ABSTRACT The central thesis of this essay is that, in addressing the many disruptive experiences people have in current times, Tillich’s notion of ‘the courage to be’ should be complemented by the notion of the ‘courage to be vulnerable’. In adding this idea, it is argued that courage should focus less on the anxieties of emptiness, guilt and death of the individual, but rather to being carried, becoming and appearing to each other. Philosophical support for this proposed modification has been (...) found in the notion of ‘natality’, coined by Hannah Arendt, by which she expresses the wonder of being born, and the meanings three feminist scholars, Stone, Brison and Cavarero ascribed to it. First, people are both fundamentally and situationally vulnerable due to their ‘being carried and being born’ physically. Secondly, human beings could experience a ‘second birth’ by starting something new. And thirdly, people could have another ‘birth’ by fostering the courage to disclose themselves and their vulnerability to the other. However, this courage to be vulnerable must be facilitated by communities-with-a-heart, which embrace reciprocity, interdependency and a plurality of experiences, leading to people becoming each other’s witness in times of disruption and pursuing activities of faith, hope and love. (shrink)

ABSTRACT When read alongside the great command of Deuteronomy, ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength,’ the Judeo-Christian directive to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ is perhaps one of the most theologically and ethically charged phrases in the Bible. In these two mutually reliant commandments lies a meeting point between the divine and the human that has important implications for our understanding of the nexus between theological conceptions of love and philosophical engagement with worldly existence. (...) This point of intersection is explored in a particularly unique way in the thinking of Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Nancy. In this article, I conduct the first sustained comparative analysis of their respective philosophies, using an exploration of the role of love and affectivity in their work to better understand the philosophical opportunity represented by the commandment to love God and neighbour. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Johannes van Oort claims that Augustine has an irreconcilable ‘two-fold ecclesiology,’ which separates the inwardness of unseen individual grace from the external empirical community. Efforts to unify Augustine’s ‘two-fold ecclesiology’ have hitherto focused on emphasizing the continuity between the invisible and the visible, the locus for which is often the manifestation of individual grace in the context of the community. The present article brackets the debate about grace and the power of signs and focuses instead on the relationship between (...) the individual and the community, broadly and loosely construed. Accordingly, the question arises, what is the relationship between individual and community? It is our conviction that drawing dichotomies between the individual and community, between the invisible and the visible, is unwarranted and in fact proves detrimental to understanding Augustine’s comprehensive approach to ecclesiology. By proposing a holistic approach to Augustine’s ecclesiology instead, we seek to accord community its central place in the Church as the culmination of individuality and vice-versa. In this way, we opt for an approach that reconciles Augustine’s ‘two-fold ecclesiology’. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Kant’s late essay ‘The End of All Things’ establishes a distinctly modern field of inquiry that has fittingly been called ‘philosophical eschatology’ by asking, ‘why do human beings expect an end of the world at all?’ Interpretation of the essay’s purpose and argument have usually taken one of two routes: Kant is either understood as writing an esoteric political critique under the guise of the philosophy of religion, or as being focused largely on problems related to the immortality of (...) the soul as a postulate of pure practical reason. In contrast, I argue that the essay presents the end of all things as a cosmological idea of reason. In this essay I trace Kant’s idea of an end as its preconditions are established through the three Critiques, and finally made explicit in his late work. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article offers a comparative reading of the ontologies of David Bentley Hart and Jean-Paul Sartre as well as their respective appeals to phenomenology as a philosophical method. While it may seem odd to compare one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated atheists with one of contemporary Christianity’s most highly-acclaimed critics of atheism, this article shows that there are many surprising parallels between the ontological outlooks of Hart and Sartre, namely their conceptions of God as the unity of being (...) and consciousness and their accounts of human consciousness as a desire to ‘become God’. By examining the similarities and differences between Sartre’s and Hart’s philosophical and theological works, this article seeks to highlight the phenomenological aspects of Hart’s theological outlook and consider how Hart’s appeal to the phenomenological analysis of intentional consciousness in his theological work can illuminate our understanding of the ongoing engagements between theology and phenomenology. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay’s aim is to demonstrate how recent defenses of divine simplicity have failed to address the prevailing challenge of analogical language, and thereby render much of their argumentation for simplicity’s appropriateness in Christian theology null-and-void. For this task, three book-length works published within the last few years are examined: Steven Duby’s Divine Simplicity: A Dogmatic Account, D. Stephen Long’s The Perfectly Simple Triune God: Aquinas and His Legacy, and Jordan Barrett’s Divine Simplicity: A Biblical and Trinitarian Account. The (...) first section briefly details what each author understands divine simplicity to characterize, and how that characterization involves the pivotal denial of God belonging to any genus. The second section addresses the extent to which each author provides an answer as to how one can analogically speak of a simple God. Finally, the third section critiques the kinds of analogical positions found in Thomas Cajetan’s influential De Nominum Analogia, showing that they do not provide a sufficient analogical framework to ground intelligible propositions or inferences about a simple God, which thereby places the original three authors’ defenses in danger of serious incoherence. (shrink)