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George MacDonald (1824–1905) remains one of the most persistently read and beloved of the Victorians. His fairy tales and children's books have delighted generations of young readers, while his sermons, essays, and poems still offer startling insights to life and literature. He has increasingly been recognised as one of Scotland's most important nineteenth-century novelists. Here, seventeen new essays from an international, diverse group of scholars illuminate the crucial aspects of MacDonald's remarkable, varied works. The chapters are organised around MacDonald's life, major genres, and central themes, and provide clear points of entry for students, researchers, and curious readers. For readers approaching MacDonald's works for the first time and for those renewing a long acquaintance, The Cambridge Companion to George MacDonald is an indispensable guide. With a foreword by Malcom Guite and an afterword by Roderick McGillis.
Aquinas argues that, abstracting from divine revelation, God's existence can be argued for successfully, and that God is the source of the existence of all that is not divine for as long as it exists. His philosophical thought about God has been seminal for later thinkers, but can be hard to grasp as it is scattered across a broad range of his writings. This book provides a comprehensive and accessible single-volume account of Aquinas's philosophy of God which also evaluates it in the light both of various criticisms that have been made of it, and of philosophical thought more generally. It situates Aquinas's thinking about God in relation to major philosophers of the past and a number of important philosophers writing today, which will enable readers to understand Aquinas's philosophy of God in the context of centuries of philosophical thought.
An ethical approach to religion tries to make sense of religious claims in terms of values shared by religious and secular people alike. In From Idolatry to Holiness, Samuel Fleischaker contributes to that project by providing an ethical framework for understanding the purpose of Jewish law (halakha). He begins by interpreting idolatry as self-worship, and explores the idea, advocated by Moses Maimonides, that Jewish law aims at curing people of idolatry. Though he endorses aspects of this idea, Fleischacker criticizes Maimonides and his modern followers for having an alienating and remote conception of God and a thin conception of the purpose of human life. He then uses ideas gleaned from Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and Martin Heidegger to provide a richer conception of God and of our lives. Halakha does not just free us of self-worship, Fleischacker concludes. Rather, it enables us to experience the presence of God-holiness-in everything around us.
According to the standard Thomistic account, God can be known both by nature and revelation. The first is the terrain of metaphysics, which knows God as the cause of his created effects. The second is theology, which knows God through the words in which he has revealed himself. Often neglected, however, is a third way that Aquinas maintains God can be known. Affective knowledge, which proceeds by way of intuition, experience, and union, is fundamental to Aquinas's theological method. The central claim of this book is that, for Aquinas, the new life of grace given in baptism also entails a new affective, connatural knowledge of the things of God. This “loving knowledge,” which finds its consummation in beatific knowing, reverberates throughout Aquinas's theological epistemology, underwriting his account of the doctrine of gifts of the Holy Spirit, divine indwelling, the spiritual senses, and theological contemplation.
The legacy of fascism has challenged far-right expansion in Central Europe, yet nativist parties have found a workaround without compromising exclusionary ethno-nationalist agendas. Barbarians at the Gate explores the under-studied role that religion plays in the promotion of the ethno-nationalist agendas currently chipping away at liberal democratic protections. The book identifies a democratic erosion grounded in a Christian Nationalist concept of the ethno-nation fused with Christianity. Through a combination of interviews, new surveys with Austrian and German voters, and an original dataset of nativist and radical-right party rhetoric, it demonstrates how nativist parties use religion as a vehicle for democratic erosion, even in nations long-seen as bastions of democracy. Especially in Germany, where the hurdles to a far-right comeback are high, understanding how nativist parties use religious framing to sidestep the legacies of Nazism while still promoting ethno-nationalism is critical.
Scholars have long recognized John's dual focus on Jesus's relationship to God's presence and his impending physical absence. Yet attention to Jesus's absence is often restricted to the Farewell Discourse. Josiah D. Hall here provides an innovative reading of John's Gospel, arguing that tension between Jesus's presence and absence develops throughout the narrative and is integral to the Gospel's plot. Drawing on sources from across the ancient Mediterranean basin, Hall contends that John leverages conceptions of how deities would manifest their presence to clarify that Jesus is the enfleshed divine presence. Likewise, John depicts Jesus's absence by drawing on motifs of divine departure, especially those which understand a deity's absence as judgment. Attending closely to the paradoxical import of Jesus's presence and absence in John, Hall provides insights on classic Johannine riddles, including John's perspectives on the temple, the characters he labels as 'the Jews', and the Spirit-Paraclete's relationship to Jesus.
A disillusioned Martin Luther was losing his faith until he experienced freedom of conscience with the gospel of grace that he found from his un-authorized re-reading of the Scriptures. This experience stimulated Luther's desire to free the Christian religion from teachings that could burden the human soul. In doing so, he offered a grammar for a Christian theology that is both mystical and liberating. Kirsi Stjerna here offers a contemporary reading of Luther's vision of a religion that is guided by concerns for freedom. Her study first considers Luther's understanding of the profound tension in human experience as simultaneously broken and holy; and second, how he aimed to orient Christians to live with freedom from despair via the security found in being grounded in God. Offering a critical reading of Luther's central insights and teachings, Stjerna invites readers to engage with Luther's story and contemplate the relevance of his theology in contemporary discourse on religion.
Broad in scope yet focused, scholarly yet written in an accessible and lucid manner, Providence, Evil and Salvation, perhaps uniquely, addresses key questions in contemporary theology from a broadly Thomist perspective: What is providence and how can it be squared with evil and suffering? What is sin? How can we construe a meaningful account of original sin in a post-Darwinian context? How does Christ address our self-inflicted alienation from God? How do we appropriate Christ's salvation through faith, hope, and love, and participation in the sacramental life? On the interface of historical and constructive-systematic theology, with a pastoral concern throughout, Rik Van Nieuwenhove offers both experts and readers who are not familiar with the thought of Thomas Aquinas a unique insight into his theology – and why it matters today, not just for scholarly debates but for how we should live our lives.
Renewal in Contemporary Islamic Thought and Society explores the shifting perspectives and debates in contemporary Islamic thought. Seeking solutions to 21st-century social issues and modern Muslim needs, Muhammad Al-Atawneh presents a fresh assessment of Islamic renewal (tajdid), Muslim ethics, and intellectual revitalization, while also reassessing Islam's image and role in the modern world today. He interrogates the dynamics of renewal in Islam by reevaluating the methods by which traditional Islamic principles may be realigned to handle modern challenges. By aligning religious practice with contemporary circumstances, he also examines efforts addressing current social problems and that advance justice, equality, and good governance within the framework of Islamic tradition. Al-Atawneh demonstrates how academic inquiry stimulate a healthy intellectual culture within Muslim society. A transformative examination of renewal within Islamic thought, his astute analysis also shows how Islamic teachings and modern science can coexist, generating a harmonious coexistence between religion and reason.
How can Christians navigate the kaleidoscopic landscape of devotion to Jesus? In this study, Higton explores what it might mean to worship and follow the Jesus who can wear so many faces and call with so many voices. Higton proposes a high Christology, in which the Word is the image of God's inexhaustible life, the incarnation makes that Word present in flesh that is itself inexhaustible, and the Spirit unfolds this inexhaustible life in a profusion of forms of devotion. Each such form is an improvisation upon Scripture and an experiment in love, and each also fraught with failure. In conversation with Black, womanist, and trans theologies, Higton argues that, for all the problems that beset it, the classical Christological tradition can be a resource for liberative theologies. He also shows that works of doctrinal theology can remain visibly rooted in specific lives and contexts, and oriented towards mercy, justice, and love.
Will capitalism bring about the end of the world or is a different future possible? In this book, Daniel P. Rhodes diagnoses the dystopic reign of capital in the contemporary world. He shows how it captures politics and history while colonizing the state and its subjects under its dominion, for the purpose of constructing a (dis)order that achieves extravagant wealth for a few at the top by enabling exploitation of and extraction from an expanding lower class. Surveying Marxist and theological utopian alternatives, Rhodes then recovers an apocalyptic, theological politics drawn from the person and work of Jesus Christ and argues for an ecclesial vision of social renewal. The Church, by acting in a way that reflects Christ's fundamental humanity, can be a site and source of radical solidarity, material and spiritual forgiveness, justice-infused deliberation, and creative peace-making. It can also offer a powerful foretaste of an alternative future that, eschatologically, will last.
Religion and politics ought not mix, we are often told. But they have always done so, and sometimes with great success, notably in the development of welfare states in the early 20th century, when Christian churches and theologians were constructively, if sometimes critically, in supportive of such initiatives. Today, however, economic and demographic pressures have conspired to place the state under immense pressure, with calls to 'rethink' the welfare state becoming more common. Rethinking, however, demands that we ask some big questions: What is welfare for? What kind of good are we trying to achieve? What kind of being is it whose good we are trying to serve? In this study, Nick Spencer steers the welfare debate away from technocratic concerns. Drawing on the work of four major, twentieth-century theologians, he offers a fresh, concrete, and realistic vision for the vision of welfare at a time when it is badly needed.
During the first four centuries of the common era, scholars and theologians laid the ground work for Christian doctrines that have shaped the faith and practice of believers for two millenia. This was the formative period of Christianity when the major theological tenets of the faith were articulated. The writings of the earliest Christians continue to serve as a vital source of inspiration and guidance for Christians around the world. This Companion offers an overview of Christianity's foundational beliefs and practices. Providing an historiographical overview of the topic, it includes essays on the key thinkers and texts, as well as doctrines and practices that emerged during early Christian era. The volume covers the range of texts produced over four centuries and written by theologians hailing from throughout the Mediterranean world, including the Latin West, North Africa, and the Greek east. Written by an international team of scholars, this Companion serves an accessible introduction to the topic for students and scholars alike.
Revelation in Christianity means the divine disclosure of events that are otherwise inaccessible to human beings. But if no one was present to see them happen, how can the faithful know what they looked like? Since the late Middle Ages, images have worked in various ways with sacred texts, such as the Bible, the Lives of Saints, and devotional books, in bringing miracles and mythic events into visually accessible form. The works of artists have also aided the interpretation of difficult texts, such as prophetic and apocalyptic books of the Bible. In this study, David Morgan examines the art of seeing things and explores how art has played a key role in the creative production and interpretation of visions and apparitions. Traversing a long stretch of historical development, he offers new insights into a significant cultural history of European Christianity from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century.
Throughout Islamic history, Muslim jurists have prohibited sex between men. Yet, this prohibition was not based solely on scriptural commands. Tracing a genealogy of Muslim discourses across the first five centuries of Islam, this study situates liwāṭ within wider debates about the body, gender, morality, medicine, and religion. Sara Omar examines changing interpretations of the Lot narrative, the evolution of ḥadīth traditions, and the gradual formation of Islamic legal frameworks. Through close readings of legal, exegetical, medical, and ethical texts, the book uncovers deep disagreements over evidence, authority, culpability, and punishment, revealing a tradition marked by contestation rather than consensus. Omar engages Jewish, Christian, and Hellenic intellectual legacies to shows how early Muslims negotiated the boundaries of nature, desire, and the permissible. Accessible yet analytically rigorous, the book offers new perspectives on Islamic law, sexual ethics, and the historical roots of contemporary debates.
Domestication is not just something that humans impose on animals, but an ancient structure binding both creatures within shared systems of subjugation. Advancing trenchant new ideas, David Carr unpacks Genesis 1–11 to reveal ways in which embedded human–animal, gender, and group hierarchies constitute our world. Drawing on animal studies and Indigenous perspectives alike, he treats the Bible's origin stories as an invitation to rethink inter-species flourishing and re-imagine community based on intrinsic worth rather than mere utility. Tracing human rule over creation in Eden to slavery and concentrated human power at Babel, the author exposes an escalating trajectory of domination. Yet these foundational stories also suggest that global subjugation is not inevitable, but instead the consequence of a fall from an earlier relational, reciprocal mode of living. Here is a hopeful framework that recognizes this crisis while offering alternatives rooted in respectful relations and multispecies kinship.
In this groundbreaking study, Asaad Alsaleh reveals how ISIS weaponized Islamic texts to transform Islamic theology into a tool of ideological violence. Drawing on close readings of Arabic primary sources, he explores the historic notion of takfir – excommunication -- from the 'apostasy wars' that followed Prophet Muhammad's death through modern jihadist movements. Alsaleh demonstrates how political authorities systematically exploited excommunication to eliminate perceived threats throughout Muslim history. He also examines the theological mechanisms through which the group legitimizes violence. Combining theological, historical, and ideological analysis, Alsaleh argues that ISIS pursues a utopian project based on man-made ideology rather than divine revelation, thus distinguishing authentic Islam (rooted in the Qur'an and authenticated Prophetic hadith) from human interpretations that have been tragically conflated with the religion itself. Alsaleh concludes with suggestions as to how to solve the problems that ideology poses, emphasizing that clear efforts must be made to disentangle ideology from religion.
Beyond Magic in the Roman World reconsiders how Romans understood ritual, deviance, and alterity by moving past the modern category of 'magic.' Instead of treating magic as a single system, Andrew Durdin reveals how Roman authors used labels of ritual deviance to negotiate cultural diversity, social tension, and political authority. Drawing on texts from the late Roman Republic through the Principate, and written by Cicero, Lucan, Pliny, Tacitus, and Apuleius, he offers clear, engaging explanations as to how Romans classified the unfamiliar. The result is a vivid portrait of a society using language, accusation, and imagination to make sense of an expanding world. Durdin's book equips readers with the tools to recognize how scholarly categories – especially 'magic' – carry colonial and imperial legacies that shape interpretation. Accessible and compelling, his study will appeal to readers of Roman history, ancient religion, and anyone curious about how cultures create – and contest – categories of difference.