Previous studies of H. Richard Niebuhr's intellectual background have fallen into two groups: those that stress the German and especially Kantian sources of Niebuhr's thought, and those that emphasize the American and especially pragmatic sources of his thought. Joseph S. Pagano provides a way beyond these seemingly antagonistic positions. Through careful readings of the philosophical background of the triadic structure, Pagano demonstrates that Niebuhr's intellectual background was both Kantian and pragmatic. He also provides the first book-length study of the development of the triadic structure of faith in Niebuhr's theology and ethics. This book is a particularly insightful reference for scholars in ethics, religious studies, theology, philosophy, and church history.

Know Thyself: An Essay in Social Personalism proposes that social Personalism can best provide for self-knowledge. In the West, self-knowledge has been sought within the framework of two dominant intellectual traditions, order and the emerging self. On the one hand, ancient and medieval philosophers living in an orderly hierarchical society, governed by honor and shame, and bolstered by the metaphysics of being and rationalism, believed persons gain self-knowledge through uniting with the ground of their being; once united they would understand what they are, what they are to be, and what they are to do. On the other hand, Renaissance and modern thinkers such as Pico della Mirandola, Copernicus, Descartes, Locke, and Kant shattered the great achievement of the high middle ages and bequeathed to posterity an emerging self in a splintered world. Continuing their search for self-knowledge, the moderns found themselves faced with the dualism of the emerging self of the Renaissance and the natural world as understood by modern scientists. New problems spun out of this dualism, including the mind-body problem; the other minds problem; free will and determinism; the nature and possibility of social relationships; values, moral norms and their relationship to the natural and social worlds; and the relationships between science and religion. Finding self-knowledge among these splinters without a guiding orientation has proven difficult. Even though luminaries such as Spinoza, Berkeley, and Hegel attempted to bring order to the sundered elements, their attempts proved unsatisfactory. We contend that neither order nor the emerging self can adequately provide for self-knowledge. Since those culturally embodied "master narratives" lead us to an impasse, we turn to social Personalism. Self-knowledge developed in this book shows how persons in relation to the Personal learn who they are, what they are to become, and what they must do to achieve that goal. It also shows that the achievement of self-knowledge is supported by a natural, social, and cultural environment rooted in trust. In this humane and timely discussion, Thomas O. Buford offers a personalist understanding of self-knowledge that avoids the impersonalisms that erode the dignity of persons and their moral life which characterize modern life.

In the face of apparently rampant individualism, there has been a steady call for a return to community and tradition, particularly in religious communities and in recent Christian theology and ethics. The form of contemporary life upheld by modern ideals like freedom and universalism, the story goes, turns out to divide people from each other and from the communal sources of our traditionally moral values. But the call to community too often confuses individualism with individuality, assuming that any appeal to individuality as a value or ideal is a rejection of communal goods, rather than a mode of promoting those goods. What's necessary now is a recovery of the individual that understands individuality to serve community, even in resistance to it. In Transforming Faith, Joshua Daniel offers a fresh reading of H. Richard Niebuhr's theological ethics that provides an account of individuality and individual creativity as both the fruits and reformers of community. What is theologically at stake in Daniel's reconstructive interpretation is the human's existentially resonant relation with God and the christological revitalization of our symbolic and virtuous activity.

The thesis of this book is that only a social personalism and no form of impersonalism can adequately account for the solidarity and stability of what we individuals share with all other members of our society, our second nature. In the ancient world the discussion of society, at least since Plato and Aristotle, began with the social nature of individuals as found in families and proceeded to topics such as the formation and the well ordering of societies according to eternal principles grasped by reason. Since the beginning of the modern world, at least since Hobbes and Locke, the discussion of society began with the relation of persons and society and then moved on to other topics, usually political and legal ones. The central problem was to find the basis on which individuals formed societies and how they could do so. Buford's question is with a more basic issue: 'What do individuals and society share in common?' or what philosophers since Cicero have called our second nature, and how to best understand its unity and stability. The crisis of our culture in the erosion of both solidarity and stability pointedly manifests itself in our second nature. There the culture in which we live is felt, lived, and shared. Buford asks how we can lay bare our second nature, revealing the extent of the crisis. Our second nature is the form of social actions of persons in triadic relations, and Buford argues that it is there that we find that trust unifies a society and provides the basis for the institutions that stabilize it.

How do the history of religion and the history of political freedom relate to each other? The variety of views on this subject in philosophy, the humanities and social sciences, and the public is broad and confusing. But the grandiose synthesis in which Hegel brought together Christianity and political freedom is still an enormous source of orientation for many-despite or even because of the influential provocations of Friedrich Nietzsche. As Hans Joas shows in Under the Spell of Freedom, a different view has developed in the religious thinking of the twentieth century based on a conception of history that is more open to the future and on a concept of freedom that is richer than that of Hegel. Using sixteen selected thinkers, Joas deconstructs the grand Hegelian narrative of human history as the self-realization of the idea of freedom, setting as a counterpart the sketches of a theory of the emergence of moral universalism. Further, taking the classical views of Hegel and his emphasis on the role of Protestant Christianity and the extremely negative views about Christianity in the work of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Joas elaborates on this new understanding of religion and freedom, which avoids both Eurocentrism and an intellectualist view of religious faith and practice. The result is a forceful plea for a global history of moral universalism. Under the Spell of Freedom is an important step in this direction.

What words from our Christian vocabulary would you miss if you could no longer use them? If you pronounced them and no one understood? If you spoke and people gave them a meaning at odds with your conviction? What words do you fear are falling into misuse? If you could save some word or phrase from disuse or misuse what would it be? Saving Words is a collection of personal, provocative essays by lay people, clergy, poets, theologians, musicians, and scholars on words they want to preserve and proclaim, urgent and important reflections on the language we need for the facing of these days. Open this volume and find saving words that matter.

Faith Negotiating Loyalties draws readers into the world of Christian faith in South Africa and the question of loyalties in the new post-apartheid state. It carries out its investigation in two parts. Part one examines Christian faith and loyalty during the first nation-building exercise following the South African War, positioning the creation and contestation of three Christianities corresponding to three nationalisms, each of which imagined South Africa in a particular way, shaping faith accordingly. The idea of an undifferentiated South African Christianity gives way to contesting and contested Christianities, nationalism gives way to nationalisms, and faith emerges in tension with and in criticism of these loyalties. Part two discusses the American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr in South Africa. Three kinds of faith in his wittings are set forth: social faith, radial faith, and reconstructing faith. Contextualized within the South African story, Niebuhr's ideas suggest self and society as constituted by hybridities and suspended in a web of loyalties. Faith Negotiating Loyalties suggests the message for faith in a post-apartheid South Africa is the importance of negotiating covenants which allow for crossings, hybridities, and contestations.