Embark on a transformative journey this Advent with Heather Khym, cohost of the Abiding Together podcast, as she extends a heartfelt invitation to embrace stillness and silence amid life’s chaos, allowing God to dwell in the depths of your being. While the world moves at an ever-faster pace, Heather encourages you to pull back from the hustle and create space for our Savior to come into every area of your life—to transform and heal it through his love. In Encountering Emmanuel, using poignant reflections and accompanying videos, Heather will gently guide you into the areas of your heart where Christ has not yet come—the areas where you’ve shut him out, the places you’ve long forgotten and ignored, or the spaces you’re ashamed to acknowledge. You’ll learn how to invite him in so that he can bring his light, love, peace, hope, and healing into your heart. From the forgotten corners to the shadowed recesses, Heather encourages you to open these spaces to the transformative power of Christ’s love. Each day will show you a unique way God can come into your life, including the following: he comes in the darkness he comes to set us free he comes to awaken us from slumber he comes as a helpless child he comes as a gift to the world he comes as a person with a face he comes to be our food God will not force—love never does—but he asks, and we have a choice. Will you open wide your heart to the Savior and give your fiat as Mary did? Each day you’ll journey deeper into the meaning of Advent with a meditation, stunning art specially created for this book by Josiah Henley of Heart of IESVS, reflection questions, a prayer, and journaling space. Encountering Emmanuel is perfect for both individual and group use. Free companion videos and a downloadable leader’s guide are available at avemariapress.com.

What does it mean to consider the world of AI through a Christian lens? Rapid developments in AI continue to reshape society, raising new ethical questions and challenging our understanding of the human person. Encountering Artificial Intelligence draws on Pope Francis’s discussion of a culture of encounter and broader themes in Catholic social thought in order to examine how current AI applications affect human relationships in various social spheres and offers concrete recommendations for better implementation. The document also explores questions regarding personhood, consciousness, and the kinds of relationships humans might have with even the most advanced AI. Through these discussions, the document investigates the theoretical and practical challenges to interpersonal encounter raised by the age of AI.

This volume consists of several contributions to a refined understanding of religious experience in view of contemporary theological epistemology. Diverse sample studies taken from the extensive field of religion, theology and religious studies reveal that 'religious experience' is today clearly a pivotal issue. More specifically, this is made evident in modern theological hermeneutics and in the anti-modern and/or post-modern reactions thereto, the theology of world religions and inter-religious dialogue, the contemporary resurgence of religiosity in Western society and culture, and the so-called turn to religion in contemporary continental philosophy. It would appear from such studies that the category of 'religious experience' is frequently called upon to clarify or explain the phenomenon of religion and religiosity on the one hand and to support and legitimise religious positions or the critique thereof on the other. Because of the loss of plausibility of tradition-bound religiosity and of foundational, so-called onto-theological schemes, 'religious experience' has come to constitute, for many, the last (or latest) point of departure and anchor for religion and religious thinking. This is certainly the case with respect to tendencies within contemporary Christian traditions and theological reflection. In a multitude of ways and from a variety of different perspectives, 'religious experience' and 'experience of transcendence' or 'of the divine' have gained a prominent place in philosophical and fundamental-theological conceptual schemes. In reaction to this, other authors have denied the very primacy given to religious experience in reflecting upon faith, pointing to the constitutive role of tradition and narrative without which there is no religious experience. From all this follows that the category of religious experience is in great need of reconceptualisation, not least from a theological point of view. On the one hand, religious experience is all too easily called upon to legitimise religious claims (often against 'tradition') and on the other hand, the category has become misleading in so far as it is tainted by the modern scientific understanding of experience - in reaction to which 'tradition' is then easily invoked to protect the core of religion. Both young scholars at the preceding junior conference and senior scholars during the conference's paper sessions presented from diverse perspectives new ways to conceive of religious experience in view of today's challenges of secularisation, religious plurality, the aestheticisation of religion, etc. The selected contributions have been arranged in four thematically oriented parts: 'Approaching Religious Experience in a Postmodern Age', 'Modern (re)Thinking of Religious Experience', 'Liberating Religious Experience', and 'Challenges for Spirituality'.

This choreographed book is dedicated to the phenomenon of the bare body in contemporary performance. This work of artistic research draws on philosophical, biopolitical, and ethical discourses relevant to the appearance of bare bodies in choreography, setting a framework for a reflexive movement between affect and ethics, sensuous address and response. Acts of exposure and concealment are culturally situated and anchored, and are examined for their methodological and nanopolitical significance. The concepts of anarchic responsibility and choreo-ethics lead to a reevaluation of contact, relationship, and solidarity. Choreography is thus understood as a complex field of revelatory experiences based on ecologies of aesthetic perception and ethico-political agency.

Two of the most creative and compelling thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century, Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas, first encountered each other in the 1920s and began a friendship that was to span over seven decades. Their subsequent exchanges of ideas and shared concerns, as well as their significant differences and influence on one another, have profound implications for the work of each. Encountering the Other represents the most sustained analysis to date of the intersections of structure and content in Blanchot and Levinas's most representative and complex works.

In Encountering God, Kelly Minter explores how essential spiritual disciplines are to our faith experience and everyday lives. She'll unpack the biblical foundation for these sacred habits along with approachable ways to practice disciplines like prayer, study, worship, rest, simplicity, hospitality, and celebration. Over 8 sessions, you'll discover that spiritual disciplines aren't just one more thing to add to your to-do list, but they can actually create more margin in your life, resulting in deeper peace, communion, and rest. And perhaps most importantly, cultivating habits of faith help you know God more, as you release control to Him, express your need for Him, and walk in glad submission and worship of Him. Features: Personal study segments with homework to complete between 8 weeks of group sessions Leader helps to guide questions and discussions within small groups Teaching videos, approximately 30 minutes per session, available for purchase or rent Explanations of the history and progression of spiritual disciplines from origins to present day along with their biblical roots Practical guidance and activities to live out the various spiritual disciplines at home Benefits: Demystify spiritual disciplines and be empowered to practice them as you draw closer to God. Understand how spiritual disciplines strengthen the Body of Christ, both in communities and individual lives. Reframe your perspective on rest and renewal.

One day, Matthew Eaton was walking through an impromptu animal shelter display at his local pet store when suddenly an eight-month-old kitten dug his claws into Eaton's flesh. Eaton recognized that the "eyes of this cat and the curve of his claw" compelled a response analogous to those found in the writings of Buber, Levinas, and Derrida. And not just Eaton but a whole community of theologians have found themselves in an encounter with particular places and animals that demands rich theological reflection. Eaton enlisted fellow editors Harvie and Bechtel to collect the essays in this volume, in which theologians listen to horses, rats, snakes, cats, dogs, and the earth itself, who become new theological voices demanding a response. In this volume, the voice of the more-than-human world is heard as making theology possible. These essays suggest that what we say theologically represents not simply ideas of our own making subsequently superimposed onto the natural world through our own discovery, but rather flow from an expressive Earth.

Science fiction often operates as either an extended metaphor for human relationships or as a genuine attempt to encounter the alien Other. Both types of stories tend to rehearse the processes of colonialism, in which a sympathetic protagonist encounters and tames the unknown. Despite this logic, Native American writers have claimed the genre as a productive space in which they can critique historical colonialism and reassert the value of Indigenous worldviews. Encountering the Sovereign Other proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding Indigenous science fiction, placing Native theorists like Vine Deloria Jr. and Gregory Cajete in conversation with science fiction theorists like Darko Suvin, David Higgins, and Michael Pinsky. In response to older colonial discourses, many contemporary Indigenous authors insist that readers acknowledge their humanity while recognizing them as distinct peoples who maintain their own cultures, beliefs, and nationhood. Here author Miriam C. Brown Spiers analyzes four novels: William Sanders’s The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan, Stephen Graham Jones’s It Came from Del Rio, D. L. Birchfield’s Field of Honor, and Blake M. Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears. Demonstrating how Indigenous science fiction expands the boundaries of the genre while reinforcing the relevance of Indigenous knowledge, Brown Spiers illustrates the use of science fiction as a critical compass for navigating and surviving the distinct challenges of the twenty-first century.

"The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas produced a considerable body of work, most notably Totality and infinity and Otherwise than Being, as well as a series of texts devoted specifically to Judaism. Yet Levinas would not have achieved his current status and influence were it not that his probing of the ethical relation to the other continues to raise more questions than it answers, and this within quite different orders of intellectual inquiry. Thus it is this Levinasian motif of the encounter with the other that was chosen to serve as a principle both of unity and diversity for the present volume" -- from book cover.