Divine Aporia

Divine Aporia

Author: John Charles Hawley

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780838754498

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The essays in this book bring together postmodern theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, literature, cultural studies, and women's studies to show how a persistent and classical theme in western theological studies (the alterity of the divine reality) has become creatively transcribed and theorized within the postmodern landscape.


God Being Nothing

God Being Nothing

Author: Ray L. Hart

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-05-09

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 022635976X

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One of the most influential voices in contemporary theology delivers “a deeply original, meticulously written” new approach to the way we think about God (Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography). In this long-awaited work, Ray L. Hart offers a radical speculative theology that profoundly challenges classical understandings of the divine. God Being Nothing contests the conclusions of numerous orthodoxies through a probing question: How can thinking of God reach closure when the subjects of creation are themselves unfinished, when God’s self-revelation in history is ongoing, and when the active manifestation of God is still occurring? A renowned theologist and author of the landmark text Unfinished Man and the Imagination, Ray L. Hart now asks us to imagine God perpetually in process: an unfinished God being self-created from nothingness. Breaking away from the traditional focus on divine persons, Hart reimagines the Trinity in terms of theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogony in order to reveal an ever-emerging Godhead who encompasses all of temporal creation and, within it, human existence. In Hart’s stunning vision, God’s continual generation from nothing manifests the full actualization of freedom: the freedom to create ex nihilo.


Subverting the Leviathan

Subverting the Leviathan

Author: James Martel

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2007-10-12

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 0231511485

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In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes's landmark work on political philosophy, James Martel argues that although Hobbes pays lip service to the superior interpretive authority of the sovereign, he consistently subverts this authority throughout the book by returning it to the reader. Martel demonstrates that Hobbes's radical method of reading not only undermines his own authority in the text, but, by extension, the authority of the sovereign as well. To make his point, Martel looks closely at Hobbes's understanding of religious and rhetorical representation. In Leviathan, idolatry is not just a matter of worshipping images but also a consequence of bad reading. Hobbes speaks of the "error of separated essences," in which a sign takes precedence over the idea or object it represents, and warns that when the sign is given such agency, it becomes a disembodied fantasy leading to a "kingdom of darkness." To combat such idolatry, Hobbes offers a method of reading in which one resists the rhetorical manipulation of figures and tropes and recognizes the codes and structures of language for what they are-the only way to convey a fundamental inability to ever know "the thing itself." Making the leap to politics, Martel suggests that following Hobbes's argument, the sovereign can also be seen as idolatrous a separated essence a figure who supplants the people it purportedly represents, and that learning to be better readers enables us to challenge, if not defeat, the authority of the sovereign.


Tracing the Lines

Tracing the Lines

Author: Robert Sweetman

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2016-08-23

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1498296823

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Tracing the Lines takes on the project of what Christian scholarship is, and should be, today. It does so, however, with an eye to locating similarities in the rich tradition the last nearly two thousand years of Christian scholarship has given birth to. With humility and a sympathetic ear, Sweetman traces the way certain lines of thought have developed over time, showing their strengths, their weaknesses, and their motivation for shaping Christian scholarship in particular ways. Though he locates his own thought within a particular one of these streams, he shows how all of them have contributed in different ways to the formation of the work of Christian scholarship. Offering in the end an understanding of Christian scholarship as scholarship attuned to the shape of our Christian hearts, this book reaches across disciplines to connect Christians engaged in scholarship in all areas of the academy, whether at public or private institutions.


Metaphysical Aporia and Philosophical Heresy

Metaphysical Aporia and Philosophical Heresy

Author: Stephen David Ross

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1989-01-01

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 9780791400067

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From Descartes to the present, there has been a call for a new beginning in philosophy. Contemporary continental philosophy and American pragmatism continue to proclaim the end of one philosophic tradition and the beginning of another. The basis for many of these developments is the repudiation of metaphysics. The purpose of this book is to rethink the metaphysical traditions in terms of the continental and pragmatist critiques, rejecting a single view. The major works in the tradition are viewed as heretical. Philosophy has recurrently acknowledged aporia: "moments in the movement of thought in which it finds itself faced with unconquerable obstacles resulting from conflicts in its understanding of its own intelligibility." A chapter is devoted to each of the eight major philosophers and movements in the Western canonical tradition: the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, empiricism, Kant, and Hegel. The last three chapters are devoted to contemporary discussions of the end of metaphysics, including the development of a "local" metaphysics that is able to express its own locality and aporia.


Questioning God

Questioning God

Author: John D. Caputo

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2001-09-01

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0253108675

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Jacques Derrida and other scholars explore postmodern thinking about God and consider the nature of forgiveness in relation to the paradoxes of the gift. In fifteen insightful essays, Jacques Derrida and an international group of scholars explore the implications of deconstruction for religion, focusing on two topics: God and forgiveness. Among the themes addressed by contributors are the possibilities of imagining God as unthinkable, imagining God as nonpatriarchal, imagining a return to Augustine, and imagining an age in which praise is far more important than narrative. Questioning God moves readers beyond the parameters of metaphysical reason and modernist rationality as it attempts to think the questions of God and forgiveness in a postmodernist context. Contributors include John D. Caputo, Jacques Derrida, Mark Dooley, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Robert Gibbs, Jean Greisch, Kevin Hart, Richard Kearney, Cleo McNelly Kearns, John Milbank, Regina M. Schwartz, Michael J. Scanlon, and Graham Ward. “What sets this work apart from the majority of other publications on the subject of postmodern theology and prevents it from descending into a sanctimonious hagiography of Derrida’s genius is the presence among the contributors of Graham Ward and John Milbank, two of the founding members of the movement known as radical orthodoxy. This present work is the first to document supporters of radical orthodoxy critically engaging with proponents of Derridean deconstruction.” —Perspectives


The Perfectly Simple Triune God

The Perfectly Simple Triune God

Author: D. Stephen Long

Publisher: Fortress Press

Published: 2016-08-01

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 150641687X

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A particularly nettlesome question is that around the relationship of the confession of God as a simple yet threefold being—the treatises of the one God and the Trinity. Although God as simple and Triune was widely accepted for over a millennium, simplicity has been widely critiqued and rejected by modern theology. The purported error is in conceiving God’s unity prior to the Triune persons, an error begun by Augustine and crystallized in Aquinas. The Perfectly Simple Triune God challenges this critique and reading of Aquinas as a misunderstanding of his doctrine of God. By refusing to begin theology with God’s oneness, who God is collapses into who God is for us, a loss of the biblical and dramatic character of God for us. D. Stephen Long posits that the two treatises were never independent, but inextricably related and entailing one another. Long provides a constructive rereading of Thomas Aquinas, tracing antecedents to Aquinas in the patristic tradition, and readings of him through to the Reformers, taking into account challenges to the classical tradition posed by modern and contemporary theology and philosophy to offer a robust articulation of divine Trinitarian agency for a contemporary age that adheres to broadly considered orthodox and ecumenical parameters.


God as the Mystery of the World

God as the Mystery of the World

Author: Eberhard Jüngel

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-11-20

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 0567659836

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Jüngel sets out to establish a basis for a theology of God the crucified while avoiding the shoals of theism and atheism. He warns of the danger, rooted in the fact that modernity no longer dares to think God, of talking God to death, of silencing God with too much God-talk. Jüngel analyzes what our possibilities are of thinking and speaking God and concludes that theology has to become the narrative of God's humanity. This second book in the series helps the reader to gain a more explicit awareness of the contemporary issues Jüngel's theology grapples with.


Surrealism, Occultism and Politics

Surrealism, Occultism and Politics

Author: Tessel M. Bauduin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-10-16

Total Pages: 639

ISBN-13: 135137902X

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This volume examines the relationship between occultism and Surrealism, specifically exploring the reception and appropriation of occult thought, motifs, tropes and techniques by Surrealist artists and writers in Europe and the Americas, from the 1920s through the 1960s. Its central focus is the specific use of occultism as a site of political and social resistance, ideological contestation, subversion and revolution. Additional focus is placed on the ways occultism was implicated in Surrealist discourses on identity, gender, sexuality, utopianism and radicalism.


Divine Essence and Divine Energies

Divine Essence and Divine Energies

Author: C Athanasopoulos

Publisher: James Clarke & Company

Published: 2013-04-25

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0227900081

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A composite book of essays from ten scholars, Divine Essence and Divine Energies provides a rich repository of diverse opinion about the essence-energy distinction in Orthodox Christianity - a doctrine which lies at the heart of the often-fraught fault line between East and West, and which, in this book, inspires a lively dialogue between the contributors. The contents of the book revolve around several key questions: In what way were the Aristotelian concepts of ousia and energeia used by the Church Fathers, and to what extent were their meanings modified in the light of the Christological and Trinitarian doctrines? What theological function does the essence-energy distinction fulfil in Eastern Orthodoxy with respect to theology, anthropology, and the doctrine of creation? What are the differences and similarities between the notions of divine presence and participation in seminal Christian writings, and what is the relationship between the essence-energy distinction and Western ideas of divine presence? A valuable addition to the dialogue between Eastern and Western Christianity, this book will be of great interest to any reader seeking a rigorously academic insight into the wealth of scholarly opinion regarding the essence-energy distinction.