In Rethinking the Medieval Legacy for Contemporary Theology, six distinguished theologians bridge medieval and contemporary theologies by developing the theological significance of medieval insights in response to contemporary issues. Their nuanced readings of medieval texts, extended to major theological issues of our time, provide examples of the retrieval of the medieval tradition, an essential part of any contemporary theological reconstruction. Barbara Newman extends the theology of perichoresis or mutual indwelling to illuminate the relationship between donor and recipient in the case of organ transplants; Marilyn McCord Adams applies insights about divine friendship to the perennial issue of horrendous evil; and Kevin Madigan brings principles of medieval exegesis to bear on the contemporary historical critical approach to biblical interpretation. Ingolf U. Dalferth applies insights from the doctrine of divine omnipotence and creation ex nihilo to deconstruct Heidegger’s limitation of the possibilities of authentic existence to historical facticity. Pim Valkenberg explores the possibilities of a theological encounter between Christianity and Islam in the works of Aquinas and Nicholas of Cusa; and Anselm K. Min applies the analogical insights of Aquinas on the nature and limits of human knowledge of God to a critique of contemporary theologies that claim to know either too little or too much about God.

Faith, hope, and love, traditionally called theological virtues, are central to Christianity. This book renews faith, hope, and love in the context of the many contemporary challenges in many unique ways. It is an ecumenical collection of papers, equally divided between Catholic and Protestant positions, that seek to radically renew the classical doctrine of faith, hope, and love, and argues for their essential connection to the praxis of justice. It contains eight different approaches, each represented by a distinguished theologian and addressing different aspects of the issues and followed by insightful and critical responses. It does not merely seek to renew the theological virtues but to also reconstruct them in the demanding context of justice and the contemporary world, nor is it simply a treatise on justice but a theoretical and practical reflection on justice as vital expressions of faith in God, hope in God, and love of God. A non-dogmatic and non-ideological approach, it accommodates both conservative and liberal positions, and avoids the separation of the theological virtues from the demands of the contemporary world as well as the separation of justice talk from the theological context of faith, hope, and love. It seeks above all to renew, not merely repeat, the classical doctrine of faith, hope, and love in the contemporary context of the urgency of justice, and to do so ecumenically, comprehensively, and from a variety of perspectives and aspects.

Theological Issues in Christian-Muslim Dialogue addresses the main theological topics of discussion that appear in Christian-Muslim engagement. Many of these topics originate in the medieval period and the earliest encounters between Christians and Muslims. Even so, the topics persist in contemporary contexts of dialogue and engagement. Christians and Muslims still discuss whether or not God should be understood as strictly one or as a Trinity-in-Unity, and debates over the nature of revelation or prophethood remain. Theological reflection, therefore, must continue to be brought to bear on these topics in light of their history and in view of their applicability to growing contexts of inter-religious engagement. Theological Issues in Christian-Muslim Dialogue is a comprehensive theological sourcebook for students learning about Christian-Muslim relations and practitioners engaged in Christian-Muslim dialogue.

”Theology of Religions” is among the most burning issues within Christian theology today. The challenge to study and discuss different ways of handling conflicting truth claims and religious narratives between religions is taken up by a growing number of theologians across denominational boundaries. This is a common and ecumenical effort undertaken by Christian theologians all over the world. And yet, the impact of specific ecclesiastical or theological traditions on different concepts of theology of religions should not be underestimated. As well known, the Second Vatican council with its pivotal decree Nostra Aetate (On the relation to other religions) not only set the agenda for Catholic theology, but even influenced the wider discussion on the topic. The papers of this volume were all given at a conference in Uppsala, Sweden in October 2017. The structure of Faithful Interpretations follows closely the way the conference was conducted. A general introduction to the development and present status of ”Theology of Religions” by Marianne Moyaert opens the book. Archbishop J Augustine Di Noia of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith then treats the recent developments in the teaching of the Magisterium regarding theology of religions. Anna Bonta Moreland adresses the issue of Muhammad and Christian Prophecy. Diego R Sarrió Cucarella focuses on early Christian theological views of Islam and concludes that Islam has been from the begining a ”disturbing” factor in the Christian view of salvation history. Wilhelmus G B M Valkenberg discusses the impact of Nostra Aetate on the Church’s relation to Muslims, using especially the precedent of Nicolaus of Cues as regards a constructive approach to Islam. Klaus von Stosch adresses a sensitive issue in Muslim-Christian relations and illustrates the advantages of the comparative theology approach for the theology of religions. Complementing this perspective, Peter Jonkers offers a hermeneutical perspective on truth claims, and reflects on ”the religious Other” with references to Jacques Derrida among others. Reinhold Bernhardt argues in favour of a biblically grounded “relational-existential” theory of truth, which would be most helpful with regard to other religions. To conclude, the prominent Catholic specialist on Theology of Religions, Gavin D’Costa, widened the perspective by addressing the relation to Judaism from the point of view of the covenant and the promises of the land. Altogether, the papers of this volume give a clear impression of the status of Roman Catholic Theology of Religions.

What strange transactions take place in the mobile spaces between loci? How does the flow of forces between fixed points enliven texts, suggest new connections, and map out the dizzying motion of myriad interactions? The essays in this volume were first presented at the 2014 New Chaucer Society Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland where a meeting of minds in a shared intermediate space initiated dialogue from diverse perspectives and wended its way through the invisible spaces between concrete categories, objects, and entities. The resulting volume asks a core question: what can we learn by tarrying at the nexus points and hubs through which things move in and out of texts, attempting to trace not the things themselves or their supposedly stable significations, but rather their forms of emergence and retreat, of disorder and disequilibrium? The answer is complex and intermediate, for we ourselves are emerging and retreating within our own systems of transit and experiencing our own disequilibrium. Scholarship, like transit, is never complete and yet never congeals into inertia. Through the manifold explorations of the dynamic transit, transports, scapes, and flows found within literary-and Chaucerian-thought-worlds, new vistas of motion and motivation emerge. Following John Urry's mobile sociology, the volume advances the notion that we can no longer view either social worlds or textual worlds as uniform surfaces upon which one can trace or write a history of the horizontal movements of humans and human mentalities; rather, everything is in constant motion: objects, images, information/ideas, and mobility is thus also vertical, involving human and non-human actants. The essays in this volume consider, then, how medieval literary texts in Chaucer's period rewarp time and space by the means of sophisticated transit and transport structures, which might be traced within specific works but also across works, such as in text networks. Motive entities within literature twist and turn, interact and collide, and destabilise predictable trajectories with unpredictable vigor. TABLE OF CONTENTS // James L. Smith, "Introduction: Transport, Scape, Flow: Medieval Transit Systems" - Christopher Roman, "Bios in The Prik of Conscience: The Apophatic Body and the Sensuous Soul" - Jennie Friedrich, "Concordia discors: The Traveling Heart as Foreign Object in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde" - Robert Stanton, "Whan I schal passyn hens: Moving With/In The Book of Margery Kempe" - Carolynn Van Dyke, "Animal Vehicles: Mobility beyond Metaphor" - Sarah Breckenridge Wright, "Building Bridges to Canterbury" - Thomas R. Schneider, "Chaucer's Physics: Motion in The House of Fame"

New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Book jacket.

In Wonder as a New Starting Point for Theological Anthropology: Opened by the World, José Francisco Morales Torres constructs a new theological anthropology that begins with wonder. He contends that the visceral experience of wonder is an opening up of the human by an excess that saturates the world. This opened-by-ness points to a transforming receptivity as the basis of the person and to an extravagant Generosity that grounds all creation. Thus, wonder, which is grounded in generous Excess, is not only a gift but a demand: it calls for a liberative praxis that resist the forces that flatten the fullness of life into what is ‘useful’ and profitable and that reduce the limitless worth of fellow humans to mere commodities to be exploited and exchanged at the altar of the idolatrous ‘Market’. Wonder reveals a primordial receptivity in the human person, which demands of us an ethic of sustainability that does not reduce the other to commodity, a vulnerability that risks being opened by the other, a commitment to solidarity and liberation that resist the forces of an insatiable, idolatrous Market that seeks “only to steal and kill and destroy.”

Marilyn McCord Adams (1943–2017) was a world-renowned philosopher, a theologian who forever changed conversations about God and evil, a compelling preacher, and a fierce advocate for the full belonging of LGBTQ+ people, especially in churches. Over the course of her career, she mentored philosophers, theologians, pastors, and activists. In this book, authors from each of these fields engage and expand upon McCord Adams’s work. Chapters address theodicy and the Holocaust, the nature and limits of human free will, sexual violence, Trinitarian relations, beatific vision, friendship, climate change, and how to protest heterosexism with truth, humor, and cookies. Examples of McCord Adams’s revised Episcopal liturgies—previously unpublished—are used to affirm the expansive love of God. Accessible and varied, these essays attest to McCord Adams’s vocational integration, as she claimed and proclaimed God’s goodness in her different professional roles.

This book shows the importance of the possibility approach for contemporary debates about metaphysics, the idea of God, the problem of evil, the role of reason and the understanding of humanity in the light of contemporary transhumanist challenges. It discusses the turn to possibility not only as a historical phenomenon, but as a systematic starting point for a contemporary philosophical theology that points beyond the barren alternatives between classical or neoclassical metaphysics as well as modern and postmodern antimetaphysics. It thus offers a new starting point for critical engagement with the philosophical and theological challengers and shortcomings of our contemporary culture.

Mind, Value, and Cosmos: On the Relational Nature of Ultimacy is an investigation into the nature of ultimacy and explanation, particularly as it relates to the status of, and relationship among Mind, Value, and the Cosmos. It draws its stimulus from longstanding “axianoetic” convictions as to the ultimate status of Mind and Value in the western tradition of philosophical theology, and chiefly from the influential modern proposals of A.N. Whitehead, Keith Ward, and John Leslie. What emerges is a relational theory of ultimacy wherein Mind and Value, Possibility and Actuality, God and the World are revealed as “ultimate” only in virtue of their relationality. The ultimacy of relationality—what Whitehead calls “mutual immanence”—uniquely illuminates enduring mysteries surrounding: any and all existence, necessary divine existence, the nature of the possible, and the world as actual. As such, it casts fresh light upon the whence and why of God, the World, and their ultimate presuppositions.