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This book analyzes current conflicts concerning authority in the Anglican church and offers a new framework for addressing them. It argues that authority in the church is fundamentally relational rather than juridical. All members of the church have authority to engage in discerning the church’s identity, direction, and mission. Most of this authority is exercised in personal interactions and group practices of consultation and direction. Formal authority in the church confers power so responsibilities can be fulfilled. Church relations always include conflict, which may be creative and helpful rather than divisive. Conflict arises because persons and groups follow Christ in ways related to their own cultural context while also being in communion with others. Communion in the church requires embracing diversity, recognizing and respecting others’ perspectives, and working together to discover and create common ground. Today’s church needs more participatory forms of governance and decision-making that are conciliar and synodal.

K. H. Ting (1915–2012) was an important Christian leader and theologian in China. Indeed, since the late-1970s, he has been seen as the spokesperson for Christianity in China. Many stories surround his life, but it is sometimes unclear which ones are true, making him a mysterious figure.

K. H. Ting became the principal of Jinling Theological Seminary in 1952 and remained in this position until his death, making him the longest-standing principal of any theological seminary in the world. He experienced many difficult times in his 97 years, and in any ways the history of Christianity in China is reflected through the ups and downs he experienced. In Incorruptible Love: The Story of K. H. Ting, the authors offer Christians, as well as people of other spiritual beliefs, intellectuals, and the general public, a greater understanding of K. H. Ting’s life and beliefs. This biography will help people learn not only about K. H. Ting, but also about the fundamentals of Chinese Christianity.

Written in a blend of creative and academic writing styles, Incorruptible Love makes the story of K. H. Ting vivid and convincing. This text can be used in courses on Christianity in China, the Chinese Church, religion in China, and modern Chinese history.

The work is based on the last command of the risen Jesus to his disciples in Matthew’s account of the events that followed the resurrection of Jesus. The command is: «Make disciples of all nations». The command reverses the initial restriction of the disciples to only the lost sheep of the house of Israel. The work presents the command as the climax of Matthew’s post-resurrection account, which is told in four scenes and each of the scenes contains a command. The last command sanctions the mission to the Gentiles without ending the mission to Israel. Making disciples involves baptism to increase the number of Christians (Church growth) and teaching to increase adherence to the teachings of Jesus (Church life).

Mit der Erklärung «Nostra Aetate» des Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzils wurden die nichtchristlichen Religionen seitens der Katholischen Kirche erstmals positiv in den Blick genommen. Seitdem ist die Theologie der Religionen, die als neue Disziplin in der Folgezeit entstand, um Antwort auf die Frage bemüht, wie die nichtchristlichen Religionen angesichts des christlichen Wahrheitsanspruchs zu bewerten sind.

Die Studie umreißt den Diskussionsstand der neuen Disziplin, beleuchtet die religionstheologischen Überlegungen zweier einflussreicher Theologen des 20. bzw. 21. Jahrhunderts, Karl Barth und Joseph Ratzinger, und fragt, inwiefern sich aus diesen Überlegungen Impulse für die Theologie der Religionen gewinnen lassen.

This volume explores how forced movement and exile of clerics developed over time and ultimately came to shape interactions between the late-antique Roman Empire, the Byzantine, post-Roman, and early medieval worlds. It investigates the politics and legal mechanics of ecclesiastical exile, the locations associated with life in exile, both in literary sources and in material culture, as well as the multitude of strategies which ancient and early medieval authors, and the exiles themselves, employed to create historical narratives of banishment. The chapters are revised versions of papers given at international conferences held at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, the German Historical Institute London, and the University of Alcalá in 2016 and 2017.

This book analyses recent moves in the debate over human enhancement from two different perspectives: moral philosophy and science. It contains not only the thorough consideration on the promise, limitations, and perils of biotechnological improvement, but also offers a lucid account of a systematic evolution of the idea of excellence from antiquity to the present-day project of the post-human condition. The book examines various approaches to the key anthropological concepts such as agency, autonomy, practical rationality, and normativity pointing out their relevance to the philosophical and biomedical research. All these issues are addressed by scholars representing different fields of study including philosophy, law, biophysics, and cognitive science. They attempt to answer the question of whether biotechnological interventions may result in bringing about a better person.

«The collection of articles is unified by the main idea - human enhancement, the challenge that has been brought about by recent developments in neuroscience, genetics, and biotechnology and that is reflected upon by the authors from different angles of perception and argumentation stemming from different philosophical views. The book is of great educational value as it can be used by students of philosophy, medicine, law, education and all those interested in the field, as the basis for well-grounded arguments and discussions, as well as raising their awareness.»

Prof. Roma Kriaučiūnienė, Vilnius University

Die Erlösungslehre Anselms von Canterbury hat eine mächtige und auch negative Wirkungsgeschichte entfaltet. Sie gehört zu den bis heute umstrittensten und auch am meisten missverstandenen Theorien der Theologiegeschichte. Die Studie unternimmt den Versuch, die Soteriologie Anselms von dessen Gotteslehre her zu lesen. Das Gottesverständnis des Kirchenlehrers bietet den Schlüssel, um Cur Deus homo überraschend neu zu verstehen und die eigentlich problematische Rede von Erlösung vor der Vernunft zu verantworten. Erst wenn Gott als Mensch begegnet, kann man definitiv sinnvoll von Offenbarung und Erlösung sprechen. Zudem zeigt der Autor, dass die apologetische Zielsetzung Anselms gegenüber Juden und Muslimen seiner Zeit Cur Deus homo bereits als ein frühes Zeugnis einer Theologie der Religionen qualifiziert. Anselms Werk weist einen Weg aus der religionstheologischen Sackgasse aus Exklusivismus, Inklusivismus und Pluralismus, den man als «Interiorismus» (Christus in den Religionen) bezeichnen kann.

If it is true that a painting can ‘think visually’, then it is also true that Diderot was the first to say so　-　and he has spelled out this concept better than anyone else. Diderot’s Salons show that the ‘imaginal’ sense that arises from the engagement with a picture needs to be investigated using the concepts of ékphrasis and theatricality　-　the capacity to explore the power of pictures in relation to the composition of the scene, to the expressive and pantomimic gestures, and to what can be called a ‘theory of affections’.

The book will focus on an issue that pertains to the theory of pictures, on a question that is ground-breaking in the English-speaking academic context: how can we look at a picture in order to rethink aesthetics as a discipline that allows us to look at pictures from a philosophical point of view?

The Salons demonstrate that the ‘imaginal’ process leading to knowledge always emerges from the picture itself, and that this process always needs to be supported by a method of inquiry that can rightly be called a philosophical method　-　as Diderot was a philosopher himself. Even when approaching this issue from a contemporary perspective, this method should always be related to the concepts of ékphrasis and theatricality. Fundamental, however, is also the ‘pathetic’, the emotionally stimulating, due to its essential relation to the enjoyment of pictures - something rooted in aesthetic disinterestedness, absorption and, conversely, voyeurism.

The Meditations of Manuel de la Vega addresses the "hard" problem of consciousness in a nonreductive way. Which is to say, the question is posited as to why, no matter how much structural or functional explanation we may devise, this does not quite satisfy attempts to grasp the essence, the "what it is like," of being an embodied consciousness. The book’s method aims to be faithful to its subject by its choice of format. It does not intend to offer fully articulated theory, as univocal argument, but to facilitate theory, over the course of several exemplars, and by way of various perspectives which in the end form a whole—albeit not a closed or finalized whole. While fully compatible with certain theories of consciousness, and while yet incorporating much theorizing itself, the book makes the point, by its example, that explanations of consciousness must not necessarily be theories and models, and that the mode in which theories are rendered may be only part, and perhaps not the most important part, of what consciousness "is" or "does." This is much in keeping with phenomenological methods, with the anthropological-genealogical approaches of existentialists, and with certain takes on aesthetics; in keeping also with the insights of post-structuralism, and yet it does not exclude (and may even complement) some current computational or neurophysiological models of consciousness.