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For millennia, messianic visions of redemption have inspired men and women to turn against unjust and oppressive orders. Yet these very same traditions are regularly decried as antecedents to the violent and authoritarian ideologies of modernity. Informed in equal parts by theology and historical theory, this book offers a provocative exploration of this double-edged legacy. Author Jayne Svenungsson rigorously pursues a middle path between utopian arrogance and an enervated postmodernism, assessing the impact of Jewish and Christian theologies of history on subsequent thinkers, and in the process identifying a web of spiritual and intellectual motifs extending from ancient Jewish prophets to contemporary radicals such as Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek.
The Bibles of the Far Right is about a far-right worldview that has taken hold in contemporary Europe. It focuses on the role Bibles have come to play in this worldview. Starting with the case of far-right terrorism in Norway in 2011, the study argues that particular perceptions of "the Bible" and particular uses of biblical texts have been significant in calls to "protect" Europe against Islam. This study proposes new ways to understand political Bible-use today in order to respond to violence inspired by biblical texts.
In this book Rowlands interrogates the theological and philosophical foundations of the 'Quest' for the historical Jesus, from Reimarus to the present day, culminating in a call for greater metaphysical transparency and diversity in the discipline. This multidisciplinary approach to historical Jesus research, drawing on historiography, sociology, philosophy, and theology, makes a significant and original contribution to the field. Part I outlines the implicit role of metaphysical presuppositions in historical methodology by examining the concept of an historiographical worldview. Part II provides an overview of the 'Quest' for the historical Jesus, demonstrating that the disparate historiographical worldviews operative in the 'Quest' evidence a particular shared characteristic, in that they might accurately be described as ‘secular.’ Rowlands’ study concludes with a call for a greater plurality and openness regarding the philosophical and theological presuppositions at work in historical Jesus research. The Metaphysics of Historical Jesus Research is of interest to students and scholars working on New Testament studies and historical Jesus research.
At a time when rapidly evolving technologies, political turmoil, and the tensions inherent in multiculturalism and globalization are reshaping historical consciousness, what is the proper role for historians and their work? By way of an answer, the contributors to this volume offer up an illuminating collective meditation on the idea of ethos and its relevance for historical practice. These intellectually adventurous essays demonstrate how ethos—a term evoking a society’s “fundamental character” as well as an ethical appeal to knowledge and commitment—can serve as a conceptual lodestar for history today, not only as a narrative, but as a form of consciousness and an ethical-political orientation.
Although the origins of Christianity lie in the Near East, Europe and Christianity have an exceptional relationship, since most Europeans perceive Christianity as a Western - more precisely, as a European - religion. The region has seen rapid social change in the 21st century, set off by factors including energy crisis and environmental awareness, poverty and exclusion, falling birthrates and increased migration, changing attitudes to sexuality, gender and family life, and challenges to Europe's idea of itself and place in the global order. Amidst all this flux, this volume focuses on one particular issue: the rapidly changing profile of the Christian faith that has shaped the life of the European continent for a millennium and more.At a time when patterns of Christian life and worship appear to be dying out, yet traces of new life are also appearing, this volume maps out the current reality of Christianity in Western and Northern Europe with all its questions and uncertainties.
History stands not only for a narrative or descriptive relation to the past, but also for an ongoing process in which we are involved on several levels: in ordinary life as well as in our epistemic endeavours, natural science and technology included. Historicity is thus not only an important question for historians, but for everyone interested in understanding what all our civilisation is about. The present volume sheds some light on different aspects of this ontological dependence. The first part deals with the historicity of understanding (Françoise Dastur, Arbogast Schmitt, Samuel Weber), the second with the limits of making (Emil Angehrn, Nicholas Davey, Jan-Ivar Lindén) and the third with the future of memory (Jayne Svenungsson, Christoph Türcke, Bernhard Waldenfels).
In this study, Calvin D. Ullrich argues for the political significance of the philosopher-theologian John D. Caputo's radical theology. Against the backdrop of present debates, the author traces the notions of 'sovereignty and event' by drawing on the political theology of Carl Schmitt and Caputo's evolving engagement with postmodern thought; from its genesis in Martin Heidegger to its deeply involved association with Jacques Derrida. Calvin D. Ullrich shows that contrary to some misleading interpretations of his religious deconstruction, Caputo has always held nascent political concerns which culminate in his radical theology. Writing for scholars working in contemporary philosophy and theology, this book offers one of the first major in-depth analyses covering Caputo's writings of the last four decades, and seeks to defend their relevance for discussions responding to ongoing political-theological challenges.
Since 1994, over 4,000 human remains have been recovered from the Sonoran Desert. Victims of a border enforcement strategy that weaponizes the landscape against migrants, the ever-growing ledger of the dead counts the human cost at which the present political paradigm is secured. Through a series of readings of biblical texts, informed by philosophical, theological, and legal theory, this book facilitates a reckoning between the self-determining polity and the excluded outsider’s ethical demand. Finding in their demand the motivation for novel forms of legal interpretation and political agency, Ellrod sketches a hopeful, life-affirming alternative to Realist Political Theologies of Migration.
The main theme of volume 4 of Eco-ethica is Ethics and Politics. In the first and second part, the authors examine the sometimes conflictual relationship between ethics and politics from an eco-ethical perspective. They investigate how our conceptions of both ethics and politics have been shaped historically as well as by today's technological conjuncture. The third part continues the discussion of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913 - 2005) begun in volume 3. The essays here focus on how his conception of the connections and differences between ethics and politics led him to embrace certain paradoxes in politics and forced him to become suspicious of apolitical thinking.
The success of Western powers in the Modern era has enabled the Western civilizational perspective and its self-understanding to present itself to the rest of the world, not as one perspective among others, but as the universal and definitive human perspective and as the culmination of the world’s intellectual and spiritual development according to principles supposedly objective and self-evident. The hegemony of this civilizational perspective makes it imperative that the basic elements of the Western paradigm of thought referenced by Western geopolitical power as the source of its legitimacy be grasped and critiqued. This book, using as its basis a relatively standard sequence of works seen as comprising the ‘Western Canon’, seeks to provide the foundation for such awareness, both to appreciate the wisdom in this intensely contested tradition as well as recognizing its hazards.