These lectures and essays were regarded by Marcel as the best introduction to his thought. Creative Fidelity not only deals with perennial themes of faith, fidelity, belief, incarnate being, and participation, but also includes chapters on religious tolerance and orthodoxy and an important critical essay on Karl Jaspers.

"This book offers guidelines that will help those interested in Catholic theology to make sound judgments about the authority and meaning of the documents in which the church has expressed its faith over the centuries. Making such judgments requires a knowledge of the correct level of response these documents call for from the faithful and the ability to offer to today's faithful a contemporary understanding of their faith. The task of the interpreter is one of creative fidelity, requiring a delicate balance between being faithful to the original meaning of the text and creative in finding the concepts and terms that make it meaningful today."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This book is a unique study of the work of Gabriel Marcel, a twentieth-century philosopher of international renown. This book brings a fresh perspective to the examination of Marcel's thought, highlighting facets of interest to many different audiences and presenting a clear exposition of the nature of creative fidelity.

I hope that this book will be widely read, and I especially commend it to four classes of persons: I. For myself I have come across nothing more important than M. Marcel’s writings here and elsewhere on the problem of metaphysics. I say problem advisedly: for we are all of us these days in the end puzzled as to what exactly metaphysics is. The strict Thomist has his answer: so has the positivist: so too the Biblical theologian who is much too ready to find in the decay of ontology an argument for the authenticity of ‘Biblical perspectives’. M. Marcel was trained in the tradition of idealism: and he knew the influence both of Bergsen and of W. E. Hocking. His conversation with himself certainly betrays their influences: but it is of far wider significance. Professor Ayer and Dr. E. L. Mascall have their answer to the question what ontology is: they have their formulae. Marcel probes beneath these answers; for him ontology is much more than a body of doctrine. It is the intellectual expression of the human situation; what is expressed in the syllogisms of, for instance, Père Garrigou-Lagrange, is valid only in so far as it catches and summarises the very being of man and the universe, as that being is lived through and met with by man in his pilgrimage through life. I find as I read M. Marcel that the frontiers are blurred reflection, metaphysics, spirituality. And that is the strength of his seemingly inconsequent method. In a way he is too wise to suppose that the arguments of the philosophia perennis are enough in their abstract form to convince a man; they only carry conviction in relation to a whole experience of life of which they are the expression. The issues between the Thomist, the positivist, the idealist are not issues simply of doctrine but of life; and to see what they are, one must probe, stretching language beyond the frontiers of poetry, somehow to convey the issues as things through which men live. 2. The book should be studied closely by the moralist whether he be philosopher or moral theologian. Where some of the most familiar ethical ideas are concerned, Marcel reminds us of their ‘inside’ when we so often in our discussion think simply of their ‘outside’. What is a promise? We have our answer pat, our formula which permits us to go on with the discussion of our obligations to keep the promises we have made and so on. We don’t wait to probe. I find myself inevitably using that word ‘probe’ again and again in connection with M. Marcel: for what he does is to probe the unsuspected profundities of the familiar. Most professional students of ethics are morally philistine, men who give little time to penetrating the ‘inside’ of the ideas they are handling. And there Marcel pulls them up short. 3. The book should be widely read by the many Christian ‘fellow-travellers’ of today, those who follow, as it were, afar off the Christian way without themselves coming yet to the point of an act of faith in the Crucified. Its very incompleteness will respond to their groping anxiety, and it will enrich their vision of life. And this it can do because it eschews dogmatic exposition seeking rather to shew the inside of the truly Christian way of life. Fidelity, hope, charity, mystery—these are fundamental categories of the Christian way: and of all these Marcel has much to say, which is in every way fresh and yet at the same time rooted in the tradition of Catholic Christianity. The reader of such a work as Albert Camus’ La Peste, with its preoccupation with the problem of an atheistic sanctity, will understand M. Marcel. In a way he challenges the possibility of Camus’ vision; and he does so not on dogmatic grounds but by an analysis of holiness and goodness which shews indirectly their inseparability from acknowledgment of the all-embracing mystery of God. An age which has known evil as ours has and does still know it, is inevitably interested in goodness; and it is with goodness, as something inevitably issuing out of God because a gift from him, that Marcel’s studies deal. 4. And lastly I commend this book because at a time when minuteness and subtlety of mind are too often the prerogatives of the light-heartedly destructive, he reminds us that a true minuteness and a true intellectual subtlety are rooted in humility and purity of heart, and manifest the soil in which they are nourished by graciousness whose charm none can escape and a strength of argument which none can break.

The Creative Curriculum comes alive! This videotape-winner of the 1989 Silver Apple Award at the National Educational Film and Video Festival-demonstrates how teachers set the stage for learning by creating a dynamic well-organized environment. It shows children involved in seven of the interest areas in the The Creative Curriculum and explains how they learn in each area. Everyone conducts in-service training workshops for staff and parents or who teaches early childhood education courses will find the video an indispensable tool for explainin appropriate practice.

The idea of 'hope' has received significant attention in the political sphere recently. But is hope just wishful thinking, or can it be something more than a political catch-phrase? This book argues that hope can be understood existentially, or on the basis of what it means to be human. Under this conception of hope, given to us by Gabriel Marcel, hope is not optimism, but the creation of ways for us to flourish. War, poverty and an absolute reliance on technology are real-life evils that can suffocate hope. Marcel's thought provides a way to overcome these negative experiences. An ethics of hope can function as an alternative to isolation, dread, and anguish offered by most existentialists. This book presents Marcel's existentialism as a convincing, relevant moral theory; founded on the creation of hope, interwoven with the individual's response to the death of God. Jill Hernandez argues that today's reader of Marcel can resonate with his belief that the experience of pain can be transcended through a philosophy of hope and an escape from materialism.

Reissued as part of Counterpoint's celebration of beloved American author Wendell Berry, the five stories in Fidelity return readers to Berry's fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, and the familiar characters who form a tight–knit community within. "Berry richly evokes Port William's farmlands and hamlets, and his characters are fiercely individual, yet mutually protective in everything they do. . . . His sentences are exquisitely constructed, suggesting the cyclic rhythms of his agrarian world." —The New York Times Book Review "Each of these elegant stories spans the twentieth century and reveals the profound interconnectedness of the farmers and their families to one another, to their past and to the landscape they inhabit." —The San Francisco Chronicle "Visionary . . . rooted in a deep concern for nature and the land, . . . [these stories are] tough, relentless and clear. In a roundabout way they are confrontational because they ask basic questions about men and women, violence, work and loyalty." —Hans Ostrom, The Morning News Tribune