Gift of Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut.

Gift of Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut.

This book examines Augustine's intellectual conversion from Platonism to Christianity, as described at Confessions 7.9.13-21.27. It is widely assumed that this occurred in the summer of 386, shortly before Augustine's volitional conversion in the garden at Milan. Brian Dobell argues, however, that Augustine's intellectual conversion did not occur until the mid-390s, and develops this claim by comparing Confessions 7.9.13-21.27 with a number of important passages and themes from Augustine's early writings. He thus invites the reader to consider anew the problem of Augustine's conversion in 386: was it to Platonism or Christianity? His original and important study will be of interest to a wide range of readers in the history of philosophy and the history of theology.

"Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, by Paul Allen Miller, argues that a key element of postmodern French intellectual life has been the reception of Plato. This fact has gone underappreciated in the Anglophone world due to a fundamental division in culture. Until very recently, the concerns of academic philosophy and philology have had little in common. On the one hand, this is due to analytic philosophy's self-confinement to questions of epistemology, speech act theory, and philosophy of science. As such, it has had little to say about the relation between antique and contemporary modes of thought." "On the other hand, blindness to the merits of postmodern thought is also due to Anglo-American philology's own parochial instincts. Ensconced within a nineteenth-century model of Alterumswissenchaft, only a minority of classicists have made forays into philosophical, psychoanalytic, and other speculative modes of inquiry. The result has been that postmodern French thought has largely been the province of scholars of modern languages." "A situation thus emerges in which most classicists do not know theory, and so cannot appreciate the scope of these thinkers' contribution to our understanding of the genealogy of Western thought, while most theorists do not know the Platonic texts and their contexts that ground them. This book bridges this gap, offering detailed and theoretically informed readings of French postmodernism's chief thinkers' debts to Plato and the ancient world."--BOOK JACKET.

We are becoming a nation of superficial and distracted consumers of instant messages and images, a state of being which does not aid engagement in religious and other deep commitments that require a sustained level of reflection and contemplation. In his thought-provoking work, Phillip M. Thompson analyses the shadow elements of technology - nuclear armaments, the bio-engineering of humans, and the distancing of humanity from the natural world - through the fascinating insights of the spiritual writer and monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968). Merton's work offers an important critique and healing resource for contemporary, technology-saturated culture through constructive recommendations which include a balanced approach to work, the careful management of technology, and an appreciation of the recuperative aspects of nature. While understanding the positive influences of technology, Merton urges us not be naively optimistic about its benefits, but to consider the threat it poses toa life of humanity and spiritual connection. A consideration of the profound issues discussed in this book will interest any reader concerned with the intersection between spirituality and technology, and how to maintain spiritual integrity in a technological world.