The Truth Of Broken Symbols

This book provides a cross-cultural analysis of how religious symbols function from a theological and philosophical perspective. Showing how religious symbols can be true in various qualified senses, Neville presents a theory of religious symbolism in the American pragmatic tradition extending and elaborating Tillich's claim that religious symbols participate in the divine realities to which they refer and yet must be broken in order not to be idolatrous or demonic. The Truth of Broken Symbols offers a theory of religious symbolism treating reference, meaning, and interpretation, and discussing different functions of religious symbols in theological, practical, and devotional contexts. It shows that religious symbols are to be properly understood as true or false and that symbol-systems such as myths, theologies, or liturgical symbols are to be used to engage divine realities while internally exhibiting semiotic structures of reference, meaning, and interpretation.

Symbols of Jesus is a systematic theology focusing on what makes Jesus important in Christianity.

Symbols of the Sacred gathers four classic essays by Louis Dupr on the role of symbols in our understanding of the sacred and on their fundamental importance to religious consciousness. A leading philosopher of religion, Dupr here discusses the nature of religious symbols, the importance of language for capturing symbolic meaning, the ancient link between art and expressions of the sacred, and the vital relationship between religious symbol and myth. The volume concludes with a powerful reflection on the innate capacity of human minds to grasp the transcendent. Elegantly expressed, conversant with a wide range of thinkers, and marked by a lifetime of reflection on the subject, Symbols of the Sacred offers profound insights into the religious dimension of human life.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a Persian Sufist is the subject of volume 28 in the Library of Living Philosophers series. As in the other volumes of the series, the subject discusses his life and philosophical development in an intellectual autobiography. This is followed by 33 critical essays by various scholars and Nasr's replies to each of them.

In Homeric Greece, Biblical Israel, and Old Mesopotamia, the king was said to be installed by divine appointment and was regarded as having a special and privileged relationship with God or the gods.

Explores religious truth in a range of world religions and discusses the issue and philosophical implications of comparison itself.

American pragmatism is fertile soil for growth in Western religious thought.