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52 books match the query 'Silence' and 2 start with e

cover of Encounters With Silence

Encounters With Silence

Karl Rahner

St. Augustine's Press, 1999

One of the classics of modern spirituality, Encounters with Silence is one of Karl Rahner’s most lucid and powerful books. A book of meditations about man’s relation with God, it is not a work of dry theology, but rather a book of prayerful reflections on love, knowledge, and faith, obedience, everyday routines, life with our friends and neighbors, our work and vocation, and human goodness. The immense success of this moving work is a tribute to its practicality and the ability of the great theologian to speak simply and yet profoundly to ordinary men and women seeking an inspiring guide to the inner life, one that never forsakes the world of reality. The book is cast in the form of a dialogue with God that moves from humble but concerned inquiry to joyful contemplation.

“You will come again because the fact that you have already come must continue to be revealed ever more clearly. It must become progressively manifest to the world that the heart of all things is already transformed, because you have taken them all to your heart. . . . The false appearance of our world, the shabby pretense that it has not been liberated . . . must be more and more thoroughly rooted out and destroyed. . . . And your coming is neither past nor future, but the present, which has only to reach its fulfillment. Now it is still the one single hour of your advent.” (from the book)

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cover of Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues

Eros, Wisdom, and Silence

Plato's Erotic Dialogues

James M. Rhodes

University of Missouri Press, 2003

Eros, Wisdom, and Silence is a close reading of Plato’s Seventh Letter and his dialogues Symposium and Phaedrus, with significant attention also given to Alcibiades I. A book about love, James Rhodes’s work was conceived as a conversation and meant to be read side by side with Plato’s works and those of his worthy interlocutors. It invites lovers to participate in conversations that move their souls to love, and it also invites the reader to take part in the author’s dialogues with Plato and his commentators.
            Rhodes addresses two closely related questions: First, what does Plato mean when he says in the Seventh Letter that he never has written and never will write anything concerning that about which he is serious? Second, what does Socrates mean when he claims to have an art of eros and that this techne is the only thing he knows?
Through careful analysis, Rhodes establishes answers to these questions.
He determines that Plato cannot write anything concerning that about which he is serious because his most profound knowledge consists of his soul’s silent vision of ultimate, transcendent reality, which is ineffable. Rhodes also shows that, for Socrates, eros is a symbol for the soul’s experience of divine reality, which pulls every element of human nature toward its proper end, but which also leads people to evil and tyranny when human resistance causes it to become diseased.
            Opening up a new avenue of Plato scholarship, Eros, Wisdom, and Silence is political philosophy at its conversational best. Scholars and students in political philosophy, classical studies, and religious studies will find this work invaluable.
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