In the Throe of Wonder

In the Throe of Wonder

Author: Jerome A. Miller

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1992-01-01

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9780791409534

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This book is a meditation on the experiences of wonder, horror, and awe, and an exploration of their ontological import. It argues that these experiences are not, as our culture often presumes, merely subjective, emotive responses to events that happen in the world. Rather, they are transformative experiences that fracture our ordinary lives and, in so doing, provide us access to realities of which we would otherwise be oblivious. Wonder, horror, and awe, like the experiences of love and death to which they are so intimately related, are not events that happen in our world but events that happen to it and thus alter our life as a whole. Miller explores the impact of that transformation -- its deconstructive effect on our ordinary sense of our selves, and the breakthrough to a new understanding of being which it makes possible.


Conversion as Transformation

Conversion as Transformation

Author: Dominic Arcamone

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2020-01-29

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1532678924

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The process of human transformation is complex and ongoing. This book presents a framework for understanding human transformation through the insights of Bernard Lonergan. The reader will be introduced to terms such as the turn to the subject, consciousness, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. It will explore terms such as horizon, feelings, values, self-esteem, sublation, conversion, dialectic, and religious experience. The book explores transformation through the way mentors have authored their own lives, told their own stories, and taken possession of their interiority. Transformation is illustrated through the lives of saints and ordinary men and women who did extraordinary things, such as St. Augustine, Dag Hammarskjold, Vaclav Havel, Franz Jaggerstatter, St. Therese of Lisieux, Fredrich Nietzsche, Katherine Ann Power, and Marie Cardinal. Transformation is also illustrated through the medium of cinema: Babette’s Feast, The Mission, As It is in Heaven, Romero, Dead Poets Society, Ordinary People, The Godfather trilogy, Three Color trilogy, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Dial M for Murder, and Twelve Angry Men. While the book treats religious, moral, affective, intellectual, and psychic conversion as moments of transformation, it argues that ecological conversion requires all of these so as to meet the most serious moral challenge of our time.


Wisdom's Wonder

Wisdom's Wonder

Author: William P. Brown

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2014-03-11

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1467440353

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Wisdom's Wonder offers a fresh reading of the Hebrew Bible's wisdom literature with a unique emphasis on "wonder" as the framework for understanding biblical wisdom. William Brown argues that wonder effectively integrates biblical wisdom's emphasis on character formation and its outlook on creation, breaking an impasse that has plagued recent wisdom studies. Drawing on various disciplines, from philosophy to neuroscience, Brown discovers new distinctions and connections in Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. Each book is studied in terms of its view of moral character and creation, as well as in terms of the social or intellectual crisis each book identifies. Most general treatments of the wisdom literature spend too much time on issues of genre, poetry, and social context at the neglect of discussing the intellectual and emotional power of the wisdom corpus. Brown argues that the real power of the wisdom corpus lies in its capacity to evoke the reader's sense of wonder. An extensive revision and expansion of Brown's Character in Crisis (Eerdmans, 1996), this book demonstrates that the wisdom books are much more than simply advice literature: with wonder as the foundation for understanding, Brown maintains that wisdom is a process with transformation of the self as the goal.


Wonder

Wonder

Author: Sophia Vasalou

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2015-04-15

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1438455542

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Wonder has been celebrated as the quintessential passion of childhood. From the earliest stages of our intellectual history, it has been acclaimed as the driving force of inquiry and the prime passion of thought. Yet for an emotion acknowledged so widely for the multiple roles it plays in our lives, wonder has led a singularly shadowy existence in recent reflections. Philosophers have largely passed it over in silence; emotion theorists have shunned it as a case that sits awkwardly within their analytical frameworks. So what is wonder, and why does it matter? In this book, Sophia Vasalou sketches a "grammar" of wonder that pursues the complexities of wonder as an emotional experience that has carved colorful tracks through our language and our intellectual history, not only in philosophy and science but also in art and religious experience. A richer grammar of wonder and broader window into its past can give us the tools we need for thinking more insightfully about wonder, and for reflecting on the place it should occupy within our emotional lives.


Beyond Clinical Dehumanisation towards the Other in Community Mental Health Care

Beyond Clinical Dehumanisation towards the Other in Community Mental Health Care

Author: Catherine A. Racine

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-03-30

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1000363430

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Beyond Clinical Dehumanisation Toward the Other in Community Mental Health Care offers a rare and intimate portrayal of the moral process of a mental health clinician that interrogates the intractable problem of systemic dehumanisation in community mental health care and looks to the notion of "wonder" and the visionary relational ethics of Emmanuel Levinas for a possible cure. An interdisciplinary study with transdisciplinary aspirations, this book contributes an original and compelling voice to the emerging therapeutic conversation attempting to re-imagine and transcend the objectifying constraints of the dominant discourse and the reductive world view that drives it. Chapters bring into dialogue the fields of community mental health care, psychology, psychology and the Other, the philosophy of wonder, Levinasian ethics, clinical ethics, the moral research of autoethnography and the medical humanities, to consider the defilement of the vulnerable help seeker, the moral injury of the clinician and look for answers beyond. This book is an ethical primer for mental health professionals, researchers, educators, advocates and service users working to re-imagine and heal a broken system by challenging the underpinnings of entrenched dehumanisation and standing with those they "serve".


Prefaces and Writing Sampler

Prefaces and Writing Sampler

Author: Robert L. Perkins

Publisher: Mercer University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 9780881460216

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The International Kierkegaard Commentary-For the first time in English the world community of scholars systematically assembled and presented the results of recent research in the vast literature of Søren Kierkegaard. Based on the definitive English edition of Kierkegaard's works by Princeton University Press, this series of commentaries addresses all the published texts of the influential Danish philosopher and theologian. This is volume 9 & 10 in a series of commentaries based upon the definitive translations of Kierkegaard's writings published by Princeton University Press, 1980ff.


Sacred Sense

Sacred Sense

Author: William P. Brown

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2015-07-07

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 1467443808

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All too often Scripture is read only to find answers to life’s perplexing questions, to prove a theological point, or to formulate doctrine. But William Brown argues that if read properly, what the Bible does most fundamentally is arouse a sacred sense of life-transforming wonder. In this book Brown helps readers develop an orientation toward the biblical text that embraces wonder. He explores reading strategies and offers fresh readings of seventeen Old and New Testament passages, identifying what he finds most central and evocative in the unfolding biblical drama. The Bible invites its readers to linger in wide-eyed wonder, Brown says -- and his Sacred Sense shows readers how to do just that.


The Mystery of the Child

The Mystery of the Child

Author: Martin E. Marty

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2007-04-23

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0802817661

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Much of today's writing on children treats the child of any age as a problem or a set of problems to be solved, effectively reducing the child to a complex of biological and chemical factors, explainable in scientific terms, or regarding children as objects of adult control. In contrast, Martin Marty here presents the child as a mystery who invokes wonder and elicits creative responses that affect the care provided him or her. Drawing on literature as new as contemporary poetry and as old as the Bible, The Mystery of the Child encourages the thoughtful enjoyment of children instead of the imposition of adult will and control. Indeed, Marty treats the impulse to control as a problem and highlights qualities associated with children -- responsiveness, receptivity, openness to wonder -- that can become sources of renewal for adults. The Mystery of the Child represents a new tack for Martin Marty -- universally respected as a historian, theologian, and interpreter of religion and culture -- but displays the same incisive, erudite quality marking the fifty-plus books and thousands of articles that he has previously written. Marty's broad, thoughtful perspective will inspire readers to think afresh about what it means to be a child -- and to be a caregiver. This book is sure to claim a wide readership -- parents, grandparents, schoolteachers, theologians, historians -- engaging anyone wanting to explore more fully the profound realm of the child.


The Nature of Christian Doctrine

The Nature of Christian Doctrine

Author: Alister E. McGrath

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-02-01

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0198901461

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A groundbreaking account of the origins, development, and enduring significance of Christian doctrine, explaining why it remains essential to the life of Christian communities. Noting important parallels between the development of scientific theories and Christian doctrine, Alister E. McGrath examines the growing view of early Christianity as a 'theological laboratory'. We can think of doctrinal formulations as proposals submitted for testing across the Christian world, rather than as static accounts of orthodoxy. This approach fits the available evidence much better than theories of suppressed early orthodoxies and reinforces the importance of debate within the churches as a vital means of testing doctrinal formulations. McGrath offers a robust critique of George Lindbeck's still-influential Nature of Doctrine (1984), raising significant concerns about its reductionist approach. He instead provides a more reliable account of the myriad functions of doctrine, utilising Mary Midgley's concept of 'mapping' as a means of coordinating the multiple aspects of complex phenomena. McGrath's approach also employs Karl Popper's 'Three Worlds', allowing the theoretical, objective, and subjective aspects of doctrine to be seen as essential and interconnected. We see how Christian doctrine offers ontological disclosure about the nature of reality, while at the same time providing a coordinating framework which ensures that its various aspects are seen as parts of a greater whole. Doctrine provides a framework, or standpoint, that allows theological reality to be seen and experienced in a new manner; it safeguards and articulates the core vision of reality that is essential for the proper functioning and future flourishing of Christian communities.


Lonergan on Philosophic Pluralism

Lonergan on Philosophic Pluralism

Author: Gerard Walmsley

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2008-12-08

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1442692936

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In his influential philosophical work Insight, Bernard Lonergan made the intriguing and problematic claim that "the polymorphism of consciousness is the one and only key to philosophy." In Lonergan on Philosophical Pluralism, Gerard Walmsley examines Lonergan's many discussions of the different forms of human consciousness, as well as his sustained responses to the problems raised by philosophical and cultural pluralism. Looking closely at Lonergan's thoughts on patterns of experience, different levels of consciousness, and the differentiations of consciousness that occur through the historical development of individual human minds, Walmsley shows how polymorphic consciousness allows individuals to understand a range of philosophical positions. By understanding this range, an individual is able to sympathetically and critically appreciate different positions. Testing the strength of Lonergan's position, he directly engages postmodern thought and comparative philosophy to demonstrate that Lonergan's account of polymorphic consciousness provides a better basis for a positive evaluation of difference than does the work of many postmodern thinkers. An ambitious and soundly argued work, Lonergan on Philosophical Pluralism is both an illuminating study of Lonergan's thought, and an intriguing proposal for how difference and pluralism can be understood.