SPIRIT MATTERS – Reaching for the Divine

Francesca Stavrakopoulou (Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou | Theology and Religion | University of Exeter) is a biblical scholar and broadcaster. She is currently (2024) Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter. The main focus of her research is on the Hebrew Bible, and on Israelite and Judahite history and religion. In this book Stavrakopoulou presents Yahweh, the […]

Religion is an extremely complex social and cultural phenomenon. No simple definition can capture its manifold nature. Rich, simple, consoling, disturbing, unifying, divisive, colourful, austere, prayerful, practical, doctrinal, mystical, peaceful, militaristic, solitary, communitarian, supernatural, worldly. It has all of these (often contradictory) aspects. The very briefest attempt to get a conceptual handle on the phenomenon

A myth is not an untruth or a lie. The word ‘myth’ has been hijacked to convey the meaning of falsity in recent decades, but this hijacking has done great disservice to the concept of myth. Myth, rather, is a package, in which deeper truths are contained. Edward Walker argues here that we should recover the value of

There is a phrase which has entered English usage recently. This is ‘the elephant in the room’. It is used to indicate a large inconvenient truth about which some prefer to remain blind. It could well be used in discussions of ‘theodicy’, otherwise known as ‘the problem of evil’ (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/). This is an entire branch of

Religion is an extremely complex social and cultural phenomenon. No simple definition can capture its manifold nature. Rich, simple, consoling, disturbing, unifying, divisive, colourful, austere, prayerful, practical, doctrinal, mystical, peaceful, militaristic, solitary, communitarian, supernatural, worldly. It has all of these (often contradictory) aspects. The very briefest attempt to get a conceptual handle on the phenomenon can be found at this link http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-religion/.

For as long as humans have thought deeply about existence there has been an intuition that there must be some universal principle of natural order. This would be a background reality to which even the gods as imagined in human culture would be subject. It has been conceived as the Indian Vedic ‘Rta’ and ‘Dharma’,

With the growing popularity of Zen Buddhism in the West, virtually everyone knows, or thinks they know, what a koan is: a brief and baffling question or statement that cannot be solved by the logical mind and which, after sustained concentration, can lead to sudden enlightenment. But the truth about koans is both simpler—and more

I was alerted to this recent publication by hearing Roger Scruton (http://www.roger-scruton.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Scruton ) on the radio last week. The publisher’s outline is as follows. In The Soul of the World, renowned philosopher Roger Scruton defends the experience of the sacred against today’s fashionable forms of atheism. He argues that our personal relationships, moral intuitions, and aesthetic

Belatedly canonized on 7 October 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI, Christian mystic and visionary Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179) (http://www.hildegard-society.org/faq.html) had been revered in the Roman Catholic Church for centuries. Apart from her work as an abbess of a Benedictine convent, and for her scholarship, Hildegard is one of the earliest known composers in the Western

For anyone with questions about the concept of God and wishing to delve into theological matters, try Systematic Theology by Wolfhart Pannenberg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannenberg) (1988-1994, 3 volumes in the English translation published by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company). This is an exhaustive analysis of all the key points in Christian doctrine. Required reading for Divinity students. For

Fr. Bernard J.F. Lonergan, CC, SJ (1904-1984) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonergan and http://www.bernardlonergan.com/) was a Canadian Jesuit Priest and a philosopher-theologian in the Thomist tradition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomism). In this landmark work of 1957 he offers a general account of knowledge in the natural sciences, humanities, philosophy and common sense. He presents a Transcendental Deduction with a Kantian flavour, a position on objectivity, the outline