Freedom Made Manifest explicates Rahner’s theology of freedom by elucidating its configuration and sources. Much of its inquiry centers on the fundamental option: each human person’s eternal decision made, paradoxically, in time, as a definitive answer to God’s personally-tailored call to salvation. This idea stems from three principal sources: Catholic conversations with transcendental-idealist philosophy, penitential theology and practice, and Ignatian spirituality. Rahner’s unique redeployment of these sources inflects the fundamental option with theologies of concupiscence, mercy and forgiveness (especially as ecclesially mediated), and devotion to Jesus Christ. Awareness of these inflections can show how Rahner’s theology of freedom may assist in theological reflection on freedom’s susceptibility to injury and trauma.
What does it mean for rigorous thought about God to be guided by prayer? What do Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises teach us about discernment? How can that discernment become a spiritual discipline which guides our choices throughout life? How can that discipline guide the theological choices we all make, including those of academic theologians? This book moves beyond the abstract notion that theology should be prayerful to bring theology together with a particular spiritual practice. It argues that the Spiritual Exercises are a system of prayerful discernment which already provide for reason to be used alongside an openness to all experience and all the ways that we can be guided by the Holy Spirit. This book provides a constructive interpretation of the Exercises as a path of prayerful discernment which can be used throughout life. It sees, in the Exercises, a way of active receptivity to all experience, treating all experience as worthy of attention but also approaching that experience with humility and caution. This book sees theology practiced in this way—as a discerning spiritual discipline—as more resistant to the challenges of modernity than theology which has been sundered from our spiritual life.
In this frank and honest work, one of the pioneers of liberation theology in Latin America reassesses the movement in light of post-Cold War realities. Comblin outlines a liberative, theological pastoral agenda for now and the decades to come in the face of massive urbanization and the apparent triumph of the global marketplace. With the increasing apartheid of rich and poor, the cause of liberation remains as urgent as ever-perhaps more so. Jose Comblin, already established as a premier contributor to liberation theology, has now provided a work of major new importance. Significant changes have occurred since the inception of liberation theology thirty years ago, and Comblin provides a remarkably comprehensive, critical, and insightful study of economic, political, cultural, and religious developments that liberation theology must address. He offers as well a challenging new theological emphasis on 'freedom.' -Arthur F. McGovern, SJ University of Detroit A 'must read' for all interested in current debates among Latin American liberation theologians, and more broadly, on the eve of the third millennium, for all wondering about the meaning of the good news of the coming of God's reign in history. -Lee Cormie St. Michael's College and the Toronto School of Theology He dispels the rumor that liberation theology is disappearing or dead. This book is about the future of liberation theology, and, if Jose Comblin is right, it will play a vital role in the coming century. -Curt Cadorette University of Rochester
Explores Schelling’s Essay on Human Freedom, focusing on the themes of freedom, evil, and love, and the relationship between his ideas and those of Plato and Kant.
In the first study to examine F. W. J. Schelling's political thought, Velimir Stojkovski not only unearths a neglected dimension of the influential thinker's philosophy but further shows what it can teach us about our ethical and political responsibilities today. Unlike Hegel or Fichte, Schelling never wrote a political treatise. Yet by reconstructing the portions of such works as The New Deductions of Natural Right that deal explicitly with the political and by thematically rethinking parts of his writings that have a clear repercussion on politics – in particular those on nature, freedom and religion – this book reveals the centrality of politics to his oeuvre. Revisiting his corpus in this way, Stojkovski uncovers a number of ways we can learn from Schelling and his reception. He examines how Schelling's views on nature can clarify our moral and political obligations to the non-human world and further demonstrates how the separation of ontology as first philosophy from the ethico-political has resulted in a fragmented view of the status of the political subject and thus the body politic. Forcefully renouncing this fragmentation, Stojkovski explores how the same divide has contributed to the ongoing political turmoil in Europe and America. Combining an exploration of German Idealism with contemporary concerns, this is an essential study that will introduce readers to a new Schelling: a political thinker for the 21st century.
In this remarkable legal page-turner, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Barry Siegel recounts the dramatic, decades-long saga of Bill Macumber, imprisoned for thirty-eight years for a double homicide he denies committing. In the spring of 1962, a school bus full of students stumbled across a mysterious crime scene on an isolated stretch of Arizona desert: an abandoned car and two bodies. This brutal murder of a young couple bewildered the sheriff 's department of Maricopa County for years. Despite a few promising leads—including several chilling confessions from Ernest Valenzuela, a violent repeat offender—the case went cold. More than a decade later, a clerk in the sheriff 's department, Carol Macumber, came forward to tell police that her estranged husband had confessed to the murders. Though the evidence linking Bill Macumber to the incident was questionable, he was arrested and charged with the crime. During his trial, the judge refused to allow the confession of now-deceased Ernest Valenzuela to be admitted as evidence in part because of the attorney-client privilege. Bill Macumber was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. The case, rife with extraordinary irregularities, attracted the sustained involvement of the Arizona Justice Project, one of the first and most respected of the non-profit groups that represent victims of manifest injustice across the country. With more twists and turns than a Hollywood movie, Macumber's story illuminates startling, upsetting truths about our justice system, which kept a possibly innocent man locked up for almost forty years, and introduces readers to the generations of dedicated lawyers who never stopped working on his behalf, lawyers who ultimately achieved stunning results. With precise journalistic detail, intimate access and masterly storytelling, Barry Siegel will change your understanding of American jurisprudence, police procedure, and what constitutes justice in our country today.
The United States is in a crisis of freedom. Influenced by neoliberal economics, the concept of freedom has become identified with an abstract, radical individualism disdainful of responsibility to others and to the past. Signs of this crisis crop up everywhere. Some invoke freedom as justification for refusing to wear a mask in a pandemic. Others argue that freedom is an empty word if it’s celebrated apart from an honest engagement with the country’s history of racism. Created Freedom under the Sign of the Cross offers a Catholic theological response to this crisis of freedom. Catholic social ethics may be better known for its emphasis on social principles like the common good and solidarity. But developments in Catholic theologies of freedom in the last decades provide fertile ground from which to develop a bold, creative response to this American crisis of freedom. In this book, theologian David DeCosse draws on thinkers ranging from philosopher Amartya Sen to Black Catholic theologian Shawn Copeland to twentieth-century theological giant Karl Rahner in order to reimagine American freedom in light of classic Catholic emphases on embodiment, relationship, history, the good, and God. The result is a Catholic public theology that provides a redemptive path forward in an age of crisis.
This volume provides an analysis of divine aseity in Karl Barth's thought and appreciates the vital role that this doctrine can play in contemporary theology. Brian D. Asbill begins by setting the general theological context, first through a broad sketch of the development of Barth's understanding of the relationship between the life of God pro nobis (pronobeity) and a se (aseity), and secondly through the examination of the basic theological convictions that guide his approach to the divine being in Church Dogmatics II/1. The second section, 'The Love and Freedom of God', turns to the dialectical pairings which guide Barth's accounts of the divine reality in his earliest dogmatic cycle (The Göttingen Dogmatics §§16-7) as well as in his most mature treatment (Church Dogmatics §§28-31). Particular attention is given to how these themes arise from revelation and relate to one another. In the final section, 'The Aseity of God', Asbill identifies this doctrine's basic features and primary functions. Divine aseity is characterized as the self-demonstration and self-movement of God's life, a trinitarian and entirely unique reality, a primarily positive and dynamic concept, and the manner and readiness of God's love for creatures. Divine aseity is said to indicate God's lordship in the act of self-binding, God's uniqueness in the act of self-revelation, and God's sufficiency in the act of self-giving.
One of this century's most eminent theologians addresses the eternal questions of the relationship of good and evil, linking the story of Job to the lives of the poor and oppressed of our world.
