Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence, with its vigorous rejection of every appeal to the beyond, is often presumed to be indifferent to the concerns of religion. Daniel Barber shows that this is not the ...case. Addressing the intersection between Deleuze’s thought and the notion of religion, he proposes an alliance between immanence and the act of naming God. In doing so, he gives us a way out of the paralysing debate between religion and the secular. What matters is not to take one side or the other, but to create the new in this world.
The psalms provide multivalent ways by which humans experience the sacred through worship and contemplation. This book explores how psalms use symbols and images to convey the sacred presence as ...concrete and intimate, yet ephemeral and transcendent-illustrating diverse types of "sanctuaries" where God is mediated.
This book examines the relationship between transcendence and immanence within Christian mystical and apophatic writings. Original essays from a range of leading, established, and emerging scholars ...in the field focus on the roles of language, signs, and images, and consider how mystical theology might contribute to contemporary reflection on the Word incarnate. This collection of essays re-examines works from such canonical figures as Eckhart, Augustine, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Nicolas of Cusa, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, along with the philosophical thought of Iris Murdoch, Jacques Lacan, and Martin Heidegger, and the contemporary phenomena of the Emerging Church. Presenting new readings of key ideas in mystical theology, and renewed engagement with the visionary and the everyday, the therapeutic and the transformative, these essays question how we might think about what may lie between transcendence and immanence.
The essays in this collection examine philosophical, religious, and literary or artistic texts using methodologies and insights that have grown out of reflection on literature and art. In them, them ...phrase "material spirit" becomes a point of departure for considering the continuing spectral effects of religious texts and concerns in ways that do not simply call for, or assume, new orrenewed forms of religiosity. The writers in this collection seek to examine religion beyond traditional notions of transcendence: Their topics range from early Christian religious practices to global climate change. Some of the essays explore religious themes or tones in literary texts, for example, works by Wordsworth, Hopkins, Proust, Woolf, and Teresa of Avila. Others approach in a literarycritical mood philosophical or para-philosophical writers such as Bataille, Husserl, Derrida, and Benjamin. Still others treat writers of a more explicitly religious orientation, such as Augustine, Rosenzweig, or Bernard of Clairvaux.
The claim has repeatedly been made, and has often been contested, that a single transcendent being is present or active in all of the world's major religions. In this view, names such as 'God, ' ...'Allah, ' 'nirvana, ' 'Vishnu, ' and 'Brahman' all refer to the same transcendent reality. Absent from the debate and here provided is a serious study of such claims in the light of the most pertinent philosophical literature, namely that concerning questions of identity and individuation. Of necessity, the terms that the claims employ are very general and abstract: the world's religions, it is said, all refer to the same 'thing, ' 'being, ' or 'reality.' Although analogy, rightly understood, can back the transcendent extension of descriptive expressions such as 'wise, ' 'good, ' and 'powerful, ' it cannot do likewise for expressions such as 'one, ' 'same, ' and 'many.' So pluralists' identity claims appear empty. Hallett scrutinizes the soundness of this critique, its broad implications, and the possibility of replacing empty identity claims with suitable parables or comparisons.
