Bøger af James Kellenberger

This book addresses the place of religious knowledge in religion, particularly within Christianity. The book begins by examining the difference between the general concepts of knowledge and belief, the relation between faith and knowledge, and reasons why belief as faith, and not knowledge, is central to the Abrahamic religions.The book explores the ambivalence about religious knowledge within Christianity. Some religious thinkers explicitly accepted and sought religious knowledge, as did St. Thomas Aquinas, while others, notably Soren Kierkegaard, cast knowledge and seeking it as incompatible with faith. The book also examines two antithetical religious intuitions about knowledge, both at home in the Christian tradition. For one, faith requires a struggle with doubt. For the other, faith requires a certainty that excludes doubt. For the first, religious knowledge would destroy faith. For the second, religious knowledge is compatible with faith and completes it.Though the book focuses on the Christian tradition, it also considers other traditions, including a chapter on the place of religious knowledge in nontheistic religious traditions. The final chapter examines how coming to Wisdom as personified in the Jewish and Christian traditions may be distinct from attaining religious knowledge.

In The Asymptote of Love, James Kellenberger develops a theory of religious love that resists essentialist definitions of the term and brings into conversation historical debates on love in Western philosophy and Christian theology. He argues that if love can be likened to a mathematical asymptote, which is a straight line that infinitely approaches a curve but never quite reaches it, then the asymptote of love reaches toward the infinite endpoint of love at its uttermost, namely, God's love. Drawing upon a broad range of thinkers who have put forth classic debates on love-such as St. Augustine of Hippo, Anders Nygren, and St. Thomas Aquinas, as well as some lesser known figures in the debate, such as Leo Tolstoy and Albert Schweitzer-Kellenberger explains the profound connection between human agape and God's infinite love in its capacity to offer both directive guidance and to exist beyond human conception.

Discusses the complexities and paradoxes of love as represented in the history of Western philosophy and Christianity.

This book addresses the different forms that religious belief can take. The book addresses the issue of the relation between belief and faith, the issue of what Soren Kierkegaard called the subjectivity of faith, and the issue of the relation between religious belief and religious experience.

This book addresses several dimensions of religious revelation. In the book's final chapter a particularly significant form of religious revelation is identified and examined: pervasive revelation.

This book is about the relationship between God and the world's evil. It proposes a religious, Job-like approach to evil that does not approach evil through the problem of evil and accepts that both good and evil are given by God.

This book explores religious epiphanies in which there is the appearance of God, a god or a goddess, or a manifestation of the divine or religious reality as received in human experience.

This work aims to clarify the debate between moral relativists and moral absolutists by showing what is right and what is wrong about each of these positions, by revealing how the phenomenon of moral diversity is connected to moral relativism.

Beginning with an examination of humility in its general notion and as a religious virtue that detachment presupposes, the author draws on a range of ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary sources that address the main characteristics of detachment, including the work of Meister Eckhart, St Teresa, and Simone Weil.

This book is an investigation of wisdom in its diverse nature and types. Wisdom may be as everyday as folk adages or as arcane as a religious parable. In one form it is highly practical, and in another it addresses what is fundamentally real. In another form it is moral wisdom, and when it is psychological wisdom it can inform wise judgment. It can be philosophical, and it can be religious. And in one form it is mystical wisdom. These types of wisdom are essentially different, even when they overlap. Often wisdom is proffered in wise sayingssuch as proverbs, aphorisms, or maximsbut one form, mystical wisdom, defies articulation.In this book all these types of wisdom will be presented, drawing upon a diversity of sources, and critically examined. Offered wisdom carries in its train a number of issues, not the least of which is how to distinguish between true wisdom and pseudo-wisdom.Also it may be asked of wisdom, when it is true, whether it is true relativistically, varying with culture, or true universally. Many types of wisdom have their origin in antiquity, but can there be new forms of wisdom? Does wisdom, as contemporary philosophers have maintained, have an underlying universal nature? This book addresses these issues and others.

This book is about religion, pacifism, and the nonviolence that informs pacifism in its most coherent form. Although moral support for pacifism is presented, a main focus of the book is on religious support for pacifism, found in various religious traditions.

As it is possible for individuals to come into the presence of God - to have this phenomenal experience - so it is possible for them to come into the presence of persons. Kellenberger explores how coming into the presence of persons is structurally analogous with coming into the presence of God.

For courses in Philosophy of Religion. Using various and competing religious sensibilities, Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion helps students work through the traditional material and their own religious questions. This text can be used alone or in conjunction with Kellenberger's Introduction to Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology. James Kellenberger wrote Introduction to Philosophy of Religion in order to make students aware of the relevance of the issues discussed to religion. One reviewer commented that when he was finished with the class discussion of the arguments for the existence of God, his classes would ask about the significance of the arguments for the existence of God. This text has a chapter that explores that question, Chap 3 ¿Religious Faith and Proving God¿s Existence. Chapter 3 follows the chapter in which the logical strength of the traditional arguments for God¿s existence is discussed. Throughout the text the issues discussed are related to religious reactions to the issues under discussion.

This book is about religion, pacifism, and the nonviolence that informs pacifism in its most coherent form. Although moral support for pacifism is presented, a main focus of the book is on religious support for pacifism, found in various religious traditions.

Using various and competing religious sensibilities, Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion helps students work through the traditional material and their own religious questions.