While rooted in careful study of Mead’s original writings and transcribed lectures and the historical context in which that work was carried out, the papers in this volume have brought Mead’s work to bear on contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology, cognitive science, and social and political philosophy.

In this, the first book to address the ongoing debate, Plantinga presents his influential thesis and responds to critiques by distinguished philosophers from a ...

This important contribution to the ground-breaking Radical Orthodoxy series revisits the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Augustine and Derrida to reconsider the challenge of speaking of God through predication, silence, confession and praise. James K. A. Smith argues for God's own refusal to avoid speaking as well as for our urgent need of words to make Him visible to us. This leads to a radical new "incarnational phenomenology" in which God's love endows imperfect signs with the means to indicate true (...) states of infinitude, and in which we may ultimately discover a new theology of the arts. (shrink)

This article focuses on the response of Africanisation to Western theological education in Africa, which has for centuries become a theological problem for the African context. In this 21st century, Africanisation is at the centre of the African discourse and focuses on the realities of our African context. Therefore, theological education in Africa should be Africanised in order to seriously engage the aspects of Africanisation. The struggle against colonial education was to ensure that Africa is liberated from unjust educational oppression, (...) socio-economic oppression, poverty, racism, political oppression and gender injustice. In this regard, Africanisation is an agent to address the introduced Western theological education in Africa. Yet the two concepts, namely commercialisation and commodification, have an influence on theological education in Africa. (shrink)

We have undertaken to discuss the nature of mathematical systems, the way in which they are discovered, and the uses to which they are put in the empirical sciences. The empirical sciences employ mathematical systems in framing final formulations, but adopt mathematical techniques long before reaching that stage. It is a prerequisite that the mathematics they employ has been developed separately and within its own domain. We shall return to the relation between mathematics and the empirical sciences before we are (...) done, but in the meanwhile we shall be constrained to begin by discussing the situation in mathematics in isolation from any empirical considerations. (shrink)

A collection of essays spanning Smith's career that examines the prospects for a renewed continental philosophy of religion, while making a constructive case for Smith's own vision of the "Nicene option" and incarnational theology as conversation partner.

The range and the reach of beliefs always involve the whole individual. organs are only the agents of organisms: the individual acts through his parts, thinks with his brain, feels through his senses, acts by means of his muscles; but the entire man is always engaged. beliefs are acquired by thought, feeling or action, held in the memory as retention schemata, and issued in individual behavior. beliefs are supported by social pressure, and are stored in the unconscious as ontology.

★ Publishers Weekly starred review One of the Top 100 Books and One of the 5 Best Books in Religion for 2019, Publishers Weekly Christianity Today 2020 Book Award Winner (Spiritual Formation) Outreach 2020 Resource of the Year (Spiritual Growth) Foreword INDIES 2019 Honorable Mention for Religion This is not a book about Saint Augustine. In a way, it's a book Augustine has written about each of us. Popular speaker and award-winning author James K. A. Smith has spent time (...) on the road with Augustine, and he invites us to take this journey too, for this ancient African thinker knows far more about us than we might expect. Following Smith's successful You Are What You Love, this book shows how Augustine can be a pilgrim guide to a spirituality that meets the complicated world we live in. Augustine, says Smith, is the patron saint of restless hearts--a guide who has been there, asked our questions, and knows our frustrations and failed pursuits. Augustine spent a lifetime searching for his heart's true home and he can help us find our way. "What makes Augustine a guide worth considering," says Smith, "is that he knows where home is, where rest can be found, what peace feels like, even if it is sometimes ephemeral and elusive along the way." Addressing believers and skeptics alike, this book shows how Augustine's timeless wisdom speaks to the worries and struggles of contemporary life, covering topics such as ambition, sex, friendship, freedom, parenthood, and death. As Smith vividly and colorfully brings Augustine to life for 21st-century readers, he also offers a fresh articulation of Christianity that speaks to our deepest hungers, fears, and hopes. (shrink)

What are international codes of conduct for? The broad support for such codes masks fundamental differences about their purpose. Corporations see codes of conduct as regimes for regulating their relations with their suppliers in developing countries and—not least—to counter negative publicity. For labor and human rights activists, on the other hand, codes of conduct are levers for forcing positive change in global labor and environmental standards. Here I consider two areas typically covered by codes of conduct—wages and child labor—and identify (...) some of the dangers of using codes to force change. If low wages or child labor are the result of poverty, and can’t be fixed by enlightened corporate policies, then codes will at best leave the underlying problems untouched and at worst will aggravate them. I conclude that we should be cautious about using codes to force higher standards. (shrink)

This work presents an annotated text of the most comprehensive and detailed arguments in Erasmus's conflict with the Catholic, conservative, scholastic theologians, the _Declarationes_. It also shows the contrast between the scholastic/logical and the humanist/rhetorical approach to Scripture and to theological questions.

In the introduction to his Human Knowledge, Bertrand Russell wrote: «If I believe that there is such a place as Semipalatinsk, I believe it because of things that have happened to me; and unless certain substantial principles of inference are accepted, I shall have to admit that all these things might have happened to me without there being any such place.» Beginning with an examination of belief, the argument turns on the nature of evidence, and it is shown that Russell (...) is in a contradictory position with respect to substance which he both rejects and assumes. A new definition of substance, one which will include a dynamic phase and also the objective existence of the irrational, is called for and offered. The new viewpoint involves us finally in the search for adequate descriptions, and here some notions of Wittgenstein and Russell seem to meet. (shrink)

Neither income nor wealth should be too highly unequal. But there is a fundamental distinction between pay for work and the ownership of capital assets. The reasons to moderate these inequalities therefore differ, and the arguments are best considered separately.