The Body And Ultimate Concern

Paul Tillich's account of "ultimate concern" has been crucial for his theological legacy. It is a concept that has been taken up and adapted by many theologians in an array of subfields. However, Tillich's own account of ultimate concern and many of the subsequent uses of it have focused on intelligibility: the ways it makes what is ultimate more accessible to us as rational beings. This volume charts a different course by placing Tillich's theology in conversation with theories of radical embodiment. The essays gathered here use discourses on the particularity and mutability of the body to offer a critical vantage point for constructive engagement with Tillich's central theological category: ultimate concern. Each essay explores how individuals can be special bearers of ultimate concern by engaging the body's role in faith, religion, and culture. As Mary Ann Stenger, professor emerita from University of Louisville, observes in her introduction: "From concerns about bodily integrity to considering bodies on the margins of society to discussions of technologically modified bodies, these articles offer us fresh theological insights and call us to ethical thinking and actions in relation to our bodies and the bodies around us. And certainly, today, the body and a person's right to bodily integrity have become central, critical issues in our culture." Book jacket.

This volume makes a powerful case for the inclusion of ultimate concerns - spiritual and religious themes in personal strivings - in an attempt to build a motivational theory of personality. The book first reviews the growing body of empirical and clinical literature on goal seeking and its relationship to subjective well-being, life satisfaction, and personality description. Emmons then sets forth an innovative framework for the assessment and measurement of ultimate concerns.

Too often we see reality in black and white, overlooking nuances that require the discernment of tensions between the brokenness of our world and our desires for reconciliation. Yet the gap between wounding words and actions and the hope for acts of reconciliation can lead to even more violence and despair. The authors of this volume explore these tensions and the valences of ‘brokenness’ and ‘reconciliation’ in Paul Tillich’s thought. Together, they contribute to a richer understanding of the thought of the German American theologian and philosopher, his commitments, and the constructive interpretations his work can induce for us today. Think of the ruptures and efforts of dialogue among divided Christian churches, or the commitment of the social worker; reflect on how love as agape, or the courage to be, can be at the heart of this constructive work; or consider the reconciliation processes of peoples torn apart by violence, to mention a few contributions from this volume. Collectively, these contributions raise the hope of a Tillichian creative justice, a hope that can stimulate a broad audience to go beyond the superficiality and instantaneity of social media to something deeper, more enduring, and transformative.

The essays in Paul Ricoeur and the Hope of Higher Education: The Just University discuss diverse ways that Paul Ricoeur’s work provides hopeful insight and necessary provocation that should inform the task and mission of the modern university in the changing landscape of Higher Education. This volume gathers interdisciplinary scholars seeking to reestablish the place of justice as the central function of higher education in the twenty-first century. The contributors represent diverse backgrounds, including teachers, scholars, and administrators from R1 institutions, seminary and divinity schools as well as undergraduate teaching colleges. This collection, edited by Daniel Boscaljon and Jeffrey F. Keuss, offers critical and practical visions for the renewal of higher education. The first part of the book provides an internal examination of the university system and details how Ricoeur’s thinking assists on pragmatics from syllabus design to final exams to daily teaching. The second portion of the book examines the Just University’s role as a social institution within the broader cultural world and looks at how Ricoeur’s description of values informs how the university works relative to religious belief, prisons, and rural poverty.

The Courage to Be introduced issues of theology and culture to a general readership. The book examines ontic, moral, and spiritual anxieties across history and in modernity. The author defines courage as the self-affirmation of one's being in spite of a threat of nonbeing. He relates courage to anxiety, anxiety being the threat of non-being and the courage to be what we use to combat that threat. Tillich outlines three types of anxiety and thus three ways to display the courage to be. Tillich writes that the ultimate source of the courage to be is the "God above God," which transcends the theistic idea of God and is the content of absolute faith (defined as "the accepting of the acceptance without somebody or something that accepts").

Jan-Olav Henriksen investigates the close relationship between God and human beings via an understanding of religion as clusters of practices that relate humans to ultimacy by different types of representation. Christian religion articulates its belief in God as creator (manifest in the power to be) and redeemer (represented in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. Christ thus is the primary representation of God as the ultimate reality of love. He is also the true image of God, and the model for how humans are also called to represent God in love. The human features of desire and vulnerability, as these express elements that shape, form, and articulate challenges for human life, present humans with the need for orienting themselves, and for different types of transformation. Christian religion articulates a specific mode of how to cope with these challenges presented by desire and vulnerability: by living in love. Against this backdrop, Henriksen argues that neither how one understands religion, God, nor how to live a life that relates to ultimacy, can be tasks fulfilled as long as history goes on.

This book is a theo-historical account of race in the United States. It argues that white supremacy is a religion that functions through the Protestant Christian tradition.