Pt. 1 Setting the stage: two pilgrims on the way home -- Kierkegaard's tensive picture of Augustine -- Augustine's restless heart and Kierkegaard's desire for an eternal happiness -- Augustine and Kierkegaard on the road: life as a journey -- Pt. 2 Signposts on the journey: specific theological intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard -- God: the attraction and repulsion of boundless love -- Sin: culpable action and corrupt state -- God's gracious response to sin: the enigma of divine sovereignty and human responsibility -- Christology: the allure of lowliness -- Salvation: faithful love and loving faith -- The church: a parting of the ways? -- Conclusion: two edifying theologies of self-giving.
Contesting the feminist critique of the dangers of Christianity's self-giving ethics, this book advances a contemporary feminist christology engaging the strength of self-giving power.
Two innovative spiritual teachers show how to use desire and passion—eros—as a gateway to realizing our fullest potential What do desire and passion have to do with our spiritual journey? According to A. H. Almaas and Karen Johnson, they are an essential part of it. Conventional wisdom cautions that desire and passion are opposed to the spiritual path—that engaging in desire will take you more into the world, into egoic life. And for most people, that is exactly what happens. We naturally tend to experience wanting in a self-centered way. The Power of Divine Eros challenges the view that the divine and the erotic are separate. When we open to the energy, aliveness, spontaneity, and zest of erotic love, we will find it inseparable from the realm of the holy and sacred. When this is understood, desire and passion become a gateway to wholeness and to realizing our full potential. Through guided exercises, the authors reveal how our relationships become opportunities on the spiritual journey to express ourselves authentically, to relate with openness, and to discover dynamic inner realms with another person. Through embodying the energy of eros, each of us can learn to be fully real and alive in all of our interactions.
Using refreshingly unconventional prose, rising theologian Wendy Farley has written a theological account of the human condition that delves into the deepest dimensions of the soul. Considering human life from the perspective of the wounding and healing of desire, with desire being that within us which longs for connection, home, and beauty, Farley presents a passionate, moving account of the human condition that draws strongly upon the Christian meditative and mystical spiritual traditions. In doing so, Farley shifts the traditional images of sin and redemption into images of healing and power. The result is a theological memoir that reaches into the human depths and draws forth a response of the soul--in courage, compassion, and delight.
In a modern world characterized by a precarious job market, class inequality, and a global migrant crisis, Natalia Marandiuc asks the question: How does home affect one's identity? In this wide-ranging contribution to Christian theological anthropology, Marandiuc argues that love attachments function as sources of subjectivity and enablers of human freedom. Human loves and the love of God are co-creators of the self and they situate human subjectivity in a relational home. Paradoxically, the depth of human belonging, dependence, is thus directly proportional to the strength of human agency, independence. Building upon Søren Kierkegaard, research in the neuroscience of attachment theory, and contemporary constructions of the self, The Goodness of Home makes original contributions to several central issues in contemporary Christian theological anthropology. Love is understood as central to the building of subjectivity, which is seen as an intersection of desire and need. For Marandiuc, the self is a complex process of becoming rather than a static entity with essentialist features. She looks at human difference in terms of the formation of particular subjectivities through particular loves. Ultimately, she depicts human love as interwoven with the infinite streams of divine love, forming a sacramental site for God's presence, and playing a constitutive role in the making of the self.
The self-emptying of Christ (kenosis) in Philippians 2 has long been the focus of attention by Christian theologians and interpreters of Paul's Christology. David E. Fredrickson sheds dramatic new light on familiar texts by discussing the centuries-old language of love and longing in Greek and Roman epistolary literature, showing that a "physics" of desire was related to notions of power and dominance. Paul's kenotic Christology challenged not only received notions of the power of the gods but of the very nature of love itself as a component of human society.
The Abased Christ is the first monograph to be devoted exclusively to Søren Kierkegaard’s Christological masterpiece, Practice in Christianity. Alongside an argument for a new translation of the work’s title, it offers detailed textual commentary on a series of themes in Practice in Christianity, such as the person of Christ, contemporaneity, imitation, and Kierkegaard’s philosophy of history. Anti-Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Practice in Christianity, presents to his readers a uniquely challenging understanding of who Christ is and what it means to follow him. The Christ of Anti-Climacus is not the glorious Christ who abides with the Father in heaven, but the abased Christ who is poor, marginal, offensive, and persecuted. Throughout Practice in Christianity, we are called not only to perceive the abased Christ, but to follow after him. The Abased Christ aims to enrich historical theologians’ appreciation of Kierkegaard’s Christology. However, it concludes by grappling with questions of power, agency, and sacrifice which have been at the forefront of contemporary theology in the 20th and 21st centuries, thereby suggesting how we might make sense of Kierkegaard’s Christology today.
Exploring Spirituality and Sexuality: An Introduction to an Interdisciplinary Field is a collection of scholarly essays which focuses on the multiple interrelations of spirituality and sexuality, including such facets as intimate relationships, inner cultivation, gender empowerment, gender empowerment, sex education, eroticism, and ecstasy embodiments.
Ironically, the philosophy of love has long been neglected by philosophers, so-called “lovers of wisdom,” who would seemingly need to understand how one best becomes a lover. In Kierkegaard and the Philosophy of Love, Michael Strawser shows that the philosophy of love lies at the heart of Kierkegaard’s writings, as he argues that the central issue of Kierkegaard’s authorship can and should be understood more broadly as the task of becoming a lover. Strawser starts by identifying the questions (How should I love the other? Is self-love possible? How can I love God?) and themes (love’s immediacy, intentionality, unity, and eternity) that are central to the philosophy of love, and he develops a rich context that includes analyses of the conceptions of love found in Plato, Spinoza, and Hegel, as well as prominent contemporary thinkers. Strawser provides an original and wide-ranging analysis of Kierkegaard’s writings—from the early The Concept of Irony and Edifying Discourses to the late The Moment, while maintaining the prominence of Works of Love— to demonstrate how Kierkegaard’s writings on love are relevant to the emerging study of the philosophy of love today. The most unique perspective of this work, however, is Strawser’s argument that Kierkegaard’s writings on love are most fruitfully understood within the context of a phenomenology of love. In interpreting Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist of love, Strawser claims that it is not Husserl and Heidegger that we should look to for a connection in the first instance, but rather Max Scheler, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Emmanuel Levinas, and most importantly, Jean-Luc Marion, who for the most part center their thinking on the phenomenological nature of love. Based on an analysis of the works of these thinkers together with Kierkegaard’s writings, Strawser argues that Kierkegaard presents readers with a first phenomenology of love, a point of view that serves as a unifying perspective throughout this work while also pointing to areas for future scholarship. Overall, this work brings seemingly divergent perspectives into a unity brought about through a focus on love—which is, after all, a unifying force.
