Subjects of Terror uses a reading of the French Romantic poet Gérard de Nerval to elucidate and critique a death-based ideology of subjectivity that has remained in force from Kant to Lacan. This model, despite variations, is distinguished by three principal characteristics: that the subject is the self-sameness of individual experience, that as such it functions like language (or, more specifically, like writing), and that this self-sameness is the annihilation of all individual experiences. Theorized by Hegel, Heidegger, Kojève, and Lacan, this abstract and ultimately impersonal notion of the self was not merely theoretical, however. It was, for example, long instantiated and enforced by the guillotine. Even in its more intimate and less spectacular forms, it provoked strong affective responses, as is evidenced by writers of the Romantic period, from Hugo to Mallarmé, Zola, and Nietzsche. As part of this affective reaction, Nerval's writings exemplify not only how this negative self-construction determines self-understanding but also how it determines self-experience, or, in other words, the way it feels to be a self in this cultural and historical context. That feeling is, fundamentally, terror, and the context is still in many ways our own. The book demonstrates that Nerval's works constitute an aesthetic resistance to that ideology of terror and as such helped open the way for the ethical models of subjectivity that will appear in Kristeva, Aulagnier, and Levinas. Although for two centuries, social, theoretical, and aesthetic forces have coerced individuals into experiencing the world through the morbid filter of their own absolute destruction, the author argues through Nerval for the possibility of an alternate, open-ended model of experience based on the libidinization of language itself.

What kind of experience might help to confirm and make sense of the puzzling belief in divine creation, so central to the main monotheistic religions? Anselm and Aquinas developed a philosophical understanding of 'Creation' as an asymmetrical relationship between the world and God, that is, that the world is really related to God in a relationship of total dependence but God is in no way really related to or modified by this created world. This idea of an asymmetrical relationship is the key concept unifying all aspects of this book which discusses the three main inter-related questions in a philosophical discussion about God -- the question of meaning, the question of existence, and the question of co-existence. The book explores various 'ciphers' of this asymmetrical relationship in our pre-philosophical lived experience. These are experiences such as that of the relationship between our knowledge and what we know, or our sense of obligation to our vulnerable neighbour. It argues that deciphering such experiences helps to make sense of the 'asymmetrical' relation of creation and that it in turn makes sense of them. Masterson argues further that this idea of asymmetrical relationship provides insight into the main questions of philosophy of religion and is an illuminating source of critical dialogue with contemporary Anglo/American and Phenomenological approaches in philosophy of religion.

Many universities, founded on the principles of vigorous scholarship and steadfast Christian faith, have abandoned those roots, resulting in confusion, fragmentation, and ideological strife. This book explores the role reflective Christian faith can play in unifying the intellectual life of the university. Contributors including Jean Bethke Elshtain, Richard Hays, John Polkinghorne, Joel Carpenter, and David Lyle Jeffrey analyze the character and practices of an ideal Christian intellectual community.

In the face of the current environmental crisis—which clearly has moral and spiritual dimensions—members of all the world’s faiths have come to recognize the critical importance of religion’s relationship to ecology. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Ecology offers a comprehensive overview of the history and the latest developments in religious engagement with environmental issues throughout the world. Newly commissioned essays from noted scholars of diverse faiths and scientific traditions present the most cutting-edge thinking on religion’s relationship to the environment. Initial readings explore the ways traditional concepts of nature in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and other religious traditions have been shaped by the environmental crisis. Readings then address the changing nature of theology and religious thought in response to the challenges of protecting the environment. Various conceptual issues and themes that transcend individual traditions—climate change, bio-ethics, social justice, ecofeminism, and more—are then analyzed before a final section examines some of the immediate challenges we face in caring for the Earth while looking to the future of religious environmentalism. Timely and thought-provoking, Companion to Religion and Ecology offers illuminating insights into the role of religion in the ongoing struggle to secure the future well-being of our natural world. With a foreword by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, and an Afterword by John Cobb

In this book, Mark P. Fusco offers a historical, philosophical and theological review and appraisal of current research into quantum, post-modern, atheistic, mathematical, and philosophical theories that engage our interpretation of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Ferdinand Ulrich’s accounts of Ur-Kenosis. This cross-disciplinary approach inspires a new speculative metaphysical theory based on the representation of being as a holo-somatic ontology. Holocryptic metaphysics gives us a novel interpretation of transubstantiation as it is founded on the findings of quantum mechanical theory. The quantum object and black hole’s properties present a new way to explain physical matter based on its holographic identity. This scientific theory for representing physical matter’s identity is recognized, for example, in the symmetry existing between a subatomic particle and its orbital shell, a single particle’s identity in relationship to its thermodynamic system, Hawking radiation, and black hole entropy. Further, the properties of quantum non-locality and teleportation signpost a new way to understand the Eternal Logos’ relationship to Jesus Christ and the Eucharist.

Cosmology, anthropology, and Christology are deeply interrelated. This implies that one cannot talk about the structure of the world without human presence in it, as well as it is impossible to produce any reasonable understanding of humanity without positioning it in the universe. In the same fashion, in order to comprehend where the human capacity of predicating the universe comes from, one needs to appeal to humanity's Divine Image, that is, to its archetype in the incarnate Christ. Whereas Christians traditionally believe that the human phenomenon is unique as created in the Divine Image, such scientific disciplines as evolutionary biology, palaeoanthropology, the sciences of artificial intelligence, psychology, and others, challenge the vision of humanity as a unique formation thus challenging the doctrine of Imago Dei. All these disciplines place humans in a mediocre position in the world accompanied by the feeling of anxiety, insecurity, and non-attunement to the universe. Theology needs to respond to these challenges by incorporating into its scope the data from the sciences in order to neutralize such anxieties. The resulting dialogue of theology with science provides a hermeneutics of the human condition with no objective to change the latter. Then the sense of the universe is disclosed from within the Divine Image reflecting the predicaments of the human created condition.

This book is an authentic collection of critical essays compiled as part of response to a situation that is hazardous to life on our planet – the current ecological crisis. Its twelve chapters innovatively engage with multiple facets of the intricate relationship between literature and ecology, covering texts, genres, movements, philosophies, and contexts spanning a long period of historical time and a variety of milieus. The volume adopts an approach that unravels the premises and assumptions that sustain the modern world view and contemporary knowledge systems.

A leading authority on faith development explores the mysteries of existence, poignantly connecting the study of a lifetime to its place in the universe. Loder provides moving case studies and integrates the preeminent psychological models of human development with seminal Christian theological perspectives.