2024 Annual Meeting Panel Discussions
July 04, 2024
January 28, 2016
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Bloomsbury Academic will publish in 2016 two volumes on Idealism and Christian Thought: Volume 1, Idealism and Christian Theology, edited Joshua Farris, Mark Hamilton, and James Spiegel, features eleven new contributions to this topic. From the publisher’s description:
In the recent history of philosophy few works have appeared which favorably portray Idealism as a plausible philosophical view of the world. Considerably less has been written about Idealism as a viable framework for doing theology. While the most recent and significant works on Idealism, composed by the late John Foster (Case for Idealism and A World for Us: The Case for Phenomenological Idealism), have put this theory back on the philosophical map, no such attempt has been made to re-introduce Idealism to contemporary Christian theology. Idealism and Christian Theology is such a work, retrieving ideas and arguments from its most significant modern exponents (especially George Berkeley and Jonathan Edwards) in order to assess its value for present and future theological construction. As a piece of constructive philosophical-theology itself, this volume considers the explanatory power an Idealist ontology has for contemporary Christian theology.
Volume 2, Idealism and Christian Philosophy, edited by Steven Cowan and James Spiegel, features ten new contributions to this topic. From the publisher’s description:
When it comes to contemporary philosophical problems, metaphysical idealism-or Berkeleyan immaterialism – is not taken seriously by most philosophers, not to mention the typical Christian layperson. This state of affairs deserves some attempt at rectification, since Idealism has considerable explanatory power as a metaphysical thesis and provides numerous practical and theoretical benefits.
Such thinkers as George Berkeley and Jonathan Edwards believed that Idealism is especially amenable to a Christian perspective, both because it provides a plausible way of conceptualizing the world from a theistic standpoint and because it effectively addresses skeptical challenges to the Christian faith. The contributors to this volume explore a variety of ways in which the case can be made for this claim, including potential solutions to philosophical problems related to the nature of time, the ontology of physical objects, the mind-body problem, and the nature of science.
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