Kierkegaard argued that Christianity is a lived religion, not a set of doctrines to be cognitively affirmed. This means theology's proper focus is reflection on revelation within the God-human relationship, and human existence-always in process and shaped by different communities, relationships, and contexts-is significant to theological construction. As Christian knowledge is a relationship that cannot be communicated directly, theology is never concluded and cannot adequately function within totalizing systems. The writings of seventeenth-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz provide an exemplary direction for contemporary theologies mindful of this need for indirect communication. Her writings show a respect of others' cognitive freedom and their, differing contexts and perspectives. Utilizing the religious work of this woman from Mexico's colonial past, Powell builds a theological case for the inclusion of literary genres in the theological discipline, a move that resists Western philosophy's dominance of form and opens the theological canon. The field of theology has witnessed a significant shift toward the perspectives of those outside dominant Western culture; in addition to featuring such a perspective through highlighting the work of this subaltern woman, this work provides additional methodological groundwork for this continued pursuit. Powell maintains that the genres Sor Juana employs-poetry, drama, and epistle-are especially appropriate for the communication of Christian knowledge. This book serves as a proposal for open forms of theological discourse marked by the limits of religious understanding emerging from human difference. Theology's reflection, then, can be understood anew as a "theology within the limits of the inconclusive." Book jacket.

This book is the second of two volumes collecting together Michael C. Rea's most substantial work in analytic theology. The first volume contains essays focused on the nature of God; this second volume contains essays focused more on doctrines about humanity, the human condition, and how human beings relate to God.

An up-to-date, accessible, and comprehensive study of every major position taken by Christian churches and theologians on world religions and religious pluralism.This volume shares insights into the positions of writers concerned with understanding Christianity among the worlds great religious traditions. Avoiding tired labels of past debates (Exclusivism, Pluralism, and Inclusivism), Knitter suggest four different models (Replacement, Fulfillment, Mutuality, and Acceptance) that more adequately link together thirteen ways of approaching and understanding the variety of the worlds religious expressions.

A Critical Realist's Theological Method explores a systematic theology method grounded in critical realism in the wake of Alister McGrath, Imre Lakatos, Nancey Murphy, N. T. Wright, and Dale Allison. Kennard surveys philosophical and traditional theological approaches for contributions and limitations in order to set out a method for theology and science. Kennard extends this method to a Thiselton-Ricoeur hermeneutic that can fund insightful exegesis and Biblical theology in the wake of Ladd, Dunn, Vos, and Goldingay. This Biblical theology method is illustrated by wisdom literature, the traditional reef of the discipline and then developed for the contributions toward systematic theology as Gabler had originally envisioned. With contextualized Scripture sourcing most of the content for systematic theology the trajectory is shown in the subtitle Returning the Bible and Biblical Theology to be the Framer for Theology and Science. The method is exampled in exegesis of creation texts which frame possibilities for science. Likewise, Biblical theology frames a bio-ethics integration of psychology and theology setting out a transactional model for psychological recovery with University of Chicago professor Paul Holmes. A theology for peer review and work is also framed.

Now in its third edition, Grounding Religion explores relationships between the environment and religious beliefs and practices. Established scholars introduce students to the ways religion shapes and is shaped by human–earth relations, surveying a series of key issues and questions, with particular attention to issues of environmental degradation, social justice, ritual practices, and religious worldviews. Case studies, discussion questions, and further readings enrich students’ experience. This third edition features updated content, including revisions of every chapter and new material on religion and the environmental humanities, sexuality and queer studies, class, ability, privilege and power, environmental justice, extinction, biodiversity, and politics. An excellent text for undergraduates and graduates alike, it offers an expansive overview of the academic field of religion and ecology as it has emerged in the past fifty years and continues to develop today.

In retrospect, Karl Barth conceded that "everything which needs to be said, considered, and believed about God the Father and God the Son . . . might be shown and illuminated in its foundation through God the Holy Spirit." Nevertheless, he refrained from doing so because it was "still too difficult to distinguish between God's Spirit and man's spirit," and so it was--then. However, the late twentieth-century explosion in various disciplines of thought now provides greater discernment between human and divine spirit, a better understanding of the logic of spirit, and the concept and role of spirit in distinction to mind and body. Gorsuch's theological interdisciplinary investigation into the analogia spiritus and a Christian perichoretic relational ontology brings new meaning and coherence to previously difficult scriptures. Moreover, it provides the fundamental landscape for addressing issues of profound theological consequence: (1) redressing the death of transcendence with a new understanding of relational dynamics through which free, temporal, and self-determining human beings might mutually relate with an Eternal God of providence; (2) laying the framework for a viable Christian pluralistic hypothesis in an increasingly pluralistic world; and (3) providing an enriched theological anthropology for addressing human spirit, origins, and theodicy.

Vols. 2-6 include "Theological and Semitic literature for 1898- 1901, a bibliographical supplement to the American journal of theology and the American journal of Semitic languages and literatures. By W. Muss-Arnolt." (Separately paged)

Originally published in in 2004. What, at this historical moment "after Auschwitz," still remains of the questions traditionally asked by theology? What now is theology's minimal degree? This magisterial study, the first extended comparison of the writings of Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, explores remnants and echoes of religious forms in these thinkers' critiques of secular reason, finding in the work of both a "theology in pianissimo" constituted by the trace of a transcendent other. The author analyzes, systematizes, and formalizes this idea of an other of reason. In addition, he frames these thinkers' innovative projects within the arguments of such intellectual heirs as Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, defending their work against later accusations of "performative contradiction" (by Habermas) or "empiricism" (by Derrida) and in the process casting important new light on those later writers as well. Attentive to rhetorical and rational features of Adorno's and Levinas's texts, his investigations of the concepts of history, subjectivity, and language in their writings provide a radical interpretation of their paradoxical modes of thought and reveal remarkable and hitherto unsuspected parallels between their philosophical methods, parallels that amount to a plausible way of overcoming certain impasses in contemporary philosophical thinking. In Adorno, this takes the form of a dialectical critique of dialectics; in Levinas, that of a phenomenological critique of phenomenology, each of which sheds new light on ancient and modern questions of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. For the English-language publication, the author has extensively revised and updated the prize-winning German version.

In theological discourse, argues Hugh Nicholson, the political goes "all the way down." One never reaches a bedrock level of politically neutral religious facts, because all theological discourse - even the most sublime, edifying, and "spiritual"--is shot through with polemical elements. Liberal theologies, from the Christian fulfillment theology of the nineteenth century to the pluralist theology of the twentieth, have assumed that religious writings attain spiritual truth and sublimity despite any polemical elements they might contain. Through his analysis and comparison of the Christian mystical theologian Meister Eckhart and his Hindu counterpart ÍaSkara, Nicholson arrives at a very different conclusion. Polemical elements may in fact constitute the creative source of the expressive power of religious discourses. Wayne Proudfoot has argued that mystical discourses embody a set of rules that repel any determinate understanding of the ineffable object or experience they purport to describe. In Comparative Theology and the Problem of Religious Rivalry, Nicholson suggests that this principle of negation is connected, perhaps through a process of abstraction and sublimation, with the need to distinguish oneself from one's intra- and/or inter-religious adversaries. Nicholson proposes a new model of comparative theology that recognizes and confronts one of the most urgent cultural and political issues of our time: namely, the "return of the political" in the form of anti-secular and fundamentalist movements around the world. This model acknowledges the ineradicable nature of an oppositional dimension of religious discourse, while honoring and even advancing the liberal project of curtailing intolerance and prejudice in the sphere of religion.