"The totalitarian state clearly intends to eliminate all those forms of organic community that rival the absolute loyalty of the individual to the state. This god is a jealous god. . . . Mrowczyński-Van Allen's diagnosis is therefore no less relevant after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And his proposed cure is no less salutary. He appeals to the work of Grossman and other voices from the East to oppose the idolatry of the deified self with the icon, which opens up a distance in which giving and forgiving can occur. Eastern voices are so helpful because they refuse to quarantine theological questions; the borders between theology, politics, and literature are fluid and porous, because they are all a part of an integrated life. The holism of totalitarianism must be opposed by another kind of holism that replaces the idol with the icon. At the same time, the aspiration of secularism to separate politics from theology, and power from love, must be opposed by a politics based on an opening of human persons to God and to each other, the kind of self-donation found in Grossman, and for Christians, on the Cross." --From the Foreword by William T. Cavanaugh

The Icons came from the sky. They belong to an inhuman enemy. They ended our civilization, and they can kill us. Most of us. Dol, Ro, Tima, and Lucas are the four Icon Children, the only humans immune to the Icon's power to stop a human heart. Now that Los Angeles has been saved, things are more complicated - and not just because Dol has to choose between Lucas and Ro, the two great loves of her life. As she flees to a resistance outpost hidden beneath a mountain, Dol makes contact with a fifth Icon Child, if only through her visions. When Dol and the others escape to Southeast Asia in search of this missing child, Dol's dreams, feelings and fears collide in an epic showdown that will change more than just four lives -- and stop one heart forever. In this riveting sequel to Icons, filled with nonstop action and compelling romance, bestselling author Margaret Stohl explores what it means to be human and how our greatest weakness can be humanity's strongest chance at survival.

By delving into the history of the fetish-object among both modern and contemporary commentators, this book highlights the fetish-object’s role as a philosophical and religious concept of the highest significance. Historically, fetishes are implicated in specific struggles for sovereign (political) and/or religious (hierarchical) power, with their interwoven symbols defined as the primary location for transcendence in our world. This book defines the political consequences of fetish-objects within a western cultural, and primarily theological context through a comparative approach of various literatures on fetish-objects—anthropological to the psychological, Marxist to the theological. It reconceives of fetishes as a form of resistance to oppressive structures, something which motivated Christians themselves historically, and shaped our western understanding of the sacraments far more than has been acknowledged. Taking up this conversation likewise holds forth the possibility of reconceptualizing how fetish-objects and sacramental presences both speak profoundly to our late-modern selves.

The Phenomenology of Revelation in Heidegger, Marion, and Ricoeur provides a critical framework for understanding the phenomenology of revelation through a series of close readings that serve as the basis for an imagined dialogue between Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricoeur. Adam J. Graves distinguishes between two dominant approaches to revelation: a “radical” approach that seeks to disclose a pre-linguistic experience of revelation through a radicalization of the phenomenological reduction, and a “hermeneutical” one that characterizes revelation as an eruption of meaning arising from our encounter with concrete symbols, narratives, and texts. According to Graves, the radical approach is often driven by a misplaced concern for maintaining philosophical rigor and for avoiding theological biases, or “contaminations.” This preoccupation leads to a process of “counter-contamination” in which the concept of revelation is ultimately estranged from the phenomenon’s rich historical and linguistic content. While Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology may do a better job of accommodating the concrete content of revelation, it does so at the price of having to renouncing the kind of “presuppositionlessness” generally associated with phenomenological method. Ultimately, Graves argues that a more nuanced appreciation of the complex nature of our linguistic inheritance enables us to reconceive the relationship between revelation and philosophical thought.

A bold recasting of prayer as a rhetorical art, Spiritual Modalities investigates situations, strategies, and performative modes of discourse directed to divine audiences. Examining how prayer “works,” Spiritual Modalities reads prayer’s situations and strategies, its characteristic acts and attitudes, to advance an understanding of prayer as a basic expression of our rhetorical capacities for communication and communion. This groundbreaking analysis demonstrates how prayer draws on fundamental capacities to engage other beings rhetorically to argue that we are never more human than when we address the nonhuman. Spiritual Modalities is notable in its aim to articulate a critical rhetoric of prayer in a secular idiom. It draws on contributions to rhetorical theory from Kenneth Burke along with a broad range of classical and contemporary perspectives on audience, address, speech acts, and modes of performance. The book also takes a multicultural and multimodal approach to prayer as rhetorical performance. The texts and practices of prayer represented range across religious traditions and historical eras and include both verbal and physical modes of divine address. The book will be of interest to scholars researching religious language, Burkean approaches to discourse, practices of memory, and media studies.

Thomas Pfau’s study of images and visual experience is a tour de force linking Platonic metaphysics to modern phenomenology and probing literary, philosophical, and theological accounts of visual experience from Plato to Rilke. Incomprehensible Certainty presents a sustained reflection on the nature of images and the phenomenology of visual experience. Taking the “image” (eikōn) as the essential medium of art and literature and as foundational for the intuitive ways in which we make contact with our “lifeworld,” Thomas Pfau draws in equal measure on Platonic metaphysics and modern phenomenology to advance a series of interlocking claims. First, Pfau shows that, beginning with Plato’s later dialogues, being and appearance came to be understood as ontologically distinct from (but no longer opposed to) one another. Second, in contrast to the idol that is typically gazed at and visually consumed as an object of desire, this study positions the image as a medium whose intrinsic abundance and excess reveal to us its metaphysical function—namely, as the visible analogue of an invisible, numinous reality. Finally, the interpretations unfolded in this book (from Plato, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Damascene via Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Julian of Norwich, and Nicholas of Cusa to modern writers and artists such as Goethe, Ruskin, Turner, Hopkins, Cézanne, and Rilke) affirm the essential complementarity of image and word, visual intuition and hermeneutic practice, in theology, philosophy, and literature. Like Pfau’s previous book, Minding the Modern, Incomprehensible Certainty is a major work. With over fifty illustrations, the book will interest students and scholars of philosophy, theology, literature, and art history.

Of many surprising experiences that life has brought, two stand out for me - God and children. Neither turned out to be anything like I had been lead to expect. God was big in my family of origin; big enough to lure me into a life of faith. But I hardly knew what I was getting into. Then I married and had two daughters. At the time I thought you had children while you got on with the rest of your life. That idea turned out to be wide off the mark as well. Parents sometimes ask their children, usually in the light of some misdemeanor: What have you got to say for yourself? But that question can as readily be put the other way. After all we bring our children without consultation into the world. They have to live with the circumstances we create until age and stage give them a choice. This book is an attempt at an answer to the implied questions of the rising generation. Of all possibilities available why did you choose to live as a believer? And what on earth has that to do with us? The author an Anglican theologian at St Mark's National Anglican Theological College in Canberra, Australia and has previously written for Liturgical Press in the US.