The orderliness of the universe and the existence of human beings already provides some reason for believing that there is a God - as argued in Richard Swinburne's earlier book Is There a God ? Swinburne now claims that it is probable that the main Christian doctrines about the nature of God and his actions in the world are true. In virtue of his omnipotence and perfect goodness, God must be a Trinity, live a human life in order to share our suffering, and found a church which would enable him to tell all humans about this. It is also quite probable that he would provide his human life as an atonement for our wrongdoing, teach us how we should live and tell us his plans for our future after death. Among founders of religions, Jesus satisfies uniquely well the requirement of living the sort of human life which God would need to have lived. But to give us adequate reason to believe that Jesus was God, God would need to put his 'signature' on the life of Jesus by an act which he alone could do, for example raise him from the dead. There is adequate historical evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. The church which he founded gave plausible interpretations of his basic message. Therefore Christian doctrines are probably true.

Richard Swinburne presents a powerful case for substance dualism and libertarian free will. He argues that pure mental and physical events are distinct, and defends an account of agent causation in which the soul can act independently of bodily causes. We are responsible for our actions, and the findings of neuroscience cannot prove otherwise.

Focusing on Algernon Charles Swinburne's poems on Apollo, Yisrael Levin calls for a re-examination of the poet's place in Victorian studies in light of his contributions to nineteenth-century intellectual history. Swinburne's Apollonian poetry, Levin argues, shows the poet's active participation in late-Victorian debates about the nature and function of faith in an age of changing religious attitudes. Levin traces the shifts that took place in Swinburne's conception of Apollo over a period of four decades, from Swinburne's attempt to define Apollo as an alternative to the Judeo-Christian deity to Swinburne's formation of a theological system revolving around Apollo and finally to the ways in which Swinburne's view of Apollo led to his agnostic view of spirituality. Even though Swinburne had lost his faith and rejected institutional religion by his early twenties, he retained a distinct interest in spiritual issues and paid careful attention to developments in religious thought. Levin persuasively shows that Swinburne was not simply a poet provocateur who enjoyed controversy but failed to provide valid cultural commentary, but was rather a profound thinker whose insights into nineteenth-century spirituality are expressed throughout his Apollonian poetry.

No detailed description available for "Swinburne's poetics".

This title was first published in 2003. This book seeks to establish whether a Christian position must entail a belief in hell or whether Christians can hold a coherent theory of universal salvation. Richard Swinburne's defence of hell depends on the argument that hell is necessary if humans are to be genuinely free. It becomes clear that the contemporary discussion of hell and universalism cannot be separated from the issues of human freedom and God's knowledge, and so Hall centres the discussion round the question 'Are we Free to Reject God?' John Hick argues that although we are free to reject God there will eventually be an universalist outcome. Having examined the contrasting arguments of Hick and Swinburne, Hall builds on Hick's position to develop an argument for Christian universal salvation which holds in balance our freedom in relation to God and the assurance that all will finally be saved.

Charles Algernon Swinburne's literary reputation rests almost exclusively upon his poetry, and though his critical writings were voluminous, they are usually slighted by literary historians. Examinations of Swinburne's aesthetic principles, too, are generally based upon interpretations of his poetry, though these may be as misleading as the discrepancies between other artists' principles and practices. Believing that a solid and consistent core of poetic theory underlay all of Swinburne's critical essays, casual pieces, and letters, Professor Connolly has attempted to reconstruct the theory from a careful analysis of this body of writing. In this book he sets forth his findings as general principles and as they apply to lyric and dramatic poetry. "Swinburne was a far sounder and more consistent critic than he is usually given credit for being," Professor Connolly concludes, "and the various critical principles that can be discovered in his essays hang together in a more integrated theory of poetry than is usually imagined. He had, as other critics had, a number of basic principles and themes that he used with astonishing versatility in his criticism. The successful poet who is also a critic usually has a valuable contribution to make to the general understanding and appreciation of poetry. Swinburne, in this respect, was not an exception."

Wrongly believed to be a parodic divertissement by the nineteenth-century English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Statue of John Brute reveals itself as a highly interesting intertextual universe where echoes from Shakespeare, the Restauration drama, Beckford, Gothic fiction, and many other sources of inspiration mix together in an extremely short but explosive text. At the heart of this volume is an absolutely original analysis of this relatively unknown text, meant to acknowledge its paramount importance as Oscar Wilde’s source for his well-known The Picture of Dorian Gray. While trying to confute the hypotheses put forward by critics from the 1920s and 1930s who believed The Statue to be a fin-de-siècle parody of Wilde’s Aesthetic masterpiece, this study anticipates its date of composition by almost twenty years – through an accurate bio-literary and corpus-stylistic analysis – thus recognising it not as a parody, but as a possible hypotext of Dorian Gray.