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It is impossible to understand the history of Christian theology without taking into account the relationship between faith and reason. Many works give an overview of faith and reason, or outline key principles, while others put forward a thesis about how one should understand the relationship between faith and reason. In this theological essay, Grant Kaplan revisits the key figures and debates that shape how faith and reason relate. Divided into three parts, Kaplan invites readers into a conversation rather than a drive-by. Readers will encounter the words and arguments of some of Christianity’s greatest thinkers, some well-known (Augustine, Aquinas, Newman) and others nearly forgotten. Readings of these figures bring them to life in an accessible manner. In Faith and Reason through Christian History, the roughly fifty figures treated are given sufficient room to breathe. Rather than simply summarizing their thought, Kaplan traces their arguments through key texts. This book will appeal to a range of audiences: theologians and philosophers, instructors, graduate students, seminarians, lay study groups, and undergraduate theology majors. No book today accomplishes what this book does!

Faithfully Seeking Understanding provides a first-hand opportunity for English-speaking readers to encounter the thought of Johannes Kuhn (1806-1887), widely considered the greatest speculative theologian of the renowned Catholic Tübingen School.

When Johann Adam Möhler published Symbolism in 1832, one commentator called it “the severest blow ever dealt to Protestantism.” It elicited a flurry of responses from both Protestants and Catholics, and the reactions ranged from praise to confusion and outrage. The most substantial answer came from Ferdinand Christian Baur, who published an entire monograph refuting Möhler. In response, Möhler not only began revising Symbolism, but also issued his own book-length response, New Considerations, which defended Catholic religion against Baur’s caricatures. After his untimely death at age forty-two, the fate of Möhler’s work lay largely in the hands of publishers and loyal readers, who for a time issued editions of the New Considerations as the second volume of Symbolism. This trend ended in the twentieth century when New Considerations went out of print. Now, for the first time, it has been translated into English, and readers can see how Möhler, the greatest German Catholic theologian of his century, understood Catholicism and its most essential differences to Protestantism. Grant Kaplan’s excellent and artful translation also provides an introduction that puts Möhler’s final work in its context and explains its abiding relevance for Catholic theology and for contemporary ecumenism.