Dionysus and the Crucified

Dionysus and the Crucified
Author: Richard Wanderman Jr.
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2009-03-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 055705706X

A travelogue of murder and sex, the main character is as twisted as the roads he navigates. A college student has divorced himself from morality and social conventions and must go on the road to find himself and rediscover his lost humanity. Here is the author's first novel. First published 10 years ago in England, be the first to read this revised and updated American edition.

The Affirmation of Life

The Affirmation of Life
Author: Bernard REGINSTER
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0674042646

While most recent studies of Nietzsche's works have lost sight of the fundamental question of the meaning of a life characterized by inescapable suffering, Bernard Reginster's book The Affirmation of Life brings it sharply into focus. Reginster identifies overcoming nihilism as a central objective of Nietzsche's philosophical project, and shows how this concern systematically animates all of his main ideas.

Nietzsche Against the Crucified

Nietzsche Against the Crucified
Author: Alistair Kee
Publisher: SCM Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1999
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN:

Nietzsche presents us with his philosophy for life, a philosophical faith to which he commits himself with passion. With the decadent values of the Christian religion set aside, he can describe Jesus of Nazareth as the noblest human being.'

The Dionysian Gospel

The Dionysian Gospel
Author: Dennis R. MacDonald
Publisher: Fortress Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2017-04-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1506421660

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” Dennis R. MacDonald offers a provocative explanation of those scandalous words of Christ from the Fourth Gospel—an explanation that he argues would hardly have surprised some of the Gospel’s early readers. John sounds themes that would have instantly been recognized as proper to the Greek god Dionysos (the Roman Bacchus), not least as he was depicted in Euripides’s play The Bacchae. A divine figure, the offspring of a divine father and human mother, takes on flesh to live among mortals, but is rejected by his own. He miraculously provides wine and offers it as a sacred gift to his devotees, women prominent among them, dies a violent death—and returns to life. Yet John takes his drama in a dramatically different direction: while Euripides’s Dionysos exacts vengeance on the Theban throne, the Johannine Christ offers life to his followers. MacDonald employs mimesis criticism to argue that the earliest Evangelist not only imitated Euripides but expected his readers to recognize Jesus as greater than Dionysos.

A God Torn to Pieces

A God Torn to Pieces
Author: Giuseppe Fornari
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1628950366

Giuseppe Fornari’s groundbreaking inquiry shows that Friedrich Nietzsche’s neglected importance as a religious thinker and his “untimeliness” place him at the forefront of modern thought. Capable of exploiting his own failures as a cognitive tool to discover what other philosophers never wanted to see, Nietzsche ultimately drove himself to mental collapse. Fornari analyzes the tragic reports of Nietzsche’s madness and seeks out the cause of this self-destructive destiny, which, he argues, began earlier than his rivalry with the composer and polemicist Richard Wagner, dating back to the premature loss of Nietzsche’s father. Dramatic experience enabled Nietzsche to detect a more general tendency of European culture, leading to his archaeological and prophetic discovery of the death of God, which he understood as a primordial assassination from which all humankind took its origin. Fornari concludes that Nietzsche’s fatal rebellion against a Christian awareness, which he identified as the greatest threat to his plan, led him to become one and the same not only with Dionysus but also with the crucified Christ. His effort, Fornari argues, was a dramatic way to recognize the silent, inner meaning of Christ’s figure, and perhaps to be forgiven.

Nietzsche Versus Paul

Nietzsche Versus Paul
Author: Abed Azzam
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2015-03-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0231538979

Abed Azzam offers a fresh interpretation of Nietzsche's engagement with the work of Paul the Apostle, reorienting the relationship between the two thinkers while embedding modern philosophy within early Christian theology. Paying careful attention to Nietzsche's dialectics, Azzam situates the philosopher's thought within the history of Christianity, specifically the Pauline dialectics of law and faith, and reveals how atheism is constructed in relation to Christianity. Countering Heidegger's characterization of Nietzsche as an anti-Platonist, Azzam brings the philosopher closer to Paul through a radical rereading of his entire corpus against Christianity. This approach builds a compelling new history of the West resting on a logic of sublimation, from ancient Greece and early Judaism to the death of God. Azzam discovers in Nietzsche's philosophy a solid, tangible Pauline structure and virtual, fragile Greek content, positioning the thinker as a forerunner of the recent "return to Paul" led by Badiou, Agamben, i ek, and Breton. By changing the focus of modern philosophical inquiry from "Nietzsche and philosophy" to "Nietzsche and Christianity," Azzam initiates a major challenge to the primacy of Plato in the history of Western philosophy and narrow certainties regarding Nietzsche's relationship to Christian thought.