Spiritual Life

Michael McGhee

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009230193
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

The original claim made in the introduction to this classic volume was that it broke fresh ground: that it set a new agenda for the philosophy of religion and was a reaction against a narrow conception of the discipline that had little to say philosophically about human experience, or subjectivity, or about the religious imagination, or the idea of 'spirituality'. In a new Foreword to the book, Michael McGhee reflects on how the discipline has changed or remained the same in the intervening twenty-five years since first publication. He argues that the connections between 'philosophy' and 'spirituality' are still developing; and that what we think of as 'religious' or 'spiritual' is shifting, along with ideas about self-knowledge. The book contains pertinent chapters by some of the leading thinkers in the field, including Rowan Williams, Janet Soskice, Fergus Kerr, Stephen Clark and Paul Williams, who offers a comparative piece on Tibetan Buddhism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Philosophy and Religion in the Thought of Kierkegaard
• 2 De Consolatione Philosophiae
• 3 The real or the Real? Chardin or Rothko?
• 4 Love and Attention
• 5 Descartes' Debt to Augustine
• 6 Visions of the Self in Late Medieval Christianity: Some Cross-Disciplinary Reflections
• 7 Refined and Crass Supernaturalism
• 8 Religious Imagination
• 9 Moral Values as Religious Absolutes
• 10 Revealing the Scapegoat Mechanism: Christianity after Girard
• 11 Philosophy vs. Mysticism: An Islamic Controversy
• 12 Non-Conceptuality, Critical Reasoning and Religious Experience: Some Tibetan Buddhist Discussions
• 13 'Know Thyself': What Kind of an Injunction?
• 14 Facing Truths: Ethics and the Spiritual Life
• Index