Aquinas on Beauty


Book Description

Aquinas on Beauty explores the nature and role of beauty in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Beginning with a standard definition of beauty provided by Aquinas, it explores each of the components of that definition. The result is a comprehensive account of Aquinas’s formal view on the subject, supplemented by an exploration into Aquinas’s commentary on Dionysius’s Divine Names, including a comparison of his views with those of both Dionysius and those of Aquinas’s mentor, Albert the Great. The book also highlights the tight connection in Aquinas’s thought between aesthetics and ethics, and illustrates how Aquinas preserves what is best about aesthetic traditions preceding him, and anticipates what is best about aesthetic traditions that would follow, marrying objective and subjective aesthetic intuitions and charting a kind of via media between the common extremes.










Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics


Book Description

"Argues that Oakeshott's views on aesthetics, religion, and morality, which she places in the Augustinian tradition, are intimately linked to a creative moral personality that underlies his political theorizing. Also compares Oakeshott's Rationalism to Voegelin's concept of Gnosticism and considers both thinkers' treatment of Hobbes to delineate their philosophical differences"--Provided by publisher.







Not Etched in Stone


Book Description

The essays presented by Professors Marie A. Conn and Thérèse McGuire examine stone and water as vehicles of ritual memory through the lenses of various disciplines. In seven concise yet revealing chapters, the authors examine instances throughout history and unbound by geography of stone and water as real or abstract objects that shape our lives, possibly without our notice. Chapters topics include: -Water as a vehicle for ritual memory from the earliest days of human history to the present-day. -An investigation of the aesthetic principles of the Middle Ages up to the Gothic styles of cathedrals in North America. -Julian of Norwich, the famous cloistress, walled in by stone in comparison to Etty Hillesum, a WWII-era mystic, whose small desk used to write her revealing diaries became her stone cloister cell. -The Irish, water, and stone in Finnegan's Wake. -Warming the "stone heart" of a child pummeled by the foster care system. -The lack of clean water that contributes to wide-spread disease. -Group behavior and the eventualities of war through stone-like, (uncooperative and hardened) psychological states.




William Desmond and Contemporary Theology


Book Description

In William Desmond and Contemporary Theology, Christopher Simpson and Brendan Sammon coordinate, through a collection of scholarly essays, a timely exploration of William Desmond’s work on theology and metaphysics, bringing the disciplines of philosophy and theology together in new and vital ways. The book examines the contribution that Desmond’s metaphysics makes to contemporary theological discourse and to the renewal of metaphysics. A central issue for the contributors is the renewal of metaphysics within the post-metaphysical, or anti-metaphysical, context of late modernity. This volume not only capably demonstrates the viability of the metaphysical tradition but also illuminates its effectiveness and value in dealing with the many issues in contemporary theological conversation. William Desmond and Contemporary Theology presents Desmond’s contemporary, yet historically aware, continental metaphysics as able to provide revealing insights for the discussion of the relation between philosophy and theology. Simpson and Sammon argue, moreover, that Desmond’s contribution to linking these two fields makes his an important voice in the academic conversation. Students and scholars of Desmond, contemporary philosophy, theology, and literature will find much to provoke thought in this collection. Contributors: John R. Betz, Christopher R. Brewer, Patrick X. Gardner, Joseph K. Gordon, Renée Köhler-Ryan, D. Stephen Long, John Panteleimon Manoussakis, Cyril O’Regan, Brendan Thomas Sammon, D. C. Schindler, Christopher Ben Simpson, and Corey Benjamin Tutewiler.