The editors of the special issue on panpsychism and pan(en)theism introduce the issue. This includes brief summaries of each of the articles.

Samuel Lebens argues that we may understand God’s act of creation by analogy with an author’s creation of fictional characters. I argue that, in the relevant sense of ‘fictional characters’, authors do not create such beings; rather, they invite us to imagine that such beings exist. I also argue that Lebens’s view would make authorship morally problematic in implausible ways. Along the way I briefly offer an account of the being of fictional characters and consider the relations between truth-in-fiction and truth.

This article examines the poetry of Raïssa Maritain as a distinctive form of theodicy shaped by prayer, suffering, and the catastrophic violence of the twentieth century. Situating Maritain’s poetic work within the context of debates on suffering, this article places her in dialogue with Johann Baptist Metz’s concept of Leiden an Gott (‘suffering unto God’), as well as with the challenges to theodicy articulated by Elie Wiesel and Emmanuel Levinas. While Wiesel’s refusal of theology after Auschwitz and Levinas’s ethical critique of teleological accounts of suffering underscore the crisis of theodicy, Metz offers a theological response that centres on prayer as anguished address to God rather than rational explanation. I argue that Maritain’s poetry anticipates, embodies and extends this insight by functioning as a form of poetic prayer that confronts evil without aestheticising or prematurely redeeming suffering. Through close engagement with poems written before and during the Second World War, I show how Maritain’s poetic language gives voice to accusation, lament, and solidarity with the suffering other, while nonetheless holding open the possibility of redemption. In doing so, her work offers a humane poetic theodicy that both complements and critically deepens Metz’s political theology.

Beginning with the public controversy over matters of conscience between William Gladstone and John Henry Newman in the nineteenth century, this article explores the significance of ‘conscience’ for moral theology in the Anglican tradition. Noting the genealogy of Newman’s thought and his debt to the eighteenth-century divine, Bishop Butler, the lecture also brings this tradition of thinking into conversation with more recent reflection about conscience in Roman Catholic moral theology. While ‘freedom of conscience’ is often emphasized in contemporary moral reflection, the lecture notes that ‘the obligations of conscience’ are also significant in the thought of Newman and others. The article considers the recent intervention on ‘Episcopacy and Conscience’ by the Faith and Order Commission of the Church of England, before ending with a series of questions about the place of moral formation in seminary education in the Anglican Communion: how might Newman’s thinking about conscience animate our understanding of the spiritual and moral formation offered to ordinands?

This paper explores the enduring tension between rational technique (technē) and creative intuition in art, tracing its origins from Plato’s Ion through Kant’s notion of genius as nature’s unteachable rule-giving via the productive imagination. It then examines Jacques Maritain’s and Étienne Gilson’s complementary Thomistic aesthetics as a unified resolution. Maritain locates creative intuition in the soul’s spiritual unconscious, a pre-conceptual grasp of Being (esse) uniting intellect, imagination, and senses in a metaphysical act mirroring divine creation, where poetry reveals beauty as transcendent radiance. Gilson, conversely, emphasizes art as cognitio factiva: the craftsman’s imposition of intelligible form on matter, producing an ontological entity that manifests Being’s splendor objectively, independent of subjectivity. Addressing modern unbelief, the analysis affirms that beauty depends on Being, not belief; even non-theistic artists intuitively participate in esse through form, yielding works that testify to divine reality despite denial.

Flannery O’ Connor’s mom criticized her for not writing what people would want to read. While O’Connor’s novels are full of freaks and distortions, this article offers some philosophical clues as to why this is so. We explore Jacques Maritain’s influence upon her as she saw herself as ‘cutting her aesthetic teeth upon his Art and Scholasticism’. Key to understanding the grotesque world of O’Connor’s stories is the understanding of Maritain’s notion of artistic imitation and its reliance upon his notion of distortion. It is the latter notion that gives us the central insight into why she distorted her characters and plot. True storytelling for O’Connor plunges the reader deeply into reality, especially into the reality of human persons. Not wanting to stay at the physical surfaces of things, distortion plunges the reader into the depth of human character and their existential aspirations, motivations, decisions, and especially, their responses to the gift of supernatural grace.

This paper examines Ballard’s narrow pro-theistic argument for the claim that a world created by God would possess more bestowed worth than a world not created by God. I argue that not only could the world have just as much bestowed worth were it not created by God, but it could possibly have more.

This article reinterprets John Milton’s Paradise Lost as a contribution to contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Milton offers a novel free-will defence, similar to Alvin Plantinga’s, grounded in original philosophical accounts of God, creation, freedom, and meta-ethics. Milton’s monist God creates worlds and creatures ex deo out of God-self. God – and everything else – is animated matter: one substance both material and spiritual. Milton rejects materialism, dualism, and idealism. Only animist monism delivers the libertarian freedom that Milton’s free-will defence demands. God has agent-causal libertarian freedom. God’s reasons don’t necessitate God’s choices. God freely chooses which worlds to create, which commands to issue, which hierarchies to institute. God radically transcends creatures – especially in relation to God’s meta-ethical power. Milton’s implicit meta-ethic, rejecting both voluntarism and intellectualism, resembles Robert Adams’s theist meta-ethic, where God’s nature determines excellence and God’s actual commands determine obligation. God also plays another meta-ethical role – instituting hierarchies where some creatures command others. Satan’s fall is epistemic and meta-ethical. He refuses to recognise God’s meta-ethical transcendence – to believe that God is God. Belief in God always requires a leap of faith beyond evidence and argument – because even perfect creatures cannot comprehend God’s transcendence. Creaturely epistemic freedom means there is no explanation why some angels fall while others stand.

In his book The Work of the Holy Spirit, Kuyper begins (in the original Dutch version) with an extensive reference to John Owen. This raises the question of his relationship to Owen. Is his theology derived from John Owen? This study outlines Owen’s view of regeneration. We then consider how Kuyper developed his theology of regeneration. It appears that the metaphor of the ‘seed’ is central to his understanding of the new birth. The seed can retain its germinating capacity for years and only then sprout. When we compare this metaphor with Owen, it appears that Kuyper uses a concept that John Owen also uses, but he elaborates in a completely different way so that it ultimately becomes a different concept.