Divine Nothingness

From the National Book Award–winning author of This Time, a new volume of poems that explore the very nature of existence. Divine Nothingness is a meditative reflection on the poet’s past and an elegy to love and the experience of the senses in the face of mortality. From the Jersey side of the Delaware River in Lambertville, Gerald Stern explores questions about who and why we are, locating nothingness in the divine and the divine in nothingness. From “What Brings Me Here?” Here I am again and what brings me here to the same wooden bench preaching to the city of Lambertville surrounded by mayapples? For who in the hell is going to lie down with whom in the hell, either inside or outside?

Provides an innovative theology based in mysticism, one that acknowledges the pain of spiritual repression and values religious pluralism.

"What do you mean, nothing and transcendent? If nothing, what to transcend? The mind has a moment of Zen!" There is an ineffable mystery even in the reality of Nothing. Walking on the guiding thread of undeniable reality, we discover the endless savor of inner peace that reveals to us the Supreme Truth: We are Nothing! The book discusses a spiritual-scientific theory on the origins of the universe, preceding the Big Bang, and provides an answer to the Big Crunch questions. It is also an invitation to play, in the book are left white pages on which the reader can write his own revelations following the exercises proposed by the writer.

In this groundbreaking new work, Dillard makes a powerful case for bringing contemporary Christian theology into critical dialogue with Martin Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). Following his initial receptivity to theology in his early writings, Heidegger becomes increasingly agnostic and even atheistic in the 1930s until the sudden resurgence of religious discourse in Contributions. Dillard shows that there are good reasons for Heidegger’s striking reversal. Key philosophical concepts from Contributions enable Heidegger to overcome earlier theological conundrums left unresolved in his earlier engagements with themes in St. Paul and Luther, while the need to make a fateful decision regarding “the last god” prevents the central philosophical task of Contributions from collapsing into empty tautology or relapsing into objectionable metaphysics. Nevertheless, Heidegger leaves us in the predicament of having no clear idea of how we are to make the crucial decision about divinity. After considering several unsuccessful proposals for escaping the dilemma, Dillard develops a christological solution based on Heidegger’s engagement with the poetry of Georg Trakl. The resulting theological perspective is defended from some possible criticisms and situated within the broader context of contemporary postmetaphysical Heideggerian theology.

Though it is simple and obvious, you may not understand the incredible importance of the way of nothing. When you do see the way, you will wonder, "Can it really be this easy and simple?" And seeing that there was never anything in the way of freedom can almost be embarrassing. "How could I have never seen it?" you’ll ask. The Way of Nothing: Nothing in the Way explores the obstacles that stop you from reaching your highest desires: enlightenment, eternal peace, or simply ordinary contentment. These obstacles are nothing more than concepts you have that seem real, yet they vanish with insight into the way. It is a wonderful surprise to discover that there has always been nothing in the way of what you want. Best of all, there is really nothing to it! ,

This book, first published in 1951, discusses the fundamental concepts which have crystallized around the fatal ‘crisis’. It proceeds by critically examining the theories which, from Kierkegaard to Heidegger, Sartre and their associates, have placed Existentialism in the focus of philosophical thought.

The theology of creation interconnected with virtually every aspect of early Christian thought, from Trinitarian doctrine to salvation to ethics. Paul M. Blowers provides an advanced introduction to the multiplex relation between Creator and creation as an object both of theological construction and religious devotion in the early church. While revisiting the polemical dimension of Christian responses to Greco-Roman philosophical cosmology and heterodox Gnostic and Marcionite traditions on the origin, constitution, and destiny of the cosmos, Blowers focuses more substantially on the positive role of patristic theological interpretation of Genesis and other biblical creation texts in eliciting Christian perspectives on the multifaceted relation between Creator and creation. Greek, Syriac, and Latin patristic commentators, Blowers argues, were ultimately motivated less by purely cosmological concerns than by the urge to depict creation as the enduring creative and redemptive strategy of the Trinity. The 'drama of the divine economy', which Blowers discerns in patristic theology and piety, unfolded how the Creator invested the 'end' of the world already in its beginning, and thereupon worked through the concrete actions of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit to realize a new creation.

This volume contains both overviews of Heidegger's life and works and analysis of his most important work, Being and Time.