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Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology

Peter Dula author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:13th Jan '11

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Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology cover

In recent decades, theologians and philosophers of religion have been engaged in a vigorous debate about the status and nature of ecclesiology, and of community. In that discussion, theologians have found resources in political philosophy, particularly communitarianism and political liberalism. In this book, Peter Dula turns instead to Stanley Cavell to see how his work might illuminate that discussion - in particular, how his understanding of companionship might usefully complicate the communitarian-liberal divide. Since the 1960s, Stanley Cavell has been the most category-defying philosopher in North America as well as one of the least understood. In part this was because philosophers were not sure what to do with Cavell's extensive engagements with literature and film or, stranger yet, Cavell's openness to theological concerns. In this, the first book on Cavell and theology, Dula places Cavell in conversation with some of the philosophers most influential in contemporary theology (Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum and John Rawls). He then examines Cavell's relationship to Christian theology, shows how the figure of Christ appears repeatedly in his work, and how Cavell's account of skepticism and acknowledgment is a profoundly illuminating and transformative resource for theological discussions - not just of ecclesiology, but of sin, salvation and the existence of God.

Stanley Cavell's unique aesthetic is not easily shoe-horned into theology-or, for that matter, into philosophy. There is nothing forced, however, in Peter Dula's honest engagement with Cavell and the unmasterable questions that Cavell is such a master at posing. Dula's study, beautifully and bravely written, is an invitation into unsettled theology and friendship. There is much to nettle and delight the intrepid reader. * James Wetzel, Augustinian Chair and Professor of Philosophy, Villanova University *

ISBN: 9780195395037

Dimensions: 163mm x 236mm x 28mm

Weight: 576g

296 pages