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The three essays in Image, written by leading philosophers of religion, explore the modern power of the visual at the intersection of the human and the technological. 

Modern life is steeped in images, image-making, and attempts to control the world through vision. Mastery of images has been advanced by technologies that expand and reshape vision and enable us to create, store, transmit, and display images. The three essays in Image, written by leading philosophers of religion Mark C. Taylor, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and Thomas A. Carlson, explore the power of the visual at the intersection of the human and the technological. Building on Heidegger’s notion that modern humanity aims to master the world by picturing or representing the real, they investigate the contemporary culture of the image in its philosophical, religious, economic, political, imperial, and military dimensions, challenging the abstraction, anonymity, and dangerous disconnection of contemporary images.

Taylor traces a history of capitalism, focusing on its lack of humility, particularly in the face of mortality, and he considers art as a possible way to reconnect us to the earth. Through a genealogy of iconic views from space, Rubenstein exposes the delusions of conquest associated with extraterrestrial travel. Starting with the pressing issues of surveillance capitalism and facial recognition technology, Carlson extends Heidegger’s analysis through a meditation on the telematic elimination of the individual brought about by totalizing technologies. Together, these essays call for a consideration of how we can act responsibly toward the past in a way that preserves the earth for future generations. Attending to the fragility of material things and to our own mortality, they propose new practices of imagination grounded in love and humility.

In Reasonable Hope considers three foundational responses to this quest for some understanding of the existence, meaning, and value of everything. Other approaches can be considered as combinations or variations of these. Firstly, there is the approach which claims that it is our humanity, exercising its unique intelligent subjectivity, that is the source and measure of all possible meaning and value. Nothing can be thought of as existing, meaningful or of value apart from a thinking human subject. This is a broadly Humanist approach to ultimate meaning. Man is the measure of all things. Secondly, there is the approach of Scientism. This claims that an ultimate understanding of the world and ourselves must be sought, less anthropocentrically, in terms of the findings of basic empirical sciences such as physics and chemistry. We live in a world ever-increasingly dominated by the autonomous system of science and technology. Such Scientism implies an explicitly reductionist and materialist conception of the meaning and value of everything. Thirdly, there is the approach of Theism which maintains that, in the final analysis, the meaning and value of everything, insofar as this can be known, is to be explained in terms of a transcendent infinitely perfect personal being we call God. The first two approaches are carefully considered. However, it is the third to which most attention is devoted. Consideration is given to the traditional impersonal metaphysical approach to questions about the existence and nature of God. The alternative approaches of linguistic philosophy and phenomenology, which reject such metaphysical speculation are also discussed. These various approaches are judged to be complementary rather than strict alternatives. In the latter half of the book is devoted to a more personal and self-involving discussion of the relevance of an affirmation of the existence of God. It explores the implications of a rational commitment to live one's life in accordance with the requirements of values which transcend explanation in purely physical terms, such as truth, goodness, beauty, and especially love. It provides a personal and existential development of the rational hope that such values are ultimately more objectively real and dependable than the eventual universal material chaos predicted by empirical science. It argues that the existence of God as the infinite expression and source of these values is the necessary and sufficient condition of this rational hope in their enduring significance. Finally, there is an account of how the Christian Revelation illuminates and transforms our rational hope in the enduring significance of love of God and neighbor.

The story of a Social Gospel leader who brought faith, activism, and social justice into the heart of modern American politics.

Radical religious and political leader Harry F. Ward started life quietly enough in a family of Methodist shopkeepers and butchers in London. But his relentless pursuit of social justice would lead him to the United States and a long career of religious activism. Ward served as professor of Christian ethics at the Union Theological Seminary and chairman of the board of the American Civil Liberties Union for two decades. He also became a leader in labor groups, Protestant activist organizations, and New York intellectual circles. 

David Duke builds his comprehensive story of this fiery leader from extensive archival sources, including FBI files and private correspondence, sermons, class notes, and other unpublished material. Duke skillfully charts Ward's rise from an idealistic Methodist minister in a Chicago stockyard parish to a prominent national religious leader and influential political figure. Ultimately, Ward's lifelong attempt to synthesize the beliefs of Jesus and Marx and his role as an admirer of the Soviet Union put him on a collision course with McCarthyism in Cold War America. Viewed by some as a prophet and by others as a heretic, traitor, and communist, Ward became increasingly marginalized as he stubbornly maintained his radical positions. Even in his own circle, he went from being a figure of unquestioned integrity who eloquently spoke his convictions to a tragically short-sighted idealogue whose unwavering pro-Soviet agenda blinded him to the horrors of Stalinist oppression. 

Harry Ward's long, colorful career intersected nearly every intellectual current in American culture for more than a half century. This biography will be important for scholars of American religious history, students of liberalism and politics, social Christians, and general readers who enjoy a compelling tour into the private and public lives of notable figures of history. 
 

How the phenomenology of pain allows us to rethink human incarnation
 
While the phenomenological tradition has carefully treated both the objective and the lived body, Espen Dahl explores a dimension of the body that does not fall neatly into either category, suggesting that philosophers should take account of the inner density of our organic, material body. By integrating the dimension of “flesh-and-blood” into the phenomenological notion of the body, Dahl argues that it is possible to reach a more adequate notion of human incarnation. The author explores the body in its subjectivity and its resistance, in activity founded on passivity, and in the ambiguous limits of its skin. The phenomenon of pain is given particular attention in this investigation, since pain is, as Dahl argues, what makes the body inescapably manifest in its otherwise hidden dimensions, including its ambiguity and vulnerability. Related to this focus, Dahl also engages with the Christian theological concerns of incarnation, pain, and hope. Phenomenologists have long drawn on this religious inheritance, particularly in what has been dubbed the French “theological turn.” In a similar manner, Incarnation, Pain, Theology: A Phenomenology of the Body draws on these theological sources while firmly holding to its philosophical commitments in methodological approach and analytic aims.

Studies bronze icons of Hindu and Buddhist deities to better understand the flow of ideas across the sea routes of Maritime Asia in the first millennium.

While the great temples of Southeast Asia have inspired research in the past, the careful study of their smaller and more portable counterparts—bronze icons of Hindu and Buddhist deities—gives us a more dynamic understanding of the movement of beliefs and practices across Asia. These sacred images—found across Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Sulawesi—rank alongside monumental temple complexes like Borobudur as among the most significant artistic and religious achievements of the region. Yet they have too often been treated as mere antiquities, prized for their beauty but stripped of their deeper historical meaning. 

Mechling recovers what these bronzes can actually tell us. By tracing their distribution patterns alongside their artistic style, iconography, fabrication techniques, and metal compositions, she reconstructs the shared cults, ritual practices, and technological relationships that linked communities across the western Indonesian archipelago and beyond from the sixth to the tenth century. The picture that emerges overturns a long-held scholarly paradigm—inherited from the colonial era—of passive Southeast Asian reception of Indian cultural influence. In its place, Indonesian Buddhist Bronzes in the Making of Maritime Asia reveals a world of multi-directional exchange among active, cosmopolitan participants whose networks of creativity and devotion shaped one of history's most dynamic cultural crossroads.

The intelligibility of nature was a persistent theme of William A. Wallace, OP, one of the most prolific Catholic scholars of the late twentieth century. This Reader aims to make available a representative selection of his work in the history of science, natural philosophy, and theology illustrating his defense and development of this central theme. Wallace is among the most important Galileo scholars of the past fifty years and a key figure in the recent revival of scientific realism. Further, his long and productive scholarly career has been shaped by a continuous effort to bring the resources of the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition to the solution of contemporary problems of philosophy and science. Through all of these contributions, Wallace has provided the foundation for a renewed confidence in the capacity of human knowers to attain understanding of the natural order. Consequently, the overall aim of this volume is to secure continued access to his scholarship for readers in the new millennium. The Intelligibility of Nature will contain twenty-nine previously published essays written by Wallace over a period of some forty years. Many of these essays are currently not readily accessible. They are arranged in five thematic groups, each representing a major subject-area of Wallace's scholarly interests. The first group is devoted to essays on making nature intelligible through the use of scientific models. The second group of essays investigates various ways in which the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition is foundational to contemporary scientific research. Essays in the third group are historical studies on the origins of modern science. The fourth group of essays discuss the viability of the cosmological argument for the existence of God in light of natural science. The final group of essays consider the relation of science and religion. Together these essays provide a representative sample of Wallace's multifaceted contributions to scholarship.

Interpretations is a collection of essays produced by the distinguished philosopher Jude Dougherty over the past decade, written to inform or to provide commentary on contemporary issues. In probing the past to interpret the present they draw upon a perspective that one may call classical, the perspective of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and their followers across the ages, notably Thomas Aquinas, and his modern disciples, such as Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain.

The first part of Interpretations is an attempt to understand modernity’s break with the past, the repudiation of Scholasticism and the classical tradition. Dougherty does this by referencing the dominant preoccupations of the Middle Ages, of the Renaissance, of the Reformation, of eighteenth-century British empiricism, and of nineteenth-century German philosophy, drawing upon the readings of Remi Brague, Pierre Manent, and others. What unifies these reflections is the role of religion (both in Christianity and Islam) in society and its impact on the culture, as well as looking at what is called “modernity” where this role becomes reduced or absent.

The second part of the volume examines selected addresses by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI from a philosophical point of view. Benedict, like others through the course of history, has recognized the role of religion in producing cultural unity. These essays are an appreciation primarily of the subtlety of the former pontiff’s thought.

The third part of Interpretations collects essays and addresses on the practice and nature of philosophy that Dean Dougherty has given throughout his career at The Catholic University of America, and reflects the trajectory of his career and the development of his thought.

Intersubjective Existence, as the author notes, aims, first, to develop a wisdom about human life that takes the form of a theory of selfhood and, second, to reflect on what is called for in the ethical practice of human existence. Secondly, the ethical implications of this theory of selfhood are explored, specifically looking at conscience, prudential reasoning, justice, friendship, the law, temperance, courage, and concluding with a brief treatment of religion. Olivia Blanchette charts the path of his inquiry through an analysis of reflective self-consciousness in selves communing with one another. They are constituted in their substance as a union of body and soul, with intelligence and free will that give rise to cultures in communion with other selves. These cultures are over and above what is given to each self in sense consciousness and in sense appetites and which each one contends with in the exercise of selfhood and the rights that go with that in keeping with justice. Concern for right reasoning and justice leads to an analysis of temperance and courage. The chief arguments take the form of phenomenological reflections on the building blocks of the perennial philosophy. Blanchette recasts Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics from the perspective of a phenomenology of the mutual recognition of agents and the historical consciousness to which it gives rise.

Intrepid Lover of Perfect Grace provides students and scholars with the first biography of Prosper of Aquitaine (388-455) and the first book-length study in English of this important figure in the history of Christianity

The visionary voice who helped shape American Judaism—and Charleston’s cultural soul.

Isaac Harby of Charleston, 1788–1828 is a richly detailed biography that brings to life one of early America’s most fascinating and underappreciated Jewish intellectuals. Gary Phillip Zola offers a compelling portrait of Harby—a playwright, newspaper editor, drama critic, educator, and religious reformer—who emerged as a central figure in Charleston’s vibrant cultural scene during the early 19th century. At a time when Charleston was experiencing both economic prosperity and cultural efflorescence, Harby stood at the crossroads of literary ambition and religious innovation.

A descendant of Sephardic Jews, Harby was deeply engaged in the intellectual and civic life of his city. He founded a literary journal at just eighteen, established a private academy, and wrote prolifically on politics, education, and religion. But his most enduring legacy lies in his role as a pioneer of Reform Judaism in America. As a founding member of the Reformed Society of Israelites in 1825, Harby advocated for a rational, modernized approach to Jewish worship—one that emphasized universal ethics and intellectual engagement over ritual formalism. His efforts, though controversial in his time, laid the groundwork for the broader Reform movement that would flourish later in the century.

Drawing on newly uncovered archival materials, including Harby’s personal library and writings, Zola’s biography not only illuminates Harby’s life and thought but also offers a window into the broader cultural, religious, and political transformations of the early American republic. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in American Jewish history, Southern intellectual life, and the roots of religious reform in the United States.