The culmination of de Certeau's lifelong engagement with the human sciences, this volume is both an analysis of Christian mysticism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and an application of this influential scholar's transdisciplinary historiography.

"The culmination of de Certeau's lifelong engagement with the human sciences, this volume is both an analysis of Christian mysticism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and an application of this influential scholar's transdisciplinary historiography." --Publisher description.

This popular text has been updated to ensure that it continues to provide a current and comprehensive overview of the main Christian theologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Each chapter is written by a leading theologian and gives a clear picture of a particular movement, topic or individual. New and updated treatments of topics covered in earlier editions, with over half the chapters new to this edition or revised by new authors. New section singling out six classic theologians of the twentieth century. Expanded treatment of the natural sciences, gender, Roman Catholic theology since Vatican II, and African, Asian and Evangelical theologies. Completely new chapters on spirituality, pastoral theology, philosophical theology, postcolonial biblical interpretation, Pentecostal theology, Islam and Christian theology, Buddhism and Christian theology, and theology and film. As in previous editions, the text opens with a full introduction to modern theology. Epilogue discussing the present situation and prospects of Christian theology in the twenty-first century.

This text is a reflection on the meaning of spiritual darkness - especially those difficult places in human experience where meaning seems to elude us, where we are emptied out and are compelled to dig deeper into who we truly are. Douglas E. Christie takes up this facet of experience, in ordinary human experience, but also in relation to the Christian contemplative and mystical traditions, where such experience is often understood to be both painful and transformative, allowing the mind and heart to open in love.

This book theorizes the baroque as neither a time period nor an artistic style but as a collection of bodily practices developed from clashes between governmental discipline and artistic excess, moving between the dramaturgy of Jesuit spiritual exercises, the political theatre-making of Angelo Beolco (aka Ruzzante), and the civic governance of the Venetian Republic at a time of great tumult. The manuscript assembles plays seldom read or viewed by English-speaking audiences, archival materials from three Venetian archives, and several secondary sources on baroque, Renaissance, and early modern epistemology in order to forward and argument for understanding the baroque as a gathering of social practices. Such a rethinking of the baroque aims to complement the already lively studies of neo-baroque aesthetics and ethics emerging in contemporary scholarship on (for example) Latin American political art.

Saint Hysteria examines scientific, literary, and religious texts that share a fascination with the otherness of the female body, whether in ecstatic pleasure or in neurotic pain. Cristina Mazzoni focuses on material from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mainly in Italy and France. Her approach uses the methodologies of cultural studies and feminism but also benefits from the insights of psychoanalytic criticism. She asks how the identification of mysticism with hysteria became prevalent, and explores the continuing dialogue between a historicizing view of hysteria and a view of hysteria as repressed religious mysticism. According to Mazzoni, this dialogue is discernible at various levels and in a variety of discourses. The medical history of hysteria, she maintains, is often linked to the religious history of supernatural phenomena, and the medical discourse of positivism depends on the religious-feminine element that it attempts to repress. Similarly, she finds a continuity between the literature of naturalism and that of decadence in their representations of the interdependence of neurosis and religion. Finally, the religious writings of women mystics and the discourses they inspired reveal an unresolved tension between nature and supernature, body and soul (or psyche) which, Mazzoni suggests, mirrors and complicates the very issues raised by hysterical conversion. Among those whose views she considers are the writers Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, Gabriele d?Annunzio, and Antonio Fogazzaro, as well as Graham Greene and Simone Weil; the mystics Angela of Foligno, Gemma Galgani, and Teresa of Avila; and the theorists Jean-Martin Charcot, Cesare Lombroso, Jacques Lacan, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray.

The disunity of the church is a social and theological scandal for it betrays the prayer of Jesus that we "will be one . . . so that the world will believe" (John 17:21). As a Baptist whose academic background focused on the Orthodox Church and whose teaching has included Catholic and Protestant contexts, this division is for Elizabeth Newman personal and professional. Attending to the Wounds on Christ's Body rests on the conviction that the broad tradition of Christianity already contains resources to heal the church, namely the saints of the church. Newman examines especially how Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) speaks to the whole church today in the midst of political, economic, and ecclesial brokenness. Teresa's reliance upon three scriptural figures--dwellings, marriage, and pilgrimage--helps make sense of an ecclesial way of life that is inherently unitive, a unity that stands in contrast to that of the nation-state or the global market. Teresa's scriptural journey offers an alternative at once liturgical, political, and economic. This Doctor of the Church provides "medicine" that can repair wounds of division that separate brothers and sisters in Christ.

Orientalism and Religion offers us a timely discussion of the implications of contemporary post-colonial theory for the study of religion. Richard King examines the way in which notions such as mysticism, religion, Hinduism and Buddhism are taken for granted. He shows us how religion needs to be reinterpreted along the lines of cultural studies. Drawing on a variety of post-structuralist and post-colonial thinkers, such as Foucault, Gadamer, Said, and Spivak, King provides us with a challenging series of reflections on the nature of Religious Studies and Indology.

Outlining the four fundamental concerns in the study of theology with representation, history, ethics and transcendence, this book examines each of these concerns in the light of contemporary critical theory.