Reading Religious Ritual With Ricoeur

Reading Religious Ritual with Ricoeur: Between Fragility and Hope creates a dialogue between Ricœur’s hermeneutic philosophy and the interpretation of human ritual practices, especially as such practices are manifested within the context of Christian liturgy. In the first part of the book, Christina M. Gschwandtner shows that Ricœur’s account of religion would be deepened if it were to take into account not only the biblical texts but also forms of liturgical expression and ritual actions. She challenges Ricœur’s early reading of the symbol and second naïveté, broadens his interpretation of biblical texts and faith to consider religious actions more fully, and suggests that ritual can enhance human capacities. The second part of the book employs Ricœur’s hermeneutics in order to shed light on the analysis of liturgy, demonstrating that his accounts of truth, of the world of the text, of religious language, of the imagination, and of the formation of identity are all eminently applicable to liturgical experience. Reading Religious Ritual with Ricoeur shows that one of the most significant themes in Ricœur’s work—the tension between fragility and hope—is especially helpful for understanding what liturgy does and how it functions. Seeing how liturgy and ritual configure fragility and hope also enriches Ricœur’s account of the role and function of religion in human experience.

Reading Ricoeur through Law, edited by Marc de Leeuw, George H. Taylor, and Eileen Brennan, is the first collection of essays solely focused on Ricoeur’s thinking about law, bringing together both established and emerging scholars to offer a systematic and critical examination of Ricoeur’s legal thinking. The chapters not only explore the specific contribution Ricoeur makes to the field of jurisprudence but also examine how Ricoeur’s work on law fits, complements, or changes his overall anthropology, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. The book provides a complex insight into how law, ethics, and politics intertwine both from within law as normative rule setting, as well as through the wider social-political and historical context in which law and legal institutions affect our inter-subjective and communal life as lived “with and for others in just institutions.” The collection also makes available in English “The Just between the Legal and the Good,” a key text in Ricoeur’s reflections about law and justice. The core topics of this collection are rights, justice, responsibility, judging, interpretation, argumentation, punishment, and authority, but contributors also offer original insights in how Ricoeur’s philosophical reconceptualization of symbolism, action, ideology, narrative, selfhood, testimony, history, trauma, reconciliation, justice, and forgiveness can be made productive for our understanding of law and legal institutions.

The topic of revelation is fundamental to any account of religious experience, playing a special role in the Judeo-Christian tradition where the texts of Scripture are regarded as revealed. Yet, any reflection on the revealed status of a given message or text requires interpretation. Paul Ricœur, one of the most important hermeneutic philosophers of the twentieth century, provides crucial insights on how such interpretation might proceed and what it might mean for texts to be revealed. Edited by Christina M. Gschwandtner, Paul Ricoeur, Philosophical Hermeneutics, and the Question of Revelation brings together major scholars of Ricœur’s work on the topic of revelation, showing both the role it already plays in his work and how his thinking might be taken further. Several contributors trace the development of his thought in regard to the concept of revelation. Others discuss the revelatory dimensions of Ricœur’s hermeneutics of the self, especially for such issues as identity, trauma, and forgiveness. Several contributions also place his work in conversation with that of other seminal thinkers on the topic of revelation, such as Karl Barth and Paul Tillich.

In Paul Ricoeur's Renewal of Philosophical Anthropology: Vulnerability, Capability, Justice, Marc de Leeuw argues that Ricoeur’s philosophical project integrates the anthropological tradition while renewing its importance as a hermeneutic anthropology of human capability. Ricoeur posits that our cogito is neither its own absolute master, nor fully transparent to itself, inflicting a “wound” (brisé) and fracturing the center of Cartesian self-certainty. But the Nietzschean disillusionment that ensues does not simply amount to a victorious anti-cogito; it opens another path towards self-understanding. In place of the direct route of intuition is found a more complex way forward, one guided by interpretation. The task of philosophical anthropology is to understand the human through its interpretative, critical, and imaginative ability as well as its capacity to act towards, with, and for others; the interpretation of the world in front of us, the interpretation of “who we are,” and the interpretation of what it means to be among others (as "other selves") coalesces in an anthropology that binds the question of the self to a moral, ethical, and political project, one aiming to reflect our existence-in-common. For Ricoeur, the basic question of our subjective and normative “standing” demands a fundamental response—a response toward our own otherness and to responsibilities triggered by the appeal of Others. In both cases, our vulnerability is inescapable: we can never have an absolute self-knowledge nor an absolute knowledge of Others. Ricoeur turns this fundamental aporia into an affirmative philosophical anthropology of human action, attestation, and justice.

The Phenomenology of Revelation in Heidegger, Marion, and Ricoeur provides a critical framework for understanding the phenomenology of revelation through a series of close readings that serve as the basis for an imagined dialogue between Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricoeur. Adam J. Graves distinguishes between two dominant approaches to revelation: a “radical” approach that seeks to disclose a pre-linguistic experience of revelation through a radicalization of the phenomenological reduction, and a “hermeneutical” one that characterizes revelation as an eruption of meaning arising from our encounter with concrete symbols, narratives, and texts. According to Graves, the radical approach is often driven by a misplaced concern for maintaining philosophical rigor and for avoiding theological biases, or “contaminations.” This preoccupation leads to a process of “counter-contamination” in which the concept of revelation is ultimately estranged from the phenomenon’s rich historical and linguistic content. While Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology may do a better job of accommodating the concrete content of revelation, it does so at the price of having to renouncing the kind of “presuppositionlessness” generally associated with phenomenological method. Ultimately, Graves argues that a more nuanced appreciation of the complex nature of our linguistic inheritance enables us to reconceive the relationship between revelation and philosophical thought.

Refiguring the Sacred: Conversations with Paul Ricoeur offers perspectives on the twenty-one papers collected by Mark I. Wallace in Paul Ricoeur’s Figuring the Sacred, translated by David Pellauer; this new collection by Joseph A. Edelheit, James Moore, and Mark I. Wallace gives Ricoeur scholars an opportunity to reflect and engage on critical issues of Ricoeur’s religious ideas. Contributions by several significant Ricoeur scholars prompt questions and invite new conversations more than 15 years after Ricoeur’s death. His life-long engagement with texts illuminates his embrace of the Sacred; his significant thinking and writings on Religious imagination, Theology, the Bible, Hope, and Praxis are all ideas that beg more reading, reflection, and refiguring of our understanding of Ricoeur. Wallace brings two additional essays that could not be included in his original collection and reflects on why they are essential to our understanding of Ricoeur and the Sacred. Refiguring the Sacred also provides a model of the interfaith and multidisciplinary dialogue that were foundational to Paul Ricoeur’s scholarship.

God and Phenomenology: Thinking with Jean-Yves Lacoste provides a starting point for scholars who seek to familiarize themselves with the work of this French phenomenologist and theologian. Thirteen international scholars comment on Lacoste's work. In conclusion the volume offers an unpublished essay by Lacoste on the topic of eschatology. / Table of Contents -- Introduction: Thinking with Jean-Yves Lacoste by Joeri Schrijvers and Martin Koci / Part I: Critiques -- 1. "'Children of the World': A Note on Jean-Yves Lacoste," by Kevin Hart / 2. "Lacoste on Appearing and Reduction," by Steven DeLay / 3. "Reduction Without Appearance: The Non-Phenomenality of God," by Robert C. Reed / 4. "Only Metaphysics Sustains Phenomenology," by John Milbank / Part II: Commentaries -- 5. "Canonical Texts," by Oliver O'Donovan / 6. "Reading Prayerfully Before God: Jean-Yves Lacoste's Treatment of Lectio Divina as an Instance of Existence Coram Deo," by Christina M. Gschwandtner / 7. "Affection, Mood, and Poetry: Overcoming Mentalism," by Joseph Rivera / 8. "Rejecting the Wrong Questions: Jean-Yves Lacoste's Resistance to a Philosophical-Theological Divide," by Stephanie Rumpza / Part III: Explorations -- 9. "For the Love of Revelation: Open and Relational Theology in Light of Lacoste," by Jason W. Alvis / 10. "Right Use, Right Thinking," by William C. Hackett / 11. "The Beautiful Life of Faith: A Liturgical Reading of Fear and Trembling," by Amber Bowen / 12. "In the Footsteps of Henri de Lubac and Gregory of Nyssa: Jean-Yves Lacoste on Human Becoming, Historical and Eternal," by Stephen E. Lewis / 13. "Kenosis and Transcendence: Jean-Yves Lacoste and Soren Kierkegaard on the Phenomenality of God," by Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere / In Conclusion -- 14. "The Final Word: Prolegomena to Eschatology," by Jean-Yves Lacoste

In this important new book, Brian Gregor gives a comprehensive account of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of religion, which focuses on the regeneration of human capability. Gregor documents the thinkers, movements, and themes that shaped Ricoeur’s thought and gives a critical examination of Ricoeur’s philosophical interpretation of religion.