David Tracy is widely considered one of the most important religious thinkers in North America, known for his pluralistic vision and disciplinary breadth. His first book in more than twenty years reflects Tracy’s range and erudition, collecting essays from the 1980s to 2018 into a two-volume work that will be greeted with joy by his admirers and praise from new readers. In the first volume, Fragments, Tracy gathers his most important essays on broad theological questions, beginning with the problem of suffering across Greek tragedy, Christianity, and Buddhism. The volume goes on to address the Infinite, and the many attempts to categorize and name it by Plato, Aristotle, Rilke, Heidegger, and others. In the remaining essays, he reflects on questions of the invisible, contemplation, hermeneutics, and public theology. Throughout, Tracy evokes the potential of fragments (understood both as concepts and events) to shatter closed systems and open us to difference and Infinity. Covering science, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and non-Western religious traditions, Tracy provides in Fragments a guide for any open reader to rethink our fragmenting contemporary culture.

In the second volume of his two-volume collection of essays from the 1980s to 2018, renowned Catholic theologian David Tracy gathers profiles of significant theologians, philosophers, and religious thinkers. These essays, he suggests, can be thought of in terms of Walt Whitman’s “filaments,” which are thrown out from the speaking self to others—ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary—in order to be caught elsewhere. Filaments arranges its subjects in rough chronological order, from choices in ancient theology, such as Augustine, through the likes of William of St. Thierry in the medieval period and Martin Luther and Michelangelo in the early modern, and, finally, to modern and contemporary thinkers, including Bernard Lonergan, Paul Tillich, Simone Weil, Karl Rahner, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Iris Murdoch. Taken together, these essays can be understood as a partial initiation into a history of Christian theology defined by Tracy’s key virtues of plurality and ambiguity. Marked by surprising insights and connections, Filaments brings the work of one of North America’s most important religious thinkers once again to the forefront to be celebrated by longtime and new readers alike.

Aimed at advanced students and upwards, this tightly organised international collection from theological experts forms a coherent and creative introduction to the most widely influential English-speaking Roman Catholic theologian of the past fifty years. It fills a gap in up-to-date commentary on the breadth and ambition of Tracy's ongoing thought.

This volume contains a new translation, with a historical introduction by the translators, of two works written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. Through Climacus, Kierkegaard contrasts the paradoxes of Christianity with Greek and modern philosophical thinking. In Philosophical Fragments he begins with Greek Platonic philosophy, exploring the implications of venturing beyond the Socratic understanding of truth acquired through recollection to the Christian experience of acquiring truth through grace. Published in 1844 and not originally planned to appear under the pseudonym Climacus, the book varies in tone and substance from the other works so attributed, but it is dialectically related to them, as well as to the other pseudonymous writings. The central issue of Johannes Climacus is doubt. Probably written between November 1842 and April 1843 but unfinished and published only posthumously, this book was described by Kierkegaard as an attack on modern speculative philosophy by "means of the melancholy irony, which did not consist in any single utterance on the part of Johannes Climacus but in his whole life. . . . Johannes does what we are told to do--he actually doubts everything--he suffers through all the pain of doing that, becomes cunning, almost acquires a bad conscience. When he has gone as far in that direction as he can go and wants to come back, he cannot do so. . . . Now he despairs, his life is wasted, his youth is spent in these deliberations. Life does not acquire any meaning for him, and all this is the fault of philosophy." A note by Kierkegaard suggests how he might have finished the work: "Doubt is conquered not by the system but by faith, just as it is faith that has brought doubt into the world!."

The Fragmentation of Being offers answers to some of the most fundamental questions in ontology. There are many kinds of beings but are there also many kinds of being? The world contains a variety of objects, each of which, let us provisionally assume, exists, but do some objects exist in different ways? Do some objects enjoy more being or existence than other objects? Are there different ways in which one object might enjoy more being than another? Most contemporary metaphysicians would answer "no" to each of these questions. So widespread is this consensus that the questions this book addressed are rarely even raised let alone explicitly answered. But Kris McDaniel carefully examines a wide range of reasons for answering each of these questions with a "yes". In doing so, he connects these questions with many important metaphysical topics, including substance and accident, time and persistence, the nature of ontological categories, possibility and necessity, presence and absence, persons and value, ground and consequence, and essence and accident. In addition to discussing contemporary problems and theories, McDaniel also discusses the ontological views of many important figures in the history of philosophy, including Aquinas, Aristotle, Descartes, Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, Leibniz, Meinong, and many more.

"This collection of writings, drawn from a wide variety of sources, reveals the intellectual depth and breadth of the author. The articles include political commentary, cultural critique, literary analysis, extended book reviews, and even a short story by West. All of these are held together by a prophetic Afro-American Christian perspective. The value of this book is that it provides easy access to a significant selection of the author's corpus." --Religious Studies Review (October 1989) "This volume collects over 50 articles, book reviews, and addresses by a Union Seminary theologian . . . . The most eloquent pieces are those in which West explains and interprets his more personally felt tradition of Afro-American Protestantism." -- Library Journal

In this book, Elizabeth S. Dodd traces the contours of a lyric theology through the lens of English lyric tradition. She addresses the dominance of narrative and drama in contemporary theological aesthetics by drawing on recent developments in lyric theory. Informed by the work of critics such as Jonathan Culler, Dodd explores the significance of lyric for theological discourse. Lyric is presented here as a short, musical, expressive and personal form that is also fragmentary, embodied, socially located and performative. The main chapters address key moments in English lyric tradition. This selective approach aims to expand the theological gaze beyond the monochromatic features of the traditional canon. It covers Anglo-Saxon hymns, medieval lullaby carols, early-modern sonnets and the prophetic poetry of Romanticism, but also Grime and hip hop, performance poetry, social media poetry and Geoffrey Hill.