In
Effing the Ineffable, Wesley J. Wildman confronts the human obsession with ultimate reality and our desire to conceive and speak of this reality through religious language, despite the seeming impossibility of doing so. Each chapter is a meditative essay on an aspect of life that, for most people, is fraught with special spiritual significance: dreaming, suffering, creating, slipping, balancing, eclipsing, loneliness, intensity, and bliss. These moments can inspire religious questioning and commitment, and, in extreme situations, drive us in search of ways to express what matters most to us. Drawing upon American pragmatist, Anglo-American analytic, and Continental traditions of philosophical theology, Wildman shows how, through direct description, religious symbolism, and phenomenological experience, the language games of religion become a means to attempt, and, in some sense, to accomplish this task.
Spis treści
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I. Ultimacy Talk
1. Dreaming
2. Suffering
3. Creating
Part II. Ultimacy Systems
4. Slipping
5. Balancing
6. Eclipsing
Part III. Ultimacy Manifestations
7. Loneliness
8. Intensity
9. Bliss
The Treachery of Words (This Is Not a Conclusion)
Works Cited
Index
O autorze
Wesley J. Wildman is Professor of Philosophy, Theology, and Ethics at Boston University. His many books include
Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future for the Philosophy of Religion and
Fidelity with Plausibility: Modest Christologies in the Twentieth Century, both also published by SUNY Press.