front cover of Continuing the Reformation
Continuing the Reformation
Essays on Modern Religious Thought
B. A. Gerrish
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Modern Christian religious thought, B. A. Gerrish argues, has constantly revised the inherited faith. In these twelve essays, written or published in the 1980s, one of the most distinguished historical theologians of our time examines the changes that occurred as the Catholic tradition gave way to the Reformation and an interest in the phenomenon of believing replaced adherence to unchanging dogma.

Gerrish devotes three essays to each of four topics: Martin Luther and the Reformation; religious belief and the Age of Reason; Friedrich Schleiermacher and the renewal of Protestant theology; and Schleiermacher's disciple Ernst Troeltsch, for whom the theological task was to give a rigorous account of the faith prevailing in a particular religious community at a particular time. Gerrish shows how faith itself has become a primary object of inquiry, not only in the newly emerging philosophy of religion but also in a new style of church theology which no longer assumes that faith rests on immutable dogmas. For Gerrish, the new theology of Protestant liberalism takes for its primary object of inquiry the changing forms of the religious life. This important book will interest scholars of systematic Christian theology, modern intellectual and cultural history, and the history and philosophy of religion.
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The Discovery of Being and Thomas Aquinas
Christopher M. Cullen, SJ
Catholic University of America Press, 2019
While there has been agreement among followers of Aquinas that being insofar as it is being (being qua being) is the subject of metaphysics, there is not agreement on how this being qua being is to be understood, nor on how we come to know the being that is the object of metaphysical investigation. The topic of what being is, as the object of the science of metaphysics, and how to account for the “discovery” of the being of metaphysics have emerged as central problems for the contemporary retrieval of Aquinas and for the larger project of post-Leonine Thomism in general. This lack of agreement has hampered the retrieval of Aquinas’s metaphysics.

The collection of essays within The Discovery of Being and Thomas Aquinas is divided into three major parts: the first set of essays concerns the foundation of metaphysics within Thomism; the second set exemplifies the use of metaphysics in fundamental philosophical issues within Thomism; and the third set employs metaphysics in central theological issues.

The Discovery of Being and Thomas Aquinas allows major scholars of the different types of Thomism to engage in a full-scale defense of their position, as well as expanding Thomistic metaphysics to the discipline of theology in important ways.
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The Dreamer and the Dream
Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought
Roger A. Sneed
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
Finalist for the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Constructive-Reflexive Studies

In The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought, Roger A. Sneed illuminates the interplay of Black religious thought with science fiction narratives to present a bold case for Afrofuturism as an important channel for Black spirituality. In the process, he challenges the assumed primacy of the Black church as the arbiter of Black religious life. Incorporating analyses of Octavia Butler’s Parable books, Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturistic saga, Star Trek’s Captain Benjamin Sisko, Marvel’s Black Panther, and Sun Ra and the Nation of Islam, Sneed demonstrates how Afrofuturism has contributed to Black visions of the future. He also investigates how Afrofuturism has influenced religious scholarship that looks to Black cultural production as a means of reimagining Blackness in the light of the sacred. The result is an expansive new look at the power of science fiction and Afrofuturism to center the diversity of Black spirituality.
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front cover of The Making of the Christian Mind
The Making of the Christian Mind
The Adventure of the Paraclete: Volume I: The Waiting World
James Patrick
St. Augustine's Press, 2020
Dr. James Patrick has spent his life teaching, and in this book he seeks to tell on a larger scale the story of the Christian mind as it developed according to what he refers to as the “adventure” of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, the Christian mind moved from faithful intuition to writing and composing original ideas of concrete truths, and this in turn led to inspired foundations upon which a new kind of world became possible. Patrick does not wish the reader to think the Christian mind has ever intended to create utopia on earth or to proselytize, rather that the dynamic Christian intellect indicates a human heart made new and from this newness still spring horizons of hope and culture. 

This is not a history of dogma or systematic account of the building of doctrine. It is a narrative that follows the major moments wherein the Christian heart so in tune with the Paraclete has rendered the seminal texts and literature of this new culture, from the Didache to the Rule of Saint Benedict and The Consolation of Philosophy. Patrick succeeds in presenting a narrative that reads more like the experience lived by those directly involved in its realization, and although he cannot include every individual accomplishment of the major Christian writers, he illuminates the context in which Christianity was born and how faith grew and allowed itself to be shaped by its participation in the “adventure” and its grasp of objective truth. The Christian mind is, says Patrick, not only inspired and moved by the restless Paraclete, but revolves around the event of Jesus Christ. Christian history is therefore best understood not simply as chronology of events but as the vision of “the new heart in time,” one that strives to be like that of the one who sent the Spirit into history.

Patrick writes with a voice of a teacher, and although this work is very well referenced and accurate he does not intend this work to be a scholarly presentation of data and careful arguments, nor does he include every aspect of this intellectual faith journey of Christianity found in writing. As a comprehensive review, Patrick acknowledges the limitations of his own project to tell a complete story. Nevertheless, The Making of the Christian Mind accomplishes the no less formidable feat of illustrating the vivacious quality of the authentic Christian intellectual life. “Christianity is a survivor, not because it possessed the instruments of power but because, as Jesus of Nazareth said before Pilate, the foundation of the Kingdom is truth, its instruments of conquest are its renewing gifts, its consequences are the substitution of truth for error and ignorance, of faith for skepticism, humility for pride, and of charity and friendship for emulation, all this realized never perfectly but always as possibilities having the power to make all things new.”

This work is divided into three volumes, of which the present work is the first. Highlights of this first volume, The Waiting World, include following revelation as it first moved uncertain hearts to write and then to offer explicit witness. In this first installment, Patrick sets the groundwork for following the faith and history of Israel to Justin Martyr’s great claim that what is true belongs to Christians. 
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The Protestant Temperament
Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America
Philip Greven
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Bringing together an extraordinary richness of evidence—from letters, diaries, and other intimate family records of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Philip Greven explores the strikingly distinctive ways in which Protestant children were reared in America. In tracing the hidden continuities of religious experience, of attitudes toward God, children, the self, sexuality, pleasure, virtue, and achievement, Greven identifies three distinct Protestant temperaments prevailing among Americans at the time: the Evangelical, the Moderate, and the General. The Protestant Temperament is a powerful reassessment of the role of child-rearing and religion in early American life.
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