front cover of Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes
Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes
Gregory T. Doolan
Catholic University of America Press, 2008
Gregory T. Doolan provides here the first detailed consideration of the divine ideas as causal principles. He examines Thomas Aquinas's philosophical doctrine of the divine ideas and convincingly argues that it is an essential element of his metaphysics
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front cover of Cloud Ethics
Cloud Ethics
Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others
Louise Amoore
Duke University Press, 2020
In Cloud Ethics Louise Amoore examines how machine learning algorithms are transforming the ethics and politics of contemporary society. Conceptualizing algorithms as ethicopolitical entities that are entangled with the data attributes of people, Amoore outlines how algorithms give incomplete accounts of themselves, learn through relationships with human practices, and exist in the world in ways that exceed their source code. In these ways, algorithms and their relations to people cannot be understood by simply examining their code, nor can ethics be encoded into algorithms. Instead, Amoore locates the ethical responsibility of algorithms in the conditions of partiality and opacity that haunt both human and algorithmic decisions. To this end, she proposes what she calls cloud ethics—an approach to holding algorithms accountable by engaging with the social and technical conditions under which they emerge and operate.
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front cover of How Large Is God
How Large Is God
The Voices of Scientists and Theologians
John Marks Templeton
Templeton Press, 1998

This new collection of essays reveals how very little we know about God and fundamental spiritual principles. In recent years, scientific research has revealed that the universe is staggering in size and intricacy, and some scientists are now suggesting that our definition of God is much too small. Nine distinguished scholars and scientists present their varied views on the dimensions of God.

Edited by philanthropist John Marks Templeton, this fascinating and challenging book continues the exploration of theological and philosophical implications of the momentous and accelerating scientific discoveries of our times.

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front cover of Saints
Saints
Faith without Borders
Edited by Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner
University of Chicago Press, 2011

While the modern world has largely dismissed the figure of the saint as a throwback, we remain fascinated by excess, marginality, transgression, and porous subjectivity—categories that define the saint. In this collection, Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner bring together top scholars from across the humanities to reconsider our denial of saintliness and examine how modernity returns to the lure of saintly grace, energy, and charisma.

Addressing such problems as how saints are made, the use of saints by political and secular orders, and how holiness is personified, Saints takes us on a photo tour of Graceland and the cult of Elvis and explores the changing political takes on Joan of Arc in France. It shows us the self-fashioning of culture through the reevaluation of saints in late-antique Judaism and Counter-Reformation Rome, and it questions the political intent of underlying claims to spiritual attainment of a Muslim sheikh in Morocco and of Sephardism in Israel. Populated with the likes of Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, and Padre Pio, this book is a fascinating inquiry into the status of saints in the modern world.
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front cover of The Soul of the Stranger
The Soul of the Stranger
Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective
Joy Ladin
Brandeis University Press, 2018
Reading some of the best-known Torah stories through the lens of transgender experience, Joy Ladin explores fundamental questions about how religious texts, traditions, and the understanding of God can be enriched by transgender perspectives, and how the Torah and trans lives can illuminate one another. Drawing on her own experience and lifelong reading practice, Ladin shows how the Torah, a collection of ancient texts that assume human beings are either male or female, speaks both to practical transgender concerns, such as marginalization, and to the challenges of living without a body or social role that renders one intelligible to others—challenges that can help us understand a God who defies all human categories. These creative, evocative readings transform our understanding of the Torah’s portrayals of God, humanity, and relationships between them.
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