious anatheistic performativity, its demarcations and limits, and its motives. A recent interview with Kearney focuses on crucial questions about philosophy, theology, and religious commitment. As a whole, this volume interprets and challenges Kearney’s philosophy of religion and its radical impact on contemporary views of God.

Author: G. Pattison
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230377815
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Existentialism was one of the most important influences on twentieth-century thought, especially in the period between the 1920s and early 1960s. Best known in its atheistic representatives such as Sartre, it also numbered many significant religious thinkers. Anxious Angels is a critical introduction to these religious existentialists, who are treated as a coherent group in their own right and not merely derivative of secular existentialism. The book argues that they constitute a distinctive religious voice that continues to merit attention in an era of postmodernity.

Author: Malcolm Guite
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351937219
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Faith, Hope and Poetry explores the poetic imagination as a way of knowing; a way of seeing reality more clearly. Presenting a series of critical appreciations of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, Malcolm Guite applies the insights of poetry to contemporary issues and the contribution poetry can make to our religious knowing and the way we 'do theology'. This book is not solely concerned with overtly religious poetry, but attends to the paradoxical ways in which the poetry of doubt and despair also enriches theology. Developing an original analysis and application of the poetic vision of Coleridge, Larkin and Seamus Heaney in the final chapters, Guite builds towards a substantial theology of imagination and provides unique insights into truth that complement and enrich more strictly rational ways of knowing. Readers of this book will return to their reading of poetry equipped with new insights and enthusiasm and will be challenged to integrate imaginative ways of knowing into their other academic and intellectual pursuits.

Author: George Westhaver
Publisher: SCM Press
ISBN: 0334058309
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
A deep and scholarly study on the person of Christ as Son of Man from an impressive array of key theological and philosophical thinkers, including NT Wright, Lydia Schumacher and Oliver O'Donovan. Poetic interludes from renowned poet and scholar Malcolm Guite creatively shed a different light on the subject.

Author: Christiaan Mostert
Publisher: ATF Press
ISBN: 9781920691202
Category : Hope
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Our age is not one of great hope; war and terror continue unabated. Despair lies hidden just below the preoccupations of daily life, and is starkly visible at many points in today's world. Directly or indirectly, the contributors to this volume seek to challenge the culture of despair. These authors, theologians and leaders, write about hope: its ground, its shape in the Bible and its expression in Christian life and worship, mission and ministry. The book challenges the church as much as the culture. Do Christians know the ground of their hope? Is the church the bearer of hope? Does its worship sustain hope? The contributors include biblical scholars, historians, systematic and pastoral theologians.

Author: Richard Bauckham
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802843913
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
The hopes by which the modern West has lived are widely understood to have failed. At the outset of the third millennium, we see the ideology of historical progress for what it is -- a myth that can no longer provide humanity with grounds for true hope. In Hope against Hope Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart present a way forward -- through a radical faith in a global future that is in God's hands. Using the present failure of secular hope as the context for a renewal of the Christian vision for the future, Bauckham and Hart seek to re-source Christian hope from its rich heritage of biblical promises and their interpretation in the Christian tradition. In a fresh and skillful way they explore the major images of eschatology -- the Antichrist, the millennium, the last judgment, the kingdom of God, and others -- proposing the category of imagination as the key to understanding their significance today. The authors insist throughout on the cosmic scope of Christian eschatology, writing of God's future not just for human individuals but for the whole creation, and they explore the relevance of such an eschatology for Christian living in the present. A thoroughly interdisciplinary work that integrates biblical study, systematic theology, and astute analysis of contemporary Western culture, Hope against Hope is unique in offering a heartening look at the future from the perspective of life today.

Author: Scott Cairns
Publisher: Paraclete Press
ISBN: 1557257914
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 91

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Book Description
“The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it.” –Simone Weil “Like most people I, too, have been blindsided by personal grief now and again over the years. And I have an increasingly keen sense that, wherever I am, someone nearby is suffering now. For that reason, I lately have settled in to mull the matter over, gathering my troubled wits to undertake a difficult essay, more like what we used to call an assay, really—an earnest inquiry. I am thinking of it just now as a study in suffering, by which I hope to find some sense in affliction, hoping—just as I have come to hope about experience in general—to make something of it.” –from the book Is there meaning in our afflictions? With the thoughtfulness of a pilgrim and the prose of a poet, Scott Cairns takes us on a soul-baring journey through “the puzzlement of our afflictions.” Probing ancient Christian wisdom for revelation in his own pain, Cairns challenges us toward a radical revision of the full meaning and breadth of human suffering. Clear-eyed and unsparingly honest, this new addition to the literature of suffering is reminiscent of The Year of Magical Thinking as well as the works of C. S. Lewis. Cairns points us toward hope in the seasons of our afflictions, because “in those trials in our lives that we do not choose but press through—a stillness, a calm, and a hope become available to us.”