In Blessed Rage for Order, David Tracy examines the cultural context in which theological pluralism emerged. Analyzing orthodox, liberal, neo-orthodox, and radical models of theology, Tracy formulates a new 'revisionist' model. He considers which methods promise the most certain results for a revisionist theology and applies his model to the principal questions in contemporary theology, including the meanings of religion, theism, and of christology.

Discusses the ethical aspects of literature.

Wallace Stevens is often characterized as an aesthete, as one withdrawn from the major artistic and social movements of the first half of the 20th century. This edition examines his major works of poetry.

Preaching the Manifold Grace of God is a two-volume work describing theologies of preaching from the historical and contemporary periods. Volume 1 focuses on historical theological families: Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, Anglican/Episcopal, Wesleyan, Baptist, African American, Stone-Campbell, Friends, and Pentecostal. Volume 2 focuses on families that are evangelical, liberal, neo-orthodox, postliberal, existential, radical orthodox, deconstructionist, Black liberation, womanist, Latinx liberation, Mujerista, Asian American, Asian American feminist, LGBTQAI, Indigenous, postcolonial, and process. In each case, the author describes the circumstances in which the theological family emerged, describes the purposes and characteristics of preaching from that perspective, and assesses the strengths and limitations of the approach.

Tracing out the origins of the Trinitarian “revival” in the modern era, particularly on account of the influence of Schleiermacher, Tillich, Barth, Rahner, and Pannenberg, through to the destabilizing effects of postmodernity on Trinitarian discourse, the author provides a critical hermeneutic for the evaluation and implementation of thoughtful Trinitarian theology in the contemporary world. Within this frame, the author argues for viewing the Trinity as the intellectual and conceptual context and interdisciplinary arena of interaction between theology and other forms of intellectual inquiries to generate a robust, multifaceted, and historically fluent doctrine of the Trinity.

One of the most significant trends in academic theology today, which emerges within Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox points of view, is the growing interest in theologies of retrieval. This mode of thinking puts a special stress upon subjecting classic theological texts to a close reading, with a view toward using the resources that they provide to understand and address contemporary theological issues. This volume offers an understanding of what theologies of retrieval are, what their rationale is, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. The contributions provided by a distinguished team of theologians answer the important questions that existing work has raised, expand on suggestions that have not yet been fully developed, summarize ideas to highlight themes that are relevant to the topics of this volume, and air new critiques that will spur further debate.

The author, a practicing Roman Catholic, was confronted in 2002 with a leadership crisis in the church. Decades of horrendous clergy sexual abuse of children was accompanied by an even more momentous hierarchical betrayal in the cover-up of the crimes. The explosion in 2002 ended his naïveté and caused him to rework his understanding of the history and methods of hierarchy, and to think about the evils of clerical monarchy. The basic determinants of the current church crisis are, first, the sacred hierarchism of church structure and, second, the culture of clericalism that flows from it. The author argues that the church needs a thoroughly desacralized and demythologized leadership if Catholic clericalism is to be eliminated. The book also reflects on the lived Catholic life, contrasting the life of the priesthood and the life of marriage and family. The approach is at once narrative, historical-critical, and ecclesiological. It also offers a personal look at the author’s life as a Catholic for the past seventy years. The basic existential issue is “Why am I still a Catholic, and, indeed, why is anyone?” “…Powerful, absorbing memoir, by turns angry, funny, engaging and painfully candid… [Shea] offers radical proposals for reform, all turning on the notion that the core problem to be confronted is the gulf that separates clergy and laity, the long term result of a flimsy theological rationale which insists that the act of ordination itself marks an ‘ontological’ change in its recipients, making them company men of a special sort, fundamentally different from those they would help and teach, loyal mainly to guidance from above.” —Michael J. Lacey is coeditor, with Francis Oakley, and contributor to The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity, (Oxford University Press, New York, 2011) “Bill Shea has written a powerful and complex book about what Catholics so often write about: God, sex, authority and the Church. He writes autobiographically in the tradition of St. Augustine’s Confessions and Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain as well as his The Sign of Jonas. He writes about the traumatic spiritual struggle with celibacy with which both Augustine and Merton were familiar. They chose to stay the course; Shea chose, after some twenty years, to find another spiritual path. That path was one opened up by marriage—a wife and two children—which finally gave him the spiritual peace he had been seeking. He writes of coming to the priesthood and leaving the priesthood for the lay Catholic life at a time of momentous historical transformation from the pre-Vatican II Church to the post-Vatican II Church. Even now we live with the struggle that exists between these two visions of the Church… So it is no accident that, like Augustine and Merton, Bill Shea finds God as a continuing presence, not at the end of his tale but in the twists and turns, the agonies and ecstasies, of his life journey.” —Darrell Fasching, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, University of South Florida, Tampa

As he examines the changing views of Leonardo since the sixteenth century, A. Richard Turner both gives the reader a cultural history in brief of western Europe during this period and provides a context for examining Leonardo's relevance to our own ways of perceiving and interpreting the world.

Contains a general introduction to the discipline, featuring classic and pioneering essays that address the history, methods, issues, and exemplary illustrations of research, teaching, and practice Presenting a diverse collection of landmark essays, The Wiley-Blackwell Reader in Practical Theology explores the turn-of-the-century renaissance of practical theology as an academic discipline and shows how the discipline has advanced a steady epistemological insurgency in theology throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first century. The text provides scholars, students, and ministerial professionals with easy access to original seminal sources that represent major milestones, growing edges, and useful classificatory rubrics. A handy, one-volume primer to practical theology, the book: Offers an excellent bird’s-eye-view of the discipline’s essential foundational contributions Provides significant introductory overview material helpful in guiding both new and experienced readers to practical theology Includes brief overview introductions before each essay to situate the reading and highlight key contributions and occasional limitations Features essay selections that consider race, gender, sexuality, age, and other differences as a critical subtheme The Wiley-Blackwell Reader in Practical Theology is an indispensable resource for students, faculty, and professionals in practical theology and colleagues in related cognate disciplines in theological education and religious studies.