Search Results

This book reconstructs Friedrich Schleiermacher's understanding of religion and sets this reconstruction into the intellectual and political context of Schleiermacher's work. It is common in the English literature to see Schleiermacher described as a theorist of “religious experience” or as a hermeneutician of religion, but these views fundamentally misrepresent both the central concerns and the contents of his writings. The reconstruction focuses on Schleiermacher's account of religion as a historically and culturally embedded phenomenon that extends from a core or “essence” within human subjectivity into the realm of interpersonal relations, practices, and material productions. The book calls particular attention to Schleiermacher's lectures in ethics at Halle and Berlin, wherein he developed an understanding of religion as a process of the social formation of feeling. Schleiermacher should be regarded as a thinker who attempted to ground not only academic theology but also the collective self‐understanding of religious persons on an understanding of religion as a natural phenomenon unfolding within history and subject to investigation by the entire range of the natural and human sciences.

This book offers a comprehensive reassessment of Milton's poetic oeuvre in light of the literary and conceptual problem posed by Milton's sustained attempt to put into words that which is unsayable and beyond representation. The struggle with the ineffability of sacred or transcendental subject matter in many ways defines Milton's triumphs as a poet, especially in Paradise Lost, and goes to the heart of the central critical debates to engage his readers over the centuries and decades. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this study sheds fresh light on many of these debates by situating Milton's poetics of ineffability in the context of the intellectual cross-currents of Renaissance humanism and Protestant theology. The book plots an ongoing narrative in Milton's poetry about silence and ineffable mystery, which forms the intellectual framework within which Milton continually shapes and reshapes his poetic vision of the created universe and the elect man's singular place within it. From the free paraphrase of Psalm 114 to Paradise Regained, the presence of the ineffable insinuates itself into Milton's poetry as both the catalyst and check for his poetic creativity, where the fear of silence and ineffable mystery on the one hand, and the yearning to lose himself and his readers in unspeakable rapture on the other, becomes a struggle for poetic self-determination and, finally, redemption.

The infidel-conversion motif—in which Jews and Muslims convert to Christianity—is a staple of romance narratives by Roman Catholic writers in medieval and early modern Europe. Baptisms and conversions of infidels lead to an important telos of the romance genre: Despite their narrative wanderings and deferrals, romances often contain transformations of identity that lead to the incorporation of the other into Christian community. Uses of the infidel-conversion motif wane in post-Reformation England, however, in the wake of a Protestant theology that deemphasized the power of baptism to create Christian identity. Whereas Catholic theology had asserted that Christian identity begins with baptism, numerous theologians in the Church of England denied the necessity of baptism for salvation and instead treated Christian identity as a racial characteristic passed from parents to their children. The Church of England’s baptismal theology transformed Christians and “infidels” into distinctive races. This book examines English translations of Calvin, treatises on the sacraments, catechisms, and sermons alongside works by Edmund Spenser, John Harington, William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and Phillip Massinger. Through charting the intersections of race, Protestant theology, and literary form, this book intervenes in critical debates about the relationship between racial and religious identity in early modern England, as well as in discussions of the social implications of romance.

This book explores the possibility of a transition from the modern paradigm—presently in a state of decay or disarray—toward new modes of life where freedom and solidarity would be reconciled, thus making possible a new flourishing of humanity on a global scale. However, it also acknowledges that antinomies of the past cannot quickly be exorcised by philosophical writings and that inherent conflicts in the modern paradigm may surface in virulent forms. Chapters 7 through 9 offer individual case studies that illustrate the difficulties involved in overcoming modern antinomies, especially the tension between freedom and solidarity. They look in particular at contemporary Protestant theology in its quest to reconcile human freedom with the Christian community of believers; Russian intellectual history in its difficult journey from traditional holism via totalitarianism to a precarious democratic freedom; and recent Indian philosophy as it tried to situate itself vis-à-vis traditional Hindu cosmology in its search for a viable democratic path in postcolonial India. The end of the book returns to the book’s central theme—the issue of a reconnection of freedom with social engagement—and stresses the need for new beginnings in this reconnection. Freedom and Solidarity ultimately offers that the solution to the possible derailments of freedom and solidarity into selfish narcissism and ethnocentric collectivism consists in the conception of solidarity as an open-ended, differentiated “public” and the conception of freedom as “authentic” guardianship.

This book presents a fresh vision for Christian theology that foregrounds the relationship between theological ideas and the experiences of Christians. It argues that theology is always operating in a vibrant landscape of feeling and desiring, and shows that contemporary theology has often operated in problematic isolation from these experiential dynamics. It then argues that a theologically serious doctrine of the Holy Spirit not only authorizes but requires attention to Christian experience. Against this background, the book outlines a new methodological approach to Christian theology that attends to the emotional and experiential power of theological doctrines. This methodology draws on recent interdisciplinary research on affect and emotion, which has shown that affects are powerful motivating realities that saturate all dimensions of human thinking and acting. In the process, the book also explains why contemporary theology has often been ambivalent about subjective experience, and demonstrates that current discourse about God’s activity in the world is often artificially abstracted from experience and embodiment. The book culminates in a proposal for a new experiential and pneumatological account of the theology of grace that builds on this methodology. Focusing on the work of the Holy Spirit in salvation and sanctification, it retrieves insights from Augustine, Luther, and Philip Melanchthon to present an affective and Augustinian vision of salvation as a pedagogy of desire. In articulating this vision, the book engages critically with recent emphasis on participation and theosis in Christian soteriology and charts a new path forward for Protestant theology in a landscape hitherto dominated by the theological visions of Karl Barth and Thomas Aquinas.

This book explores the unique phenomenon of Christian engagement with Yiddish language and literature from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century. By analyzing the motivations for Christian interest in Yiddish, and the differing ways in which Yiddish was discussed and treated in Christian texts, it addresses a wide array of issues, most notably Christian Hebraism, Protestant theology, early modern Yiddish culture, and the social and cultural history of language in early modern Europe. The analysis of a wide range of philological and theological works, as well as textbooks, dictionaries, ethnographical writings, and translations, demonstrates that Christian Yiddishism had implications beyond its purely linguistic and philological dimensions. Indeed, Christian texts on Yiddish reveal not only the ways in which Christians perceived and defined Jews and Judaism, but also, in a contrasting vein, how they viewed their own language, religion, and culture.