Neither the Ash‘arites nor Kierkegaard’s systems of theology are anti-rational, for Kierkegaard regards the contradiction present in the object of faith as absolute rather than logical, suggesting thereby the existential dialectics for understanding this contradiction instead of resolving it. The Ash‘arites also hold that one can understand the existence of God through absolute reason, or reaso...

In the past few decades there has been a growing controversy in society and in the Church over evolution and the age of the earth. Some Christians accept the idea of billions of years, as taught by the scientific establishment, while others contend that Scripture requires that we believe that creation is only a few thousand years old. Systematic theology texts are influential in this debate as ...

ONE IMPORTANT BUT OFTEN NEGLECTED CONSEQUENCE OF THE FERMENT IN ROman Catholic moral theology since the close of the Second Vatican Council (1965) has been the gradual displacement of the traditional categories for distinguishing Roman Catholic from protestant approaches to moral matters. While obvious differences still divide “moral theology” and “Christian ethics” (the traditional terms of th...

Maurizio Lazzarato argues that contemporary capitalism functions through two central apparatuses: Social subjection and machinic enslavement. Social subjection equips individuals with a subjectivity, assigning them identities, sexes, bodies, professions, and other markers of identity, along with a sense of their own individual agency within society. Machinic enslavement arises out of the growin...

I. Basic Beliefs of Islam. Before taking up the subject of Islamic theology proper I should like, by way of introduction, to outline the basic religious beliefs which are common to all Muslims. As you may know, Islam was founded by the Prophet Muh.ammad in the Arabian Peninsula in the first quarter of the seventh century. At the age of forty the Prophet began to receive certain revelations whic...

method or conceptual discipline, but rather represented a way of life and a discovery of one’s self. The philosopher was much more a spiritual adviser than a professor. He exhorted his students to mold themselves through a conversion of attention and through spiritual exercises to follow the paths of wisdom. As Pierre Hadot has noted, the discourse on the transcendent and the spiritual experien...

William Oliver Martin published "The Order and Integration of Knowledge" in 1957 to address the problem of the nature and the order of various kinds of knowledge; in particular, the theoretical problem of how one kind of knowledge is related to another kind. Martin characterizes kinds of knowledge as being either autonomous or synthetic. The latter are reducible to two or more of the autonomous...

In pursuing the question of incarnation, it must be noted from the beginning that what is at stake is Platonism. More specifically, my concern will be the relationship of Christian theology to Platonism. It is a curious phenomenon that here, now, on the brink of the twentyfirst century, the question of Christian theology’s relationship to Platonism remains an orienting and fundamental theme of ...

Recent developments in the disciplines of cinema studies, theology, and religion and film have generated renewed interest in the experiential dimensions of filmgoing. More specifically, those contributing to theological scholarship have begun to explore these cinematic experiences as theologically significant. With these developments in mind, this essay offers a close reading of the principal m...