Poet, critic, biographer, and Catholic intellectual Paul Mariani delivers huge armfuls of experience and knowledge in this wide-ranging collection of twenty-four essays. As a man of faith in a secular
'A mere metaphor', 'only symbolic', 'just a myth' - these tell tale phrases reveal how figurative language has been cheapened and devalued in our modern and postmodern culture. In God and the Creative
This book aims to bring Muslim theology into the present day. Rather than a purely academic pursuit, Modern Muslim Theology argues that theology is a creative process and discusses how the Islamic tra
This book aims to bring Muslim theology into the present day. Rather than a purely academic pursuit, Modern Muslim Theology argues that theology is a creative process and discusses how the Islamic tra
The great plague of Athens that began in 430 BCE had an enormous effect on the imagination of its literary artists and on the social imagination of the city as a whole. In this book, Professor Mitchell-Boyask studies the impact of the plague on Athenian tragedy early in the 420s and argues for a significant relationship between drama and the development of the cult of the healing god Asclepius in the next decade, during a period of war and increasing civic strife. The Athenian decision to locate their temple for Asclepius adjacent to the Theater of Dionysus arose from deeper associations between drama, healing and the polis that were engaged actively by the crisis of the plague. The book also considers the representation of the plague in Thucydides' History as well as the metaphors generated by that representation which recur later in the same work.
Recent discoveries in physics, cosmology, and biochemistry have captured the public imagination and made the Design Argument - the theory that God created the world according to a specific plan - the
God, Space, and City in the Roman Imagination is a unique exploration of the relationship between the ancient Romans' visual and literary cultures and their imagination. Drawing on a vast range of anc
"Ray McCollum challenges the Christian reader to reclaim the power of imagination, so often used for success only in the business or self-help world, and to instead use it to unlock a future of hope,
Contrary to popular belief, the medieval religious imagination did not restrict itself to masculine images of God but envisaged the divine in multiple forms. In fact, the God of medieval Christendom w
Dickinson knew the Bible well. She was profoundly aware of Christian theology and she was writing at a time when comparative religion was extremely popular. This book is the first to consider Dickinson's religious imagery outside the dynamic of her personal faith and doubt. It argues that religious myths and symbols, from the sun-god to the open tomb, are essential to understanding the similetic movement of Dickinson's poetry - the reach for a comparable, though not identical, experience in the struggles and wrongs of Abraham, Jacob and Moses, and the life, death and resurrection of Christ. Linda Freedman situates the poet within the context of American typology, interprets her alongside contemporary and modern theology and makes important connections to Shakespeare and the British Romantics. Dickinson emerges as a deeply troubled thinker who needs to be understood within both religious and Romantic traditions.
We are obsessed with "barbarians." They are the "not us," who don't speak our language, or "any language," whom we despise, fear, invade and kill; for whom we feel compas
Could the best thing about religion be the heresies it spawns? Leading intellectuals in interwar Europe thought so. They believed that they lived in a world made derelict by God's absence and the inte
Could the best thing about religion be the heresies it spawns? Leading intellectuals in interwar Europe thought so. They believed that they lived in a world made derelict by God's absence and the inte
Though neither king nor priest, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco nevertheless conceptualized his right to sovereignty around a political theology in which national identity resembled a sacred cult. U
