Inner Animalities

Inner Animalities PDF Author: Eric Daryl Meyer
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823280160
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Most theology proceeds under the assumption that divine grace works on human beings at the points of our supposed uniqueness among earth’s creatures—our freedom, our self-awareness, our language, or our rationality. Inner Animalities turns this assumption on its head. Arguing that much theological anthropology contains a deeply anti-ecological impulse, the book draws creatively on historical and scriptural texts to imagine an account of human life centered in our creaturely commonality. The tendency to deny our own human animality leaves our self-understanding riven with contradictions, disavowals, and repressions. How are human relationships transformed when God draws us into communion through our instincts, our desires, and our bodily needs? Meyer argues that humanity’s exceptional status is not the result of divine endorsement, but a delusion of human sin. Where the work of God knits human beings back into creaturely connections, ecological degradation is no longer just a matter of bodily life and death, but a matter of ultimate significance. Bringing a theological perspective to the growing field of Critical Animal Studies, Inner Animalities puts Gregory of Nyssa and Karl Rahner in conversation with Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Kelly Oliver, and Cary Wolfe. What results is not only a counterintuitive account of human life in relation with nonhuman neighbors, but also a new angle into ecological theology.

Inner Animalities

Inner Animalities PDF Author: Eric Daryl Meyer
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823280160
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description
Most theology proceeds under the assumption that divine grace works on human beings at the points of our supposed uniqueness among earth’s creatures—our freedom, our self-awareness, our language, or our rationality. Inner Animalities turns this assumption on its head. Arguing that much theological anthropology contains a deeply anti-ecological impulse, the book draws creatively on historical and scriptural texts to imagine an account of human life centered in our creaturely commonality. The tendency to deny our own human animality leaves our self-understanding riven with contradictions, disavowals, and repressions. How are human relationships transformed when God draws us into communion through our instincts, our desires, and our bodily needs? Meyer argues that humanity’s exceptional status is not the result of divine endorsement, but a delusion of human sin. Where the work of God knits human beings back into creaturely connections, ecological degradation is no longer just a matter of bodily life and death, but a matter of ultimate significance. Bringing a theological perspective to the growing field of Critical Animal Studies, Inner Animalities puts Gregory of Nyssa and Karl Rahner in conversation with Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Kelly Oliver, and Cary Wolfe. What results is not only a counterintuitive account of human life in relation with nonhuman neighbors, but also a new angle into ecological theology.

Inner Animalities

Inner Animalities PDF Author: Eric D. Meyer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823280155
Category : Theological anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Most theology proceeds under the assumption that divine grace works on human beings at the points of our supposed uniqueness among earth's creatures--our freedom, our self-awareness, our language, or our rationality. Inner Animalities turns this assumption on its head. Arguing that much theological anthropology contains a deeply anti-ecological impulse, the book draws creatively on historical and scriptural texts to imagine an account of human life centered in our creaturely commonality. The tendency to deny our own human animality leaves our self-understanding riven with contradictions, disavowals, and repressions. How are human relationships transformed when God draws us into communion through our instincts, our desires, and our bodily needs? Meyer argues that humanity's exceptional status is not the result of divine endorsement, but a delusion of human sin. Where the work of God knits human beings back into creaturely connections, ecological degradation is no longer just a matter of bodily life and death, but a matter of ultimate significance. Bringing a theological perspective to the growing field of Critical Animal Studies, Inner Animalities puts Gregory of Nyssa and Karl Rahner in conversation with Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Kelly Oliver, and Cary Wolfe. What results is not only a counterintuitive account of human life in relation with nonhuman neighbors, but also a new angle into ecological theology.

Ecospirituality

Ecospirituality PDF Author: Rachel Wheeler
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers
ISBN: 1506473865
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Ecospirituality comprehensively introduces and lays the foundation for further individual growth in the burgeoning field of ecospirituality. This book is not only a foundation-laying tool for educators, but also a concise, thorough way for students and other individuals to gain a comprehensive understanding of ecospirituality and why it matters.

Catholicity and Emerging Personhood

Catholicity and Emerging Personhood PDF Author: Horan OFM, Daniel P.
Publisher: Orbis Books
ISBN: 1608338002
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
An exploration of the meaning and identity of the human person in light of a renewed theology of creation, the ongoing discoveries of evolution and natural sciences, and newly appropriated resources in the theological tradition.

All God's Animals

All God's Animals PDF Author: Christopher Steck
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
ISBN: 1626167168
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The book is the first of its kind to draw together in conversation the views of the early Church, contemporary biblical and theological scholarship, and post-conciliar teachings. Steck develops a comprehensive, Catholic theology of animals based on an in-depth exploration of Catholicism's fundamental doctrines—trinitarian theology, Christology, pneumatology, eschatology, and soteriology. All God's Animals makes two central claims. First, we can hope that God will include animals of the present age in the kingdom inaugurated by Christ. Second, because of this inclusion, our responses to animals should be guided by the values of the kingdom. As Christians await the final liberation of all creation, they are to be witnesses to God’s kingdom by embodying its ideals in their relations with animal life. Because the kingdom's fullness is yet to come and because our world remains marked by the wounds of sin, however, Christian treatment of animals will at times require acts that are at odds with the kingdom’s ideals (for example, those causing suffering and death). Steck examines each of these ideas and explores all of their complexities.

Faith after the Anthropocene

Faith after the Anthropocene PDF Author: Matthew Wickman
Publisher: MDPI
ISBN: 3039430122
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Recent decades have brought to light the staggering ubiquity of human activity upon Earth and the startling fragility of our planet and its life systems. This is so momentous that many scientists and scholars now argue that we have left the relative climactic stability of the Holocene and have entered a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. This emerging epoch may prompt us not only to reconsider our understanding of Earth systems, but also to reimagine ourselves and what it means to be human. How does the Earth’s precarious state reveal our own? How does this vulnerable condition prompt new ways of thinking and being? The essays that are part of this collection consider how the transformative thinking demanded by our vulnerability inspires us to reconceive our place in the cosmos, alongside each other and, potentially, before God. Who are we “after” (the concept of) the Anthropocene? What forms of thought and structures of feeling might attend us in this state? How might we determine our values and to what do we orient our hopes? Faith, a conceptual apparatus for engaging the unseen, helps us weigh the implications of this massive, but in some ways, mysterious, force on the lives we lead; faith helps us visualize what it means to exist in this new and still emergent reality.

Ways of Being Alive

Ways of Being Alive PDF Author: Baptiste Morizot
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509547223
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
The ecological crisis is a very real crisis for the many species that face extinction, but it is also a crisis of sensibility – that is, a crisis in our relationships with other living beings. We have grown accustomed to treating other living beings as the material backdrop for the drama of human life: the animal world is regarded as part of ‘nature’, juxtaposed to the world of human beings who pursue their aims independently of other species. Baptiste Morizot argues that the time has come for us to jettison this nature─human dualism and rethink our relationships with other living beings. Animals are not part of a separate, natural world: they are cohabitants of the Earth, with whom we share a common ancestry, the enigma of being alive and the responsibility of living decent lives together. By accepting our identity as living beings and reconnecting with our own animal nature, we can begin to change our relationships with other animals, seeing them not as inferior lifeforms but as living creatures who have different ways of being alive. This powerful plea for a new understanding of our relationships with other animals will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the ecological crisis and the future of different species, including our own.

Radical Kinship

Radical Kinship PDF Author: Rachel Wheeler
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers
ISBN: 1506487467
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
"Rachel Wheeler offers compelling testimony for the value--and the life-giving power--of "rewilding." Drawing on the Bible, Christian spirituality, and environmental disciplines, Radical Kinship provides theoretical foundations and practical strategies for restoring the life-generating and life-sustaining norms in which we were created to dwell"--

Divinity, Hospitality and the Posthuman in 21st-Century Literature

Divinity, Hospitality and the Posthuman in 21st-Century Literature PDF Author: Emily McAvan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350280380
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
What does it feel like to experience the sacred today? Examining in detail many of this century's most significant writers, including Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Elizabeth Strout, Marilynne Robinson, Mohsin Hamid, Michael Chabon, Howard Jacobson and Don DeLillo, Divinity, Hospitality and the Posthuman in 21st-Century Literature: The Material Sacred argues that contemporary social and cultural forms, most especially those of 21st century literature, are marked by what Emily McAvan calls a material sacred. Placing Christian, Jewish and Muslim writers in conversation with the new materialisms, this book shows how secular and sacred mix unpredictably in contemporary writing. In this important contribution to the understanding of religion, materialism and literature, McAvan maps new territory, arguing that the material sacred shows us that the human and non-human, the divine and the profane, have been interwoven from the start.

What is Constructive Theology?

What is Constructive Theology? PDF Author: Marion Grau
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567695182
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
This essential introduction to contemporary constructive theology charts the most important disciplinary trends of the moment. It gives a historical overview of the field and discusses key hermeneutical and methodological concerns. The contributors apply a constructive perspective to a wide range of approaches, ranging from biblical hermeneutics and postcolonial studies to comparative, political, and black theology. What is Constructive Theology? shows how diverse and interdisciplinary constructive theology can be by exploring key themes in the field. The contributors explore the porous boundaries between Christianity and other religions, reflect on contextual, liberation and constructive theologies from Africa and from Black British perspectives, explore the connection between embodiment, epistemology and hermeneutics, and take a constructive approach to the dangerous memories and theologies of colonial histories in Belgium and Native Americans in the United States. This sampler of the field will help you rethink theologies and find constructive alternatives.