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What do the occult sciences, séances with the souls of the dead, and appeals to saintly powers have to do with rationality? Since the late nineteenth century, modernizing intellectuals, religious leaders, and statesmen in Iran have attempted to curtail many such practices as "superstitious," instead encouraging the development of rational religious sensibilities and dispositions. However, far from diminishing the diverse methods through which Iranians engage with the immaterial realm, these rationalizing processes have multiplied the possibilities for metaphysical experimentation. The Iranian Metaphysicals examines these experiments and their transformations over the past century. Drawing o...
Modernism's theological project was an attempt to explain two things: firstly, how faith might enable persons to experience their lives as hanging together, even in the face of disintegrating forces like injustice, tragedy, and luck; and secondly, how one could see such faith, and so a life held together by it, as self-expressive. Modern theologians such as Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Ritschl, and Tillich thus offer accounts of how one's life would have to hang together such that one could identify with it; of the oppositions which stand in the way of such hanging-together; of God as the one by whom oppositions are overcome, such that one can have faith that one's life ultimately hangs together; and of what such faith would have to be like in order for one to identify with it, too. So understood, modern theology not only sheds light on faith's potential role in enabling persons to identify with their lives, but stands in unexpected continuity with contemporary "contextual" theologies. This book offers clear, careful readings of modernism's key figures in order to explain their relevance to practical concerns and to contemporary understandings of faith.
In this volume, Karin Krause examines conceptions of divine inspiration and authenticity in the religious literature and visual arts of Byzantium. During antiquity and the medieval era, “inspiration” encompassed a range of ideas regarding the divine contribution to the creation of holy texts, icons, and other material objects by human beings. Krause traces the origins of the notion of divine inspiration in the Jewish and polytheistic cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and their reception in Byzantine religious culture. Exploring how conceptions of authenticity are employed in Eastern Orthodox Christianity to claim religious authority, she analyzes texts in a range of genres, as well as images in different media, including manuscript illumination, icons, and mosaics. Her interdisciplinary study demonstrates the pivotal role that claims to the divine inspiration of religious literature and art played in the construction of Byzantine cultural identity.
This volume examines divine anthropomorphism in the Hebrew Bible, a study characterized by disagreement and contradiction. Discussions of anthropomorphism in the Hebrew Bible are typically found in three areas of inquiry: ancient Israelite religion, as reflected by the compositions of the Pentateuch; comparisons with ancient Near Eastern religions; and comparison with ancient translation and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. Contradictory arguments exist, both within each area of study and between them, about the intent of biblical writers, with respect to a theology of anthropomorphism. In this work, Knafl asserts that biblical studies has reached this impasse, largely due to its approach...
Heidegger's Paul -- The cogito out-of-reach -- The remains of Christian theology -- Testimony and the irretrievable in being and time -- Temporality and transformation, or Augustine through the turn -- On retraction -- Conclusion : difference and de-theologization.
This volume collects all of Kant's writings on religion and rational theology.
One of the central arguments of post-metaphysical theology is that language is inherently 'metaphysical' and consequently that it shoehorns objects into predetermined categories. Because God is beyond such categories, it follows that language cannot apply to God. Drawing on recent work in theology and philosophy of language, Kevin Hector develops an alternative account of language and its relation to God, demonstrating that one need not choose between fitting God into a metaphysical framework, on the one hand, and keeping God at a distance from language, on the other. Hector thus elaborates a 'therapeutic' response to metaphysics: given the extent to which metaphysical presuppositions about language have become embedded in common sense, he argues that metaphysics can be fully overcome only by defending an alternative account of language and its application to God, so as to strip such presuppositions of their apparent self-evidence and release us from their grip.
Since the Arab Spring in 2011 and ISIS’s rise in 2014, Egypt’s Copts have attracted attention worldwide as the collateral damage of revolution and as victims of sectarian strife. Countering the din of persecution rhetoric and Islamophobia, The Political Lives of Saints journeys into the quieter corners of divine intercession to consider what martyrs, miracles, and mysteries have to do with the routine challenges faced by Christians and Muslims living together under the modern nation-state. Drawing on years of extensive fieldwork, Angie Heo argues for understanding popular saints as material media that organize social relations between Christians and Muslims in Egypt toward varying politi...
From the founding of the first colonies until the present, the influence of Christianity, as the dominant faith in American society, has extended far beyond church pews into the wider culture. Yet, at the same time, Christians in the United States have disagreed sharply about the meaning of their shared tradition, and, divided by denominational affiliation, race, and ethnicity, they have taken stances on every side of contested public issues from slavery to women's rights. This volume of twenty-two original essays, contributed by a group of prominent thinkers in American religious studies, provides a sophisticated understanding of both the diversity and the alliances among Christianities in ...
Religion has always been a focal element in the long and tortured history of American ideas about race. In The Burden of Black Religion, Curtis Evans traces ideas about African American religion from the antebellum period to the middle of the twentieth century. Central to the story, he argues, was the deep-rooted notion that blacks were somehow "naturally" religious. At first, this assumed natural impulse toward religion served as a signal trait of black people's humanity -- potentially their unique contribution to American culture. Abolitionists seized on this point, linking black religion to the black capacity for freedom. Soon, however, these first halting steps toward a multiracial democ...