Exploring and Proclaiming the Apostles' Creed

Exploring and Proclaiming the Apostles' Creed
Author: Roger van Harn
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2004-11-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0819281166

Doctrinal preaching has fallen on hard times in recent years. Exploring and Proclaiming the Apostles' Creed seeks to stimulate renewed interest in - and provide useful models of - Christian proclamation that is truly rooted in the central tenets of the faith. Using the Apostles Creed as a template for doctrinal, confessional preaching, this book draws together an ecumenical cast of respected biblical scholars and preachers who explain the creed and demonstrate its preaching possibilities. Each of the book's fifteen chapters consists of an essay that explores and illuminates one of the creed's articles of faith, followed by a scintillating sermon that models how that article can be preached as good news today.

The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas

The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas
Author: Brian Davies
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 724
Release: 2012-01-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190208791

Thomas Aquinas (1224/6-1274) lived an active, demanding academic and ecclesiastical life that ended while he was still comparatively young. He nonetheless produced many works, varying in length from a few pages to a few volumes. The present book is an introduction to this influential author and a guide to his thought on almost all the major topics on which he wrote. The book begins with an account of Aquinas's life and works. The next section contains a series of essays that set Aquinas in his intellectual context. They focus on the philosophical sources that are likely to have influenced his thinking, the most prominent of which were certain Greek philosophers (chiefly Aristotle), Latin Christian writers (such as Augustine), and Jewish and Islamic authors (such as Maimonides and Avicenna). The subsequent sections of the book address topics that Aquinas himself discussed. These include metaphysics, the existence and nature of God, ethics and action theory, epistemology, philosophy of mind and human nature, the nature of language, and an array of theological topics, including Trinity, Incarnation, sacraments, resurrection, and the problem of evil, among others. These sections include more than thirty contributions on topics central to Aquinas's own worldview. The final sections of the volume address the development of Aquinas's thought and its historical influence. Any attempt to present the views of a philosopher in an earlier historical period that is meant to foster reflection on that thinker's views needs to be both historically faithful and also philosophically engaged. The present book combines both exposition and evaluation insofar as its contributors have space to engage in both. This Handbook is therefore meant to be useful to someone wanting to learn about Aquinas's philosophy and theology while also looking for help in philosophical interaction with it.

The Problem of Evil

The Problem of Evil
Author: Nick Trakakis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2018
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 019882162X

Eight leading philosophers of religion debate 'the problem of evil' - the problem of reconciling the existence of a perfectly good and loving God with the existence of sin and suffering in the world. Their dialogues explore a range of imaginative and innovative approaches to the nature of divinity and its relationship to evil.

Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III

Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III
Author: John F. Wippel
Publisher: CUA Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2020-09-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0813233550

Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III is Msgr. John Wippel’s third volume dedicated to the metaphysical thought of Thomas Aquinas. After an introduction, this volume of collected essays begins with Wippel’s interpretation of the discovery of the subject of metaphysics by a special kind of judgment (“separation”). In subsequent chapters, Wippel turns to the relationship between faith and reason, exploring what are known as the preambles of faith. This is followed by two chapters on the important contributions by Cornelio Fabro on Aquinas’s distinction between essence and esse and on participation. The volume continues with articles on Aquinas’s view of creation as a preamble of faith, Aquinas’s much-disputed defense of unicity of substantial form in creatures, his account of the separated soul’s natural knowledge, and Aquinas’s understanding of evil in his De Malo 1. The volume concludes with an article comparing Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Godfrey of Fontaines on the metaphysical composition of angelic beings. Most of these issues were disputed during Aquinas’s time by some of his contemporaries, and the proper understanding of each continues to be debated by various students of his thought today. Wippel’s purpose, therefore, is to help clarify our understanding of Aquinas’s thought on each of these topics, a task that requires the careful analysis of primary sources and of secondary literature and attention to the relative chronology of his writing.

Wandering in Darkness

Wandering in Darkness
Author: Eleonore Stump
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 688
Release: 2012-09-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191056316

Only the most naïve or tendentious among us would deny the extent and intensity of suffering in the world. Can one hold, consistently with the common view of suffering in the world, that there is an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God? This book argues that one can. Wandering in Darkness first presents the moral psychology and value theory within which one typical traditional theodicy, namely, that of Thomas Aquinas, is embedded. It explicates Aquinas's account of the good for human beings, including the nature of love and union among persons. Eleonore Stump also makes use of developments in neurobiology and developmental psychology to illuminate the nature of such union. Stump then turns to an examination of narratives. In a methodological section focused on epistemological issues, the book uses recent research involving autism spectrum disorder to argue that some philosophical problems are best considered in the context of narratives. Using the methodology argued for, the book gives detailed, innovative exegeses of the stories of Job, Samson, Abraham and Isaac, and Mary of Bethany. In the context of these stories and against the backdrop of Aquinas's other views, Stump presents Aquinas's own theodicy, and shows that Aquinas's theodicy gives a powerful explanation for God's allowing suffering. She concludes by arguing that this explanation constitutes a consistent and cogent defense for the problem of suffering.

Speaking the Incomprehensible God

Speaking the Incomprehensible God
Author: Gregory P Rocca
Publisher: CUA Press
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2004
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0813213673

Gregory Rocca's nuanced discussion prevents Aquinas's thought from being capsulized in familiar slogans and is an antidote to unilateralist or monochrome views about God-talk.

The Poet and the Fly

The Poet and the Fly
Author: Robert Hudson
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2020-07-28
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1506457290

Flies are the most ubiquitous of insects: buzzing, minuscule, and seemingly insignificant, they've been both plagues and minor annoyances for millennia. Rather than ignore these incredibly mundane and seemingly insignificant creatures, poets spanning centuries--from the seventeenth to the twentieth--and continents--from North America to Asia--have found that these ordinary bugs in fact illuminate deep spiritual mysteries. In this revelatory book, Robert Hudson considers seven poets, each of whom wrote a provocative poem about a fly. These poets--all mystics in their own way--ponder the simple fly and come to astounding conclusions. Considering Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and several other poets, The Poet and the Fly brings together the poetry, the flies, and the poets' own lives to explore the imaginative, and often prophetic, insights that come from the startling combination of poetry and flies. Ultimately, the message each poet offers to us through the fly is as relevant today as it was in their own time: the miracle of existence, the gift of mortality, the power of the imagination, the need for compassion, the existence of the soul, the mystery of everything around us, and the sacramental, grace-giving power of story.

Lessons from Aquinas

Lessons from Aquinas
Author: Creighton Rosental
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2011
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0881462535

Thomas Aquinas has long been understood to have reconciled faith and reason. Typically, he is understood as having provided justification for faith by means of proof, particularly, that the Five Ways prove the existence of God. Under this interpretation, faith becomes a species of justified belief, and the justification for faith rests upon the success of the Five Ways (or, alternatively, on the success of other justificatory evidence). In this book, Creighton Rosental argues that Aquinas¿s account of faith is not one of justified belief, at least as it is understood in contemporary philosophy. Instead, Rosental argues, faith has its own basis for epistemic ¿reasonableness¿ ¿ a reasonableness that does not derive from ordinary evidence or proof. Rather than requiring evidence accessible to the natural light of reason, Aquinas holds that faith has its own sort of ¿evidence¿¿that which results from the light of faith. Aquinas ¿Aristotelianizes¿ faith and argues that faith has the Aristotelian epistemic virtue of certitude, and in so doing reconciles faith and Aristotelian reason, at least as Aristotle was understood by Medieval philosophers. This reconciliation resolves important tensions between Aristotelian science and Christian doctrine. Further, Rosental examines three contemporary accounts of what counts as an epistemically ¿responsible¿ belief (namely, justified belief, practical rationality, and warrant) and argue that under Aquinas¿s account, faith should be counted as rational, and in an important, though modified sense, as justified. Rosental¿s book is an erudite and accessible reading of this most fundamental issue in Thomistic studies.

The Creed

The Creed
Author: Berard L. Marthaler
Publisher: Twenty-Third Publications
Total Pages: 484
Release: 1993
Genre: Creeds
ISBN: 9780896225374

Newly revised and expanded, this is the perfect introduction to the beliefs of Catholicism and a unique and invaluable guide for studying the Catechism of the Catholic Church. This revised and expanded edition of The Creed is highly recommended for students of Ecclesiology, Christology, Church History, and Catechetical Theology. Unique among the many commentaries on the classic formulas of Christian faith, this book does not simply relate the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and the Apostle's Creed to the apostolic faith of the New Testament, but presents them in light of contemporary theological issues. The revised edition features updated, expanded text, a glossary, and enhanced bibliographic resources.