On Memory, Marriage, Tears and Meditation

On Memory, Marriage, Tears and Meditation
Author: Margaret R. Miles
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2021-01-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350191442

On Memory, Marriage, Tears, and Meditation offers readers the tools for reading Augustine's journey to human emotions through his writings on feeling, marriage, conversion, and meditation. Augustine understood that feeling, not rationality, gathers and reveals the deep longing of the whole person. Throughout his ecclesiastical career, he discussed marriage in sermons, letters, and treatises from the perspective of his own experience. Miles examines Augustine's prototypes for conversion – reading and conversion; sacrifice and conversion; and the importance of friends in what might be considered a subjective and private process. Meditation was central to Augustine's Christian life and Miles argues that his practice of meditation suggests that penitence included a rich range of feeling leading to gratitude, peace, wonder, and love.

On Images, Visual Culture, Memory and the Play without a Script

On Images, Visual Culture, Memory and the Play without a Script
Author: Matthias Smalbrugge
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 150135888X

Matthias Smalbrugge compares modern images to plays without a script: while they appear to refer to a deeper identity or reality, it is ultimately the image itself that truly matters. He argues that our modern society of images is the product of a destructive tendency in the Christian notion of the image in general, and Augustine of Hippo's in particular. This insight enables him to decode our current 'scripts' of image. As we live in an increasingly visual culture, we are constantly confronted with images that seem to exist without a deeper identity or reality – but did this referential character really get lost over time? Smalbrugge first explores the roots of the modern image by analysing imagery, what it represents, and its moral state within the framework of Platonic philosophy. He then moves to the Augustinian heritage, in particular the Soliloquies, the Confessions and the Trinity, where he finds valuable insights into images and memory. He explores within the trinitarian framework the crossroads of a theology of grace and a theology based on Neoplatonic views. Smalbrugge ultimately answers two questions: what happened to the referential character of the image, and can it be recovered?

Beautiful Bodies

Beautiful Bodies
Author: Margaret R. Miles
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2024-05-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1666767328

St. Augustine was known as a theologian of feeling for many centuries. Renaissance painters pictured him holding his passionately blazing heart in his hand. In Augustine’s society and education, feeling was considered an intimate and integral aspect of thinking, so intimately interwoven that philosophers struggled to distinguish these activities. Thus, Augustine was also committed to learning throughout his passionate and thoughtful life, from his early conviction that “God and the soul” can be known through the meticulous use of reason, to mature sermons in which he quoted “God is love,” and commented, in effect, that is all you need to know about God. The role of feeling in his understanding of the effect of Christian doctrines on present life has been less noticed. This book proposes that changes in his perception of the value and significance of human bodies—from objects of rapacious lust to rapturous admiration of their beauty—form the nexus within which Augustine’s thought and feeling cohere. The old Augustine’s understanding of the theological significance of present bodies informed his acknowledged speculations on the qualities and capacities of beautiful bodies, nunc et tunc.

On Memory, Marriage, Tears, and Meditation

On Memory, Marriage, Tears, and Meditation
Author: Margaret Ruth Miles
Publisher:
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2020
Genre: Christian saints
ISBN: 9781350191464

"On Memory, Marriage, Tears, and Meditation offers readers the tools for reading Augustine's journey to human emotions through his writings on feeling, marriage, conversion, and meditation. Augustine understood that feeling, not rationality, gathers and reveals the deep longing of the whole person. Throughout his ecclesiastical career, he discussed marriage in sermons, letters, and treatises from the perspective of his own experience. Miles examines Augustine's prototypes for conversion - reading and conversion; sacrifice and conversion; and the importance of friends in what might be considered a subjective and private process. Meditation was central to Augustine's Christian life and Miles argues that his practice of meditation suggests that penitence included a rich range of feeling leading to gratitude, peace, wonder, and love"--

Attunement

Attunement
Author: Professor of Theology and Affiliated Faculty in Women's and Gender Studies Natalie Carnes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2024-06-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0197765629

What is a feminist theologian to do with Christianity's patriarchal inheritance? She can avoid the most patriarchal aspects of the theological tradition and seek resources for constructive work elsewhere. Or she can critique misogynistic texts and artifacts, exposing their strategies of domination to warn against replicating them. Both approaches have merits and yet, without other interpretive strategies, they reaffirm that the theological tradition does not belong to women and others marginalized by gender. They cannot transform the discourse. But within feminist theology are the seeds of another approach, aimed at just such transformation by reworking the theological landscape to become hospitable to all those marginalized by gender. Attunement: The Art and Politics of Feminist Theology identifies trajectories resonant with this alternative approach and from them, describes and develops attunement as a third, generative path for feminist theologians. Attunement is an aesthetically-invested approach to texts and artifacts that self-consciously co-creates as it interprets. Aware of what the text affords the reader, attunement constellates images, texts, and insights to build or augment positive affordances in the text and diminish negative ones. Natalie Carnes describes why this approach is significant for feminist theology, maps its roots in a long history of gender-marginalized individuals claiming authority, describes how it casts interpretation as both an aesthetic and political event, and notes how it might provide a way forward in vexed topics in feminist theology.

On Christology, Anthropology, Cognitive Science and the Human Body

On Christology, Anthropology, Cognitive Science and the Human Body
Author: Martin Claes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2022-03-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350296112

This book reads texts of Augustine on the topic of the human body in the context of contemporary debates in philosophical theology and relevant authors from the cognitive science of religion. Martin Claes focuses particularly on Augustine's special position in the intellectual discourses of Western philosophy (free will, theodicy), theology (grace, incarnation) and humanities (anthropology, political sciences, law), arguing that his written work is an excellent point of departure for a multidimensional scholarly approach. The reading in this book shows that a different picture emerges if we make the effort to situate Augustine's mature anthropology within contemporary debates in philosophical theology and cognitive science of religion. Omnipotence, vulnerability, suffering but also purification and perfection are discussed in dialogue between patristic and philosophical theology; the human offers the clue to concepts of unity in diversity in Christ.

On Mystery, Ineffability, Silence and Musical Symbolism

On Mystery, Ineffability, Silence and Musical Symbolism
Author: Laurence Wuidar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2021-09-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1350228818

Collecting together numerous examples of Augustine's musical imagery in action, Laurence Wuidar reconstructs the linguistic laboratory and the hermeneutics in which he worked. Sensitive and poetical, this volume is a reminder that the metaphor of music can give access not only to human interiority, but allow the human mind to achieve proximity to the divine mind. Composed by one of Europe's leading musicologists now engaging an English-speaking audience for the first time, this book is a candid exploration of Wuidar's expertise. Drawing on her long knowledge of music and the occult, from antiquity to modernity, Wuidar particularly focuses upon Augustine's working methods while refusing to be distracted by questions of faith or morality. The result is an open and at times frightening vista on the powers that be, and our complex need to commune with them.

On The Confessions as 'confessio'

On The Confessions as 'confessio'
Author: Barry A. David
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2022-06-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1350203262

This is a new guide to reading the Confessions, Augustine's most important work, and what is widely known as the first Western Christian autobiography ever written. The Confessions consists of thirteen books, in which Augustine outlines his sinful youth and his conversion to Christianity. Barry David guides the reader swiftly through these complex texts, explaining the historical context, as well as the various philosophical concepts; and considers its spiritual, ecclesial and theological significance. As with other titles in the Reading Augustine series, this book presents concise introductory reading of Augustine's work from one of the leading scholars in the field.

On Hellenism, Judaism, Individualism, and Early Christian Theories of the Subject

On Hellenism, Judaism, Individualism, and Early Christian Theories of the Subject
Author: Guillermo M. Jodra
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2022-11-17
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350303429

This first of a two-volume work provides a new understanding of Western subjectivity as theorized in the Augustinian Rule. A theopolitical synthesis of Antiquity, the Rule is a humble, yet extremely influential example of subjectivity production. In these volumes, Jodra argues that the Classical and Late-Ancient communitarian practices along the Mediterranean provide historical proof of a worldview in which the self and the other are not disjunctive components, but mutually inclusive forces. The Augustinian Rule is a culmination of this process and also the beginning of something new: the paradigm of the monastic self as protagonist of the new, medieval worldview. In this volume, Jodra takes one of the most influential and pervasive commons experiments-Augustine's Rule-and gives us its Mediterranean backstory, with an eye to solving at last the riddle of socialism. In volume two, he will present his solution in full, as a kind of Augustinian communitarianism for today. These volumes therefore restore the unity of the Hellenistic and Judaic world as found by the first Christians, proving that the self and the other are two essential pieces in the construction of our world.