Christianity

The review shows how Guha reinstates the sacred within Eliot studies in India. Through his efforts at reading Eliot; Guha effects a literary turn and rescues Eliot from purely materialist readings which Eliot himself would not have been able to recognise. Let the review speak for itself: -/- "We knew about Baudelaire and his flamboyant short life. But how many of us know of Baudelaire’s spirituality? Guha writes that Baudelaire had a profound understanding “of Original Sin” (92). It is another (...) matter that, as Guha points out, Eliot too shared this Baudelairian sense of Original Sin (92). Before reading this book, the reviewer was aware of Eliot’s self-confessed Christianity, but there exists no work where Baudelaire’s views on spirituality have been connected to Eliot’s poetry and criticism. Guha’s genius unearths for us a new Baudelaire and a new Eliot. Who would have thought before Guha researched Eliot that Baudelaire took a dim view of Victor Hugo being opaque to spirituality? In fact, Guha’s Baudelaire is not a picaresque avant garde, he is a young man searching for the numinous.". (shrink)

Diego de Deza was an important ecclesiastic in early 16th century Spain. Before being ordained bishop, he was the first Dominican to occupy the most important chair of theology in Salamanca, which would later be held by Francisco de Vitoria. As bishop he contributed in different ways to the spread of Thomism, especially with the refoundation of the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid and the Colegio de Santo Tomás in Seville. Especially in his college of Seville he gave indications (...) that indicated to follow Aquinas as a teacher not only for theology, but also for philosophy and the Bible. This article investigates this contribution by contrasting various unpublished manuscripts. (shrink)

This paper gives a first theoretical formulation to a religious phenomenon which has not received much attention in philosophical discourse so far despite appearing in different highly heterogeneous religions. Vicarious religious ordinance refers to cases in which a living or deceased fully mature human being is knowingly or unknowingly assigned a religious affiliation without their consent or the consent of their dependents. I shall first offer three real-world examples of vicarious religious ordinance from Mormonism, Islam, and Shintoism and then raise (...) some normative concerns. I suggest (i) that vicarious religious ordinance does not fit neatly into current debates about religious epistemology, especially the recent debate on religious disagreement. I argue (ii) that normative questions as to why vicarious religious ordinance elicits indignation in its ‘victims’ is not easily explained through adducing similar examples. This paper aims to motivate further coordinated research on this topic. (shrink)

Within a broadly Thomistic frame, this paper shows how simple apophaticism in the theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite is the more fitting mode of knowing the triune God, beyond the use of all divine names. Specifically, we will proceed using the work of Father Bernard Lonergan, SJ on theological fittingness. After setting forth Father Lonergan's understanding of fittingness, the paper will proceed through Dionysius's cataphatic names, apophatic names, and apophatic silence. The cataphatic and apophatic names, while true, useful, and fittingly (...) said of God, will be shown to be imperfectly applied to God. As such, their fittingness pales in comparison to the simple silence of the intellect orientated towards God, despite such pure apophaticism's dissimilarity to normal human intellectual operations. (shrink)

Recently the General Synod of the Church of England agreed to approve liturgical resources— Prayers of Love and Faith—for blessing same-sex couples. This decision was the result of a long process of discernment concerning matters of sexuality and identity called Living in Love and Faith. This article aims to critique some of the background ethical and theological assumptions at work in the Living in Love and Faith resources, specifically the way the role of asceticism is conceived in them. I argue (...) that while there are promising references to formation of desire through discipline and restraint in the LLF resources, their ascetic intuitions remain limited to world-related goods, neglecting the significance of bodily practices for God-related goods and for our final flourishing. Paying attention to the theological dimensions of Christian ascetic practice will also reveal the importance of concrete limitations for ascetic formation of desire. I argue that such limits are required for unravelling the transcendent capacities of human desire. At the end of the article, I make some suggestions as to how the revitalisation of not just ethical but theological ascetic praxis can be helpful in navigating the Church of England's current disagreement with respect to same-sex unions. (shrink)

This article offers a theological description of one practice necessary for good local belonging: the creative practice of naming local creatures, both human and non-human. I explore the practice of naming as forming local belonging in dialogue with new nature writers in the British Isles and Jean-Louis Chrétien. I offer a brief review of the scope of theologies of place in the United Kingdom before turning to the themes of displacement and naming in new British nature writing. Finally, I use (...) Jean-Louis Chrétien's theological accounts of naming and corporate prayer, to examine the effect of naming in transforming one's relation to one's locality, and propose that the Church's creative participation in local naming—especially in prayer—offers a transforming narrative as to the kinds of local belonging which ought to be pursued. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the moral significance of human interiority, examining how one's inner life has moral import vis-à-vis external, observable, or public behaviour. Contrary to views that problematize interiority or introspection, pitting them against truthful self-understanding, sociality, or public moral behaviour, I will draw on Augustine and Iris Murdoch as resources for reconsidering interiority's role in moral growth. First, I will show how both depict objective, ‘public’ moral behaviour as being fundamentally contingent upon subjective, ‘personal’ judgement, deliberation, and (...) reflection. Then, I will consider three overlapping areas of interest regarding subjectivity in Augustine and Murdoch: self-examination, humility, and love. In drawing on Augustine and Murdoch as resources for an enriched account of interiority vis-à-vis moral growth, I hope to reaffirm the significance of subjectivity for ‘public’, objective moral behaviour while re-examining settled, conventional characterisations of subjectivity and objectivity by suggesting that our perspectives and responses to questions concerning the good are irreducibly and inextricably personal. (shrink)

In recent years, third-party forgiveness has received renewed attention, much of it negative. While a few have undertaken important attempts to defend or expound accounts of third-party forgiveness, many suspect that it is incoherent, vicious, or both. If true, this would be bad news for Christians, for Christians rely on notions of third-party forgiveness for their accounts of salvation and pastoral authority. I think there is reason to think that some notions of third-party forgiveness can overcome the critics’ worries. In (...) what follows, I argue that third-party forgiveness is more common, coherent, salutary, and diverse in species than many critics suppose. After considering key objections to third-party forgiveness, I offer a constructive account of it that makes sense of these objections while also defending the underlying concept and act. What emerges from this defense is a newfound appreciation for the diverse species of third-party forgiveness. Still, some of these species are more intelligible and safeguarded from declension than others, and I conclude by examining the limits of third-party forgiveness by considering its most contentious species. (shrink)

Doughnut Economics is an economic model designed to overcome the negative impact that the crude use of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) can have on both society and the environment. As the model becomes more widely adopted it is important to explore the model from a theological perspective. Early Christian economic thought provides a way of exploring and challenging many of the fundamental ideas and conceptualisations of the DE model. DE has much to learn from early Christian thinkers. Firstly, a non-absolutist (...) understanding of property can fuel calls for a more radical distribution of wealth than called for in DE, with an even greater emphasis on the process and benefits of individual almsgiving. Secondly, it shows how the limitations of the social foundation of DE has much to learn from the positive value of the ascetic lifestyle promoted by some early Christian thinkers. Finally, at a time when there are understandable concerns about the limits of the ecological ceiling, early Christian thought offers both hope and a call to action. (shrink)

This article elucidates the significance of eschatology—particularly what may be called negative eschatology—for the task of political life. Through tracing some of the appeals to eschatological notions in recent political thinking and movements, we demonstrate some of the dangers of eschatology as a resource for political theology. The article then engages with the version of negative eschatology rendered by Vincent Lloyd, which holds out the possibility of experiencing a foretaste of the eschaton in moments of struggle against domination. The form (...) of political activity in focus here is a struggle to dismantle that which does not belong to the eschatological order of justice—that is, struggling against what the eschaton is not. We bring this account of the relationship between the eschaton and the political into conversation with Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of infinity, and offer an account of negative eschatology as an invitation into living in relation to a fullness that is ever unfolding. Political activity undertaken in this light is oriented towards opening the conditions of possibility for the contingent transformation of injustice and led by those at the margins. We suggest, therefore, that in the dismantling of what eschatology is not, it is possible to glimpse what the eschaton might be. (shrink)

In this article I aim to highlight one aspect of what it is like to address the problem of evil. The discussion aims to show that the suffering of others comes to matter, in part, because of the way in which we are with others, and they with us. Through a sustained discussion of the film 12 Years a Slave, and drawing on the idea of joint attention, I suggest that the possibility of sharing attitudes with others is central to (...) our experience of the meaning of suffering. In dialogue with the moral philosophy of Stephen Darwall, I highlight the way in which—at least in some significant cases—being with others depends on mutual answerability. These points suggest that whilst moral critics of theodicy are right to emphasise the way that the practice of theodicy can involve a failure to recognise the seriousness of suffering, it is a mistake to think that the suffering of others is ‘hermeneutically off-limits’ to me: whilst we may often be concerned for others, we can also be concerned with them. This, it is claimed, is an intrinsic part of the difficulty of the problem of evil, as well as one reason for its moral significance. (shrink)

Amid the many figures who number among the Thomists writing during the early 20th century period of revival in scholastic thought in the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of the encyclical letter Aeterni Patris (1879) of Leo XIII, there is numbered the French convert, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973). Over the course of his long lifetime, Maritain authored works covering a host of philosophical and theological topics: epistemology, the philosophy of the sciences and natural philosophy, aesthetics, moral philosophy, political philosophy, metaphysics, (...) the philosophy of history, etc. The details concerning Maritain’s youth and conversion have been ably told by others and can be consulted by the interested reader. Detailed bibliographies of his works are available for those interested in engaging the full breadth of his writing. In this article, I will focus on the particular shape of Maritain’s Thomism and his place in the overall hermeneutics of the Thomistic tradition, in particular the debt that he owes to John Poinsot (1589–1644), to whom he refers as “John of St. Thomas,” in accord with the standard appellations within the Thomistic tradition in which he wrote. Following a general account of Maritain’s “style” of Thomism, I will provide a specific catalogue of some central themes in his thought that bear the clear impress of his engagement with the thought of John of St. Thomas. Without claiming to be exhaustive, this article intends to provide the reader with a sufficient appraisal of the main lines of influence exercised upon Maritain’s thought by the Baroque Commentator, without whose philosophical and theological works Maritain’s own labors would be unthinkable. (shrink)

This article studies the notion of providence as exposed by John Philoponus in two theological works, 'De aeternitate mundi contra Proclum', where he studies providence in contrast with Neoplatonism, and 'De opificio mundi', in which he returns to the same topic in polemic with astral determinism. Drawing on elements of Neoplatonic philosophy, he argues against the thesis of the eternity of the world and harshly criticizes astral determinism in accordance with the antideterminist line previously defended by other Christian authors such (...) as Origen. (shrink)

This article shows why it is important to not "hastily condemn the condemnation of Gutiérrez by ecclesiastical authorities, [instead] we should learn from those censures". Then the essay shows why the last two Popes, John Paul the Great and Pope Bendict were sceptical of liberation theology. Nonetheless, this mode of theological praxis is now pervasive throughout global and Indian academia. The last part of this long essay contextualises how liberation theology has concetreley shaped the Indian Church and also, to an (...) extent, Hinduism. -/- . (shrink)

This comprehensive and award-winning orientation to Christian philosophical foundations is now updated and expanded in a second edition, including enhanced arguments, updated bibliographies, and new chapters on atonement and the mind-body problem. This textbook from Moreland and Craig, two leaders in the field, is the keystone in any library of Christian philosophy.

Four Views on Christian Metaphysics presents four prominent views held among Christians today on the major questions in philosophical metaphysics. What is the nature of existence itself? What is it for something to exist? What are universals? What is the soul? How do these things relate to God, in light of special and general revelation? The four Christian perspectives presented in this book are: Platonism, Aristotelianism, idealism, and postmodernism. The purpose of this book is to help Christians think deeply and (...) carefully about a Christian view of the ultimate nature of reality and our place in it. (shrink)

Accessible and wide-ranging essays on the philosophy of religion.

The concept of bliss, in its connotations of beatitude and salvation, may seem of little relevance to so-called secular modernity. Bliss Against the World argues otherwise by advancing a novel framework of the entanglement between modernity, Christianity, and bliss through the thought of German Idealist and Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854). In Schelling's concept of bliss (Seligkeit), the idea of salvation from the world mutates into a burning concern with the negativity of the modern world, and with the way modernity (...) inherits the Christian promise of a non-alienated future that never arrives. Throughout his thinking, Schelling grapples with the question of theodicy: Can this negative world be justified? And what would it mean to be free of the world—to enact bliss right now—when the idea of otherworldly salvation increasingly loses its conceptual relevance? This leads Schelling to conceptualize bliss as what refuses or apocalyptically annihilates this world and its divisions and burdens. Bliss Against the World reinterprets Schelling's philosophical trajectory from the 1790s to the 1840s, showing his metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and natural philosophy to be underwritten by the apocalyptic tension between bliss and theodicy. It argues that this tension is located likewise at the heart of modernity and reconstructs the Schellingian genealogy of the modern age as intensifying what may be termed the general Christian contradiction. It also focuses on Schelling's anxiety about the possibility of universal history in the dark and de-centered universe and critiques his Romantic construction of humanity and his geo-racial theodicy of history—a theodicy that refracts and legitimates the violent logics of post-1492 modernity, including European colonialism, racialization, and transatlantic slavery. Bliss Against the World thus theorizes bliss not only with, but also against Schelling, who emerges from this book as a key thinker of modernity, and of the Christian-modern trajectory as a path to salvation in the shadow of whose failure we continue to live. (shrink)

Avant Newman: Le christianisme bourgeois.--Sydney Smith.--Aubes conversion: I. L'inquiétude de Newman et la sérénité de Pusey. II. La logique du coeur.--M. Brunetière et "l'irrationnel" de la foi. III. Wiseman et les catholiques anglais pendant la crise d'Oxford.--Lendemains de conversion: I. La logique de l'esprit. W. G. Ward. II. Manning et Newman. III. L'ideal et la réalité dans la vie catholique.--Épilogue:Christus vivit.

This is the second part of my theological dialogue with ChatGPT on the meaning of God. We explore the nature of God's agency, will, goodness, the problem of evil and suffering, the meaning of sin, and the meaning and nature of the redemptive act of Christ.