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 […]
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The Nature and Destiny of Man (1943) issues a vigorous challenge to Western civilization to understand its roots in the faith of the Bible, particularly the Hebraic tradition. The growth, corruption, and purification of the important Western emphases on individuality are insightfully chronicled here. This book is arguably Reinhold Niebuhr’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Niebuhr and http://niebuhrsociety.typepad.com/) most important work.
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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
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This monumental work of scholarship is a breathtaking panorama of the development of Christian doctrine written by Jaroslav Pelikan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaroslav_Pelikan#Death) over a period of 18 years between 1971-1989. It is nothing less than a history of the subject from the year 100 to our own times. This will demand a place in the bookcase of anyone
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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
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In 1945 fifty-two papyrus texts, including gospels and other secret documents, were found by a local farmer named Mohammed al-Samman near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. They were concealed in an earthenware jar. These so-called ‘Gnostic’ writings were Coptic translations from the original Greek dating from the time of the New Testament and
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Don Cupitt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Cupitt) has been a theologian at Cambridge for over 40 years, writing over 40 books in that time. He came to public attention with the broadcast in 1984 of the BBC television series The Sea of Faith (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Faith_(TV_series)). The programme dealt with the history of Christianity in the modern world, focussing especially on
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A classic of religious philosophy, The Idea of the Holy (1917) by Rudolph Otto (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_Otto) has been revered by generations of lay readers as well as divinity students. In the work, Otto introduces the concept of the ‘numinous’ which he defines as a ‘non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the
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When William James (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_james) went to the University of Edinburgh in 1901 to deliver a series of lectures on ‘natural religion’, he defined religion as ‘the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine’. Considering religion,
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