This collection of essays stages a dialogue between Friedrich Schleiermacher and Alfred North Whitehead on significant features of 'open' system. The volume offers new options for rehabilitating system for future theological and philosophical thinking by opening system to a flexible relation with changing reality. Key ingredients for system are discussed in three areas of contact between Schleiermacher and Whitehead. One such ingredient concerns historical precedents figuring crucially in Western systematic philosophy. Another feature is the systematic categorization of experience that relates epistemology, metaphysics, and the empirical sciences. System is also brought to bear on pressing contemporary issues, such as ethics and religious pluralism.

Genome Editing Techniques are seen to be at the frontier of current research in the field of emerging biotechnologies. The latest revolutionary development, the so-called CRISPR technology, represents a paradigmatic example of the ambiguity of such techniques and has resulted in an international interdisciplinary debate on whether or not it is necessary to ban the application of this technique by means of a moratorium on its use for human germline modifications, particularly in human embryos in the reproduction process. However, given that other germline engineering techniques like mitochondrial (mt) DNA transfer techniques are already permitted and applied, the question arises what lies at the root of the apparent social unease about the modification of the human germline by Genome Editing Techniques like CRISPR. Against this background, the book seeks to make a substantial contribution to the current debate about a responsible and participatory framework for research on emerging biotechnologies by analysing underlying perceptions, attitudes, arguments and the reasoning on Genome Editing Techniques.

In Adventures in the Spirit, respected and influential theologian Philip Clayton argues that two major intellectual movements of our day-panentheism and emergence-are converging and that together they offer exciting new vistas for theological reflection. On the one hand, over the last decades many theologians have been re-conceiving the God-world relation panentheistically, affirming a radical indwelling of God within the world and the world within God. On the other hand, scientists have begun to abandon the reductionist ideology that characterized much of the modern period, with a new emphasis on emergence. Their study of how new, novel structures and entities arise throughout the evolutionary process yields a much more open-ended, holistic vision of reality, Clayton argues.

Bringing together a collection of essays by prominentscholars, The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth CenturyTheology presents a comprehensive account of the mostsignificant theological figures, movements, and developments ofthought that emerged in Europe and America during the nineteenthcentury. Representing the most up-to-date theological research, thisnew reference work offers an engaging and illuminating overview ofa period whose forceful ideas continue to live on in contemporarytheology A new reference work providing a comprehensive account of themost significant theological figures and developments of thoughtthat emerged in Europe and America during the nineteenthcentury Brings together newly-commissioned research from prominentinternational Biblical scholars, historians, and theologians,covering the key thinkers, confessional traditions, and majorreligious movements of the period Ensures a balanced, ecumenical viewpoint, with essays coveringCatholic, Russian, and Protestant theologies Includes analysis of such prominent thinkers as Kant andKierkegaard, the influence and authority of Darwin and the naturalsciences on theology, and debates the role and enduring influenceof the nineteenth century “anti-theologians”

This book presents proponents of five approaches to biblical hermeneutics and allows them to respond to each other. The five approaches are the historical-critical/grammatical (Craig Blomberg), redemptive-historical (Richard Gaffin), literary/postmodern (Scott Spencer), canonical (Robert Wall) and philosophical/theological (Merold Westphal) views.

Minister and theologian Marcia Mount Shoop Offers an analysis of Reformed heritage---and an impassioned provocation that we live more adventurously. "Beautifully written and deeply felt. This work offers a vivid theology relocated in the flesh and blood of life's utter physicality. Finally a book to recommend when people ask about resources on bodies and theology!"---Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Pastoral Theology, The Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion, Vanderbilt University "An incredibly compelling theological work. Bringing together a host of cutting-edge concerns that matter not simply to academic theologians, but to the lived life of faith, this project invokes the importance of bodies and their marking by gender, race, ethnicity, etc. Mount Shoop uses these now-familiar themes to break new ground by revealing the inadequacy of the overly verbal and cognitive character of Protestant worship and practice. It is groundbreaking."---Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Professor of Theology, Duke Divinity School, and author of Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church "Mount Shoop thiks in new ways about central theological concepts and dares to imagine a new church emerging out of them. She combines the intellectual vigor of an academic with the heart and soul of a pastor who understands what it means to lead a congregation. Happily, she writes like a poet. Let the Bones Dance is provocative, stimulating, and readable."---John M. Buchanan, pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, Illinois, and author of A New Church for a New World Contemporary Christian faith and practice tend to address spiritual, mental, and emotional issues but ignore the body. As a result, many believers are uncomfortable in their own skins. Mount Shoop addresses this "dis-ease" with a theology that is attentive to physical experience. She also suggests how worship services can more fully invite God to inhabit every part of a congregation---including their flesh-and-blood bodies.

The topic of evil and redemption has been at the center of the Western tradition since the beginning of the Christian era. In The End of Evil, Suchocki explores the source and end of evil in the thought of Augustine, Leibniz, Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Whitehead's philosophy is used as a creative response to the problems and possibilities raised in these earlier developments.

This volume illuminates why Friedrich Schleiermacher is hailed as the father of modern theology. Terrence Tice generates a dialogue between Schleiermacher, readers, and himself by examining one of Schleiermacher’s Christmas sermons and commenting on the relationship between God, the human condition, and Jesus as the Redeemer of humankind that is at the center of Schleiermacher’s work. Following this, the major themes of his thought and the reception of the theologian since his lifetime are traced out in detail.

Philosophical hermeneutics provides a model of interreligious dialogue that acknowledges the interpretive variability of truth claims while maintaining their relation to a preinterpretive reality. The dialectic and tensive structure of philosophical hermeneutics directly parallels the tension between the diversity of belief and the ultimacy of the sacred. By placing philosophers like Gadamer, Ricoeur, Peirce, and Whitehead in conversation, J. R. Hustwit describes religious truth claims as coconstituted by the planes of linguistic convention and uninterpreted otherness. Only when we recognize that religious claims emerge from a dalliance back and forth across the limits of the understanding can we appreciate the engagement between religions. In terms of dialogue, this approach treats religious truth claims as tentative hypotheses, but hypotheses that are frequently commensurable and rationally contestable. Interreligious dialogue goes beyond facilitating bonhomie or negotiating tolerance; dialogue can and should be a disciplined space for rationally adjudicating claims about what lies beyond the limits of human understanding.

The problem of creation and grace has a long history of contention within Protestant and Catholic theology, involving not only internecine conflict within the traditions but fueling, as well, ecumenical debates that have continued a dogmatic divide. This volume traces out that conflict in modern Catholic and Protestant dogmatics and provides a historical genealogy that situates the origin of the problem within different emphases in the thought of St. Augustine.