Through a comparison of their aesthetics and hermeneutics, this book reveals that both Gadamer and Balthasar reject an autonomous, neutral, distanced starting point for interpretation. Instead, they advocate a dialogical model in which interpreters allow themselves to be engaged by the truth of the text or artwork at hand. Both thinkers use aesthetic categories to describe this model of interpretation (such as the neo-Platonic category of radiance) and both reflect a disclosure-concealment theory of truth. In recognizing that interpreters are part of an unfolding history and that the examination of historical texts cannot be done from a neutral standpoint, they both acknowledge that textual interpretation must contain the dimension of dialogue with the past truths. Significantly, Balthasar incorporates these aesthetic and hermeneutical categories into an explicitly Trinitarian salvation-history framework, which is absent in Gadamer's thought. This book concludes with the implications of an aesthetic hermeneutics for contemporary Roman Catholic theology and its dialogue with various schools of thought (philosophical and religious), arguing that the concrete, particular forms of Christianity as expressed in Roman Catholicism cannot be bracketed or evacuated by Catholic theologians in the interest of achieving consensus in religious matters. To the contrary, it is precisely in these forms that we believe that God's revelation takes place.

The work of the influential Jesuit theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) has become a common point of reference in discussing the relationship of theology and the arts. However, the full significance of his theological aesthetics for both the emerging field of theology and the arts, as well as for interdisciplinary conversation with contemporary art and theory, remains to be unfolded. This book explores the ways in which Balthasar's theo-aesthetics, when taken together with his theological dramatics and theo-logic, yield a theologically informed phenomenology of the work of art with rich implications for contemporary theologies of art. By investigating the nature and disclosure of beauty and being through art, Balthasar's theological re-reading of Heidegger, his theo-dramatic relation of all forms to Christ, and his phenomenology of truth, Balthasar's philosophical and theological insights into the nature of art are presented as a resource for a constructive theology of art which "springs" from the depths of his theological aesthetics.

'This volume presents carefully selected essays from Gadamer's Kleine Schriften. The seven essays comprising Part 1 contain Gadamer's discussion of hermeneutical reflection. Part 2 consists of six essays dealing with phenomenology, existential philosophy, and philosophical hermeneutics.

Gadamer's Hermeneutics and the Art of Conversation covers the nature of dialogue and understanding in Hans-Georg Gadamer's lingually oriented hermeneutics and its relevance for contemporary philosophy. This timely collection of essays stresses the fundamental significance of the other for a further development of Heidegger's analytics of Dasein. By recognizing the priority of the other over oneself, Gadamerian hermeneutics founds a culture of dialogue sorely needed in our multi-cultural globalized community. The essays solicited for this volume are presented in three thematic blocks: "Hermeneutic Conversation," "Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, and Transcendence," "Hermeneutic Ethics, Education, and Politics." The volume proposes a dynamic understanding of hermeneutics as putting into practice the art of conversation.

Hans-Georg Gadamer's poetics completely overturns the European aesthetic tradition. By concentrating on the experience of meaning, Unfinished Worlds shows how Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics transforms aesthetics into a mode of attentive practice. Gadamer's poetics has deep implications for all of the humanities, and how we can understand the meaning of poetry, art, literature, history and theology. His emphasis on participation promises an approach that will revolutionise aesthetic and hermeneutic practice, and gives us new ways to think about the cultural productivity and social legitimacy of the humanities.

This collection of essays by distinguished authors explores the present-day field of theological aesthetics: from von Balthasar's contribution and parallel developments to correctives and alternatives to his approach. A tribute to von Balthasar's own project expands into a dialogue with ancient and medieval traditions in search of revelatory aesthetics. The contributors outline challenges to his approach (including Protestant perspectives) and introduce new ways of viewing the field of theological aesthetics, which ultimately opens up to the idea of concrete cultural contexts and practical human needs determining the use of the arts and aesthetic sensibilities in theology.