This volume by leading philosophers and theologians explores the reception of continental philosophy in North America and its ongoing relation to Catholic institutions. What has prompted so many North American Catholics to support this particular school of thought? Why do so many Catholics continue to find continental philosophy attractive, and why do so many continental philosophers work in Catholic departments? The establishment of the relationship between continental philosophy and Catholicism was not obvious, nor was it easy. Many of the contributors to this volume have played important roles in its development, and in these pages they take a stance on this evolving relationship and demonstrate that the engagement is far from over. Exploring the mutual interests that made this alliance possible as well as the underlying tensions, the volume provides, for the first time, an extended reflection on the historical, institutional, and intellectual relationship between Catholicism and continental philosophy on North American soil up to the present day.

Why has continental philosophy so often made its North American home in Catholic institutions?

The history of phenomenology, and its absence, in American philosophy. Phenomenology and so-called “continental philosophy” receive scant attention in most American philosophy departments, despite their foundational influence on intellectual movements such as existentialism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. In Inventing Philosophy’s Other, Jonathan Strassfeld explores this absence, revealing how everyday institutional practices played a determinative role in the development of twentieth-century academic discourse. Conventional wisdom holds that phenomenology’s absence from the philosophical mainstream in the United States reflects its obscurity or even irrelevance to America’s philosophical traditions. Strassfeld refutes this story as he traces phenomenology’s reception in America, delivering the first systematic historical study of the movement in the United States. He examines the lives and works of Marjorie Grene, Alfred Schütz, Hubert Dreyfus, and Iris Marion Young, among others, while also providing a fresh introduction to phenomenological philosophy.

A magisterial history of the centuries-long conflict between “progress” and “tradition” in the world’s largest international institution. The story of Roman Catholicism has never followed a singular path. In no time period has this been more true than over the last two centuries. Beginning with the French Revolution, extending to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, and concluding with present-day crises, John T. McGreevy chronicles the dramatic upheavals and internal divisions shaping the most multicultural, multilingual, and global institution in the world. Through powerful individual stories and sweeping birds-eye views, Catholicism provides a mesmerizing assessment of the Church’s complex role in modern history: both shaper and follower of the politics of nation states, both conservator of hierarchies and evangelizer of egalitarianism. McGreevy documents the hopes and ambitions of European missionaries building churches and schools in all corners of the world, African Catholics fighting for political (and religious) independence, Latin American Catholics attracted to a theology of liberation, and Polish and South Korean Catholics demanding democratic governments. He includes a vast cast of riveting characters, known and unknown, including the Mexican revolutionary Fr. Servando Teresa de Mier; Daniel O’Connell, hero of Irish emancipation; Sr. Josephine Bakhita, a formerly enslaved Sudanese nun; Chinese statesman Ma Xiaobang; French philosopher and reformer Jacques Maritain; German Jewish philosopher and convert, Edith Stein; John Paul II, Polish pope and opponent of communism; Gustavo Gutiérrez, Peruvian founder of liberation theology; and French American patron of modern art, Dominique de Menil. Throughout this essential volume, McGreevy details currents of reform within the Church as well as movements protective of traditional customs and beliefs. Conflicts with political leaders and a devotional revival in the nineteenth century, the experiences of decolonization after World War II and the Second Vatican Council in the twentieth century, and the trauma of clerical sexual abuse in the twenty-first all demonstrate how religion shapes our modern world. Finally, McGreevy addresses the challenges faced by Pope Francis as he struggles to unite the over one billion members of the world’s largest religious community.

The late Jean-Louis Chretien's responsorial and polyphonic style of thinking is nothing less than a performance of gratitude, which manifests the many ways and manners that our wounded finitude is graced and blessed along the peregrine path of human existence. Finitude's Wounded Praise: Responses to Jean-Louis Chretien is a receptive celebratory response to the immense fecundity and potential of Chretien's "thank you" of gratitude. This volume gathers leading Chretien scholars and thinkers to explicate, explore, think with, and commemorate his thought. The essays in the volume engage Chretien's work from three primary fields: phenomenological, literary/poetic, and theological. Finitude's Wounded Praise is a diverse, exploratory, and impressive testament to the expansive and enduring richness of Chretien's oeuvre.

This book presents a historiographical and theorical analysis of how Husserlian Phenomenology arrived and developed in North America. The chapters analyze the different phases of the reception of Edmund Husserl’s thought in the USA and Canada. The volume discusses the authors and universities that played a fundamental role in promoting Husserlian Phenomenology and clarifies their connection with American Philosophy, Pragmatism, and with Analytic Philosophy. Starting from the analysis of how the first American Scholars of Edmund Husserl's thought opened the door to the reception of his texts, the book explores the first encounters between Pragmatism and Husserlian Phenomenology in American Universities. The study focuses, then, on those Scholars who fled from Europe to America, from 1933 onwards, to escape Nazism - Felix Kaufmann, Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, Herbert Spiegelberg, Fritz Kaufmann, among the most notable - and illustrates how their teaching provided the very basis for the spreading of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America. The volume examines, then, the action of the 20th Century North-American Husserl Scholars, together with those places, societies, centers, and journals, specifically created to represent the development of the studies devoted to Husserlian Phenomenology in the U.S., with a focus of the Regional Phenomenological Schools.

This book aims to put modern continental philosophy, specifically the sub-fields of phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, critical theory and genealogy, into conversation with the field of contemporary theology. Colby Dickinson demonstrates the way in which negative dialectics, or the negation of negation, may help us to grasp the thin (or non-existent) borders between continental philosophy and theology as the leading thinkers of both fields wrestle with their entrance into a new era. With the declining place of “the sacred” in the public sphere, we need to pay more attention than ever to how continental philosophy seems to be returning to distinctly theological roots. Through a genealogical mapping of 20th-century continental philosophers, Dickinson highlights the ever-present Judeo-Christian roots of modern Western philosophical thought. Opposing categories such as immanence/transcendence, finitude/infinitude, universal/particular, subject/object, are at the center of works by thinkers such as Agamben, Marion, Vattimo, Levinas, Latour, Caputo and Adorno. This book argues that utilizing a negative dialectic allows us to move beyond the apparent fixation with dichotomies present within those fields and begin to perform both philosophy and theology anew.