This short but thought-provoking volume asks the question 'What is it that tragedy makes us know?'. The focus is on tragedy as a mode of representing the experience of radical suffering, pain, or loss, a mode of narrative through which we come to know certain things about ourselves and our world--about its fragility and ours. Through a mixture of historical discussion and close reading of a number of dramatic texts--from Sophocles to Sarah Kane--the book addresses a wide range of debates: (...) how tragedy is defined, whether there is such a thing as 'absolute tragedy', various modern attempts to rework the classical heritage and the relation of comedy to tragedy. There is also a fresh discussion of whether religious--particularly Christian--discourse is inimical to the tragic, and of the necessary tension between tragic narrative and certain kinds of political as well as religious rhetoric. Rowan Williams argues that tragic drama both articulates failure and frailty and, in affirming the possibility of narrating the story of traumatic loss, refuses to settle for passivity, resignation, or despair. In this sense, it still shows the trace of its ritual and religious roots. And in challenging two-dimensional models of society, power, humanity and human knowing, it remains an intrinsic part of any fully humanist culture. (shrink)

Attention has often been seen as a selective process in which the mind chooses which already‐formed objects to focus on. However, as Merleau‐Ponty and others have pointed out, this ignores the complexity and ambiguity of sensory information and imposes on it a set of already‐formed objects in the world. Rather, attention is a process by which objects in the world are constituted by the perceiving subject. Attention thus involves a process of mutual negotiation with the environment. There are connections between (...) this and the process of attente described by Simone Weil, in which the perceiving subject suspends the dominant preoccupations of the ego in order to become more aware of an independent reality. This, in turn, expresses in a more modern idiom what early Christian teachers had to say about the role of attentive looking in the contemplative life. (shrink)

Being a theist makes a difference, but not so much to what propositions we assent to, nor to an expanded ontology of spiritual entities. Rather, it is concerned with what commitments we enter into, and involves a participatory engagement with a broader reality then we might have supposed was possible. Embodied practices are a crucial part of the contemplative path, which draws on the wisdom of the body. This leads on to a “labor of culture.” Our present culture is not (...) obviously as secular as supposed to be, but what has now become sacred is a strong sense of the individual ego, around which many ethical and political commitments are built, and which sits uneasily with our widely accepted mechanistic view of life. The crucial challenge to artificial intelligence is whether it can find ways of enhancing the mutual recognition that is crucial to the ethical life. (shrink)

To be told, ‘know thyself’ is to be told that I don't know myself yet: it carries the assumption that I am in some sense distracted from what or who I actually am, that I am in error or at least ignorance about myself. It thus further suggests that my habitual stresses, confusions and frustrations are substantially the result of failure or inability to see what is most profoundly true of me: the complex character of my injuries or traumas, the (...) distinctive potential given me by my history and temperament. I conceal my true feelings from my knowing self; I am content to accept the ways in which other people define me, and so fail to ‘take my own authority’ and decide for myself who or what I shall be. The therapy-orientated culture of the North Atlantic world in the past couple of decades has increasingly taken this picture as foundational, looking to ‘self-discovery’ or ‘self-realization’ as the precondition of moral and mental welfare. And the sense of individual alienation from a true and authoritative selfhood mirrors the political struggle for the right of hitherto disadvantaged groups, especially non-white and non-male, to establish their own self-definition. The rhetoric of discovering a true but buried identity spreads over both private and political spheres. The slogan of the earliest generation of articulate feminists, ‘The personal is the political’, expresses the recognition of how this connection might be made. (shrink)

This is a response to Tom McLeish's Boyle Lecture 2021 on the rediscovery of contemplation through science. Several implications are sketched: no single mind can encompass fully what there is to be known; we are likely to be unaware of the full range of what it is that is acting upon us or informing us at any given moment; and the universe that we encounter is a system of interaction and implication in which nothing is simply passive or lifeless.

Henry Chadwick's achievement overall remains immense. The range of his learning in classical and post-classical literature, both Greek and Latin, and his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Fathers and, increasingly, the early medievals was rare by any standard, and his success in making it available to the non-specialist reader as well as the expert was striking. Chadwick played a pivotal role in redefining a whole area of scholarship. Individual works, both long and short, still occupy a significant place in the literature (...) of their subjects–especially the work on Origen, Augustine, and Boethius. The translations that frame his career–the Contra Celsum and the Confessions–illustrate his capacity to get into the skin of ancient authors. Chadwick was without doubt the foremost patristic scholar of his generation in the English-speaking world, and one of the foremost in Europe. He will be remembered with enormous gratitude and affection by a large number of scholars to whom, by direct or indirect teaching and example, he taught their business. (shrink)

The Edge of Words is Rowan Williams' first book since standing down as Archbishop of Canterbury. Invited to give the prestigious 2014 Gifford Lectures, Dr Williams has produced a scholarly but eminently accessible account of the possibilities of speaking about God -- taking as his point of departure the project of natural theology. Dr Williams enters into dialogue with thinkers as diverse as Augustine and Simone Weil and authors such as Joyce, Hardy, Burgess and Hoban in (...) what is a compelling essay about the possibility of language about God. (shrink)

This essay responds to Sajjad Rizvi’s analysis of Shi‘a political theology in terms of the risks of over-emphasising the achieved clarity of a religious/political ethic in society. It notes the comparable reserve in Christian political thought, especially in the Augustinian tradition, in respect of a single sacral authority in society, and briefly discusses the various ways in which this has been articulated in mediaeval and modern contexts.

Human beings exist in one of two sorts of solidarity, according to St. Paul—the solidarity of sin or alienation ‘in Adam’ or the solidarity of life-giving mutuality in Christ. There can be no Christian theology of the human that is not a theology of communion—which converges with the conviction that our creation in the divine image is creation in relationality. The image of God is not a portion or aspect of human existence but a fundamental orientation towards relation. This understanding (...) of the divine image in turn points to the way in which—as the Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky stresses—a proper understanding of the nature of personal being depends upon a proper grasp of the divine image, including the fact that it is always an image of the divine ‘filiation’—the eternal relation of Word to the Father in the Trinity. Our personal flourishing is a filial dependence that liberates and empowers. And what is ‘empowered’ is the human vocation to make reconciled sense of the material world of which we are part, articulating and serving its Godward meaning, so that we may see our humanity as essentially a priestly calling within the reconciling priesthood of Christ, in whom all things cohere. (shrink)

To understand what the Psalms “made of” Augustine is to grasp the central issues of faith and ecclesiology as Augustine understood them. To read the Psalms is to make our own voice the voice of the Body of Christ in worship.

Austin Farrer is often called the one genius the Church of England produced in the 20th Century. His innovative ideas crossed a host of theological disciplines. Assessing his continuing importance and introducing him to a new generation of readers, Austin Farrer for Today brings together a stellar collection of writers to reflect on Farrer’s contribution to biblical theology, philosophy, language, doctrine, prayer and preaching. Chapters include: •Rowan Williams on Farrer as a doctrinal theologian •Morwenna Ludlow on Farrer's language (...) and symbolism •Jane Shaw on Farrer as preacher •John Barton, on typology in Farrer. (shrink)

Raimon Panikkar: A Companion to his Life and Thought is a guide to the life, work and thought of Raimon Panikkar, a self-professed Buddhist-Christian-Hindu philosopher and theologian. A man of deep and wide learning and an extremely prolific author, Panikkar is equally at home in various religious and cultural traditions and embodies in himself the ideals of intercultural, intrareligious, and interreligious dialogues. This book explicates Panikkar’s basic vision of life as the harmonious rhythm of divinity, humanity, and the cosmos, which (...) he terms "cosmotheandrism," and shows how it permeates and illumines his articulations of the central Christian doctrines. Given the complexity and difficulty of Panikkar’s thought this book is a welcome companion for a course on Panikkar and for a general reader who wishes to understand one of the most profound and orginal thinkers of our time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dominus Deus Noster Deus Unus Est:Aquinas on Divine UnityArchbishop Rowan Williams"The Lord our God is one LORD," says the Shema (Deut 6:4), echoed by Christians and Muslims alike. "We believe in one God," the Nicene Creed announces; and the Shahada's "There is no deity but God" affirms the same. But at first sight, Christian theology looks like the outlier here, as St. Thomas obliquely acknowledges when, early (...) in his discussion of the Trinity (Summa theologiae [ST] I, q. 30, a. 1, obj. 1 and ad 1), he quotes Boethius: "That [alone] is truly one in which there is no numeration" (obj. 3). If there is a plurality of relation in God, there is something that can be enumerated, says Thomas. This objection is duly met by distinguishing between "absolute" plurality and the mutually definitory relations of the Trinitarian life which rule out any "composition" in God. But, for this fully to make sense, we must return to Thomas's explicit discussion of divine unity (ST I, q. 11). The present essay attempts a brief examination of how divine unity is understood in this quaestio, in the hope of clarifying an aspect of Aquinas's Trinitarian thought, and also of suggesting ways of developing an implicit theme of some significance for contemporary theology.It is still a textbook commonplace that "Western" Trinitarian theology begins from the divine unity and treats the distinction of the divine persons only in the light of this prior reality. The eloquent polemic of Orthodox theologians like Vladimir Lossky has played a major role in canonizing this supposed opposition. He writes, for example, that Western Trinitarianism treats the relationships of the divine hypostases as "a system of relationships within the one essence: something logically posterior to the essence," with [End Page 555] the distinguishing "relations of origin" (originary fatherhood, generatedness, procession) as "more or less swallowed up in the nature or essence."1 Examples could be multiplied, from Lossky and many others, and from Western theologians influenced by this characterization.2 The very structure of Aquinas's Summa theologiae, with the quaestiones de Deo uno preceding those de Trinitate, is sometimes adduced in support of this analysis of the ambiguities and inadequacies of Thomist Trinitarianism, and of a general Western resistance to the radical personalism of authentic patristic theology.But, polemic apart, what is Aquinas actually saying in his treatment of divine unity, primarily in ST I, q. 11? The four articles of the quaestio deal with whether saying that something is "one" actually tells us anything beyond the postulation of something as a coherent subject/substance; with whether unity and plurality are simply opposed and incompatible notions; with whether it is right to say that God is one, and if so, whether he is maxime unus, one in a unique and unsurpassable sense. Basic to his argument, as we shall see, is something touched on briefly in ST I, q. 30, a. 1, where his response (ad 3) to the Boethian formulation associates divine unity with simplicity—that is, with non-composition:3 affirming the divine unity is, crucially, denying the applicability of certain kinds of discourse in theology. But, as we shall see, part of the abiding importance of Aquinas's discussion is, perhaps unexpectedly, to open the door to a new ontological perspective in which laying out the difference between different senses of "unity" allows for the development of a more systematically relational metaphysics. Related to this is the distinction drawn (especially in ad 2 of [End Page 556] a. 3) between "mathematical" and "metaphysical" unity; one of the problems with a good deal of modern criticism of Western Trinitarianism is a failure to reckon with the diversity of ways in which "unus est" might be used, and St. Thomas is in fact abundantly clear about the senses that must be ruled out in theology—including any sense that would oppose an "individual" essence to "multiple" hypostases, as if the divine essence were itself a sort of numerically identified individual.The ground for this is laid in the first article. If we say that something is "one," we are surely offering a determination of it, specifying one way of... (shrink)

This paper evaluates a general argument for the conclusion that visual representations in science must play the role of truth bearers if they are to figure as legitimate contributors to scientific arguments and explanations. The argument is found to be unsound. An alternative approach to assessing the role of visual representations in science is exemplified by an examination of the role of structural formulas in organic chemistry. Structural formulas are found not to play the role of truth bearers; nonetheless, they (...) contribute to the arguments and explanations of organic chemistry. An early success of conformational analysis is presented in order to illustrate the role of structural formulas in the discourse of organic chemistry. *Received January 2007; revised July 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Rowan University, 201 Mullica Hill Road, Glassboro, NJ 08028; e‐mail: goodwin@rowan.edu. (shrink)

On the one hand, we find secularized approaches to theology stemming from the Death of God movement of the 1960s, particularly as pursued by North American religious thinkers such as Thomas J.J. Altizer, Mark C. Taylor, Charles Winquist, Carl Raschke, Robert Scharlemann, and others, who stress that the possibilities for theological discourse are fundamentally altered by the new conditions of our contemporary world. Our world today, in their view, is constituted wholly on a plane of immanence, to such an extent (...) that traditional appeals to faith in an other world become difficult to take as more than self-deception and willful blindness to our human reality. On the other hand, we hear the assertion of a new lease on life for theology and its traditional affirmation of divine transcendence over and against the putative arrogance of all claims of human autonomy. This claim is advanced particularly by theologians grouped under the banner of the so-called Radical Orthodoxy. Emanating from England, originally from the University of Cambridge in the 1980s and 1990s, this movement includes such theological thinkers as John Milbank, Graham Ward, Rowan Williams, and Catherine Pickstock. It has also explicitly styled itself “post-secularist.” I propose that both approaches are based on not very fully acknowledged and often explicitly denied premises in negative theology, which surprisingly emerges as key to fostering genuine possibilities for dialogue among apparently antagonistic theological approaches. (shrink)