"Richard Kearney" in Philosophers Find God

European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2013

1924

From Preface: "I am neither a philosopher nor a theologian, but a humble servant of the Lord, whose delight it is to meditate on the love of God and on the great wonders of His creation. It is impossible to describe all that I know and feel about Reality through my internal senses in meditation and prayer. Words cannot express all the deep truths which the soul feels in these solemn moments. Such truths though unspoken are readily and easily understood by receptive minds."

Scottish Journal of Theology, 1982

Philosophy in Review, 2012

Saving God: Religion after Idolatry is a brilliant book: erudite, intriguing and inventive. Anyone interested in the concept of God and the relationship between religion and naturalism will want to read it. That said, even sympathetic readers (I count myself as such) may find it difficult to decide just what Johnston's proposal comes to and how to assess it. What follows will leave out much and won't come close to doing justice to Johnston's arguments. Johnston reminds us early of life's large-scale defects: suffering, the depredations of aging, the loss of what we care about, untimely death. On top of this, we are constitutionally bent to favor our own interests, even to the point of willingness to subjugate ourselves to lessthan-savory supernatural beings. The redeemed life would reconcile us to life's defects and give us "a way to go on, keeping faith in the importance of goodness, and an openness to love." Something deserving of the title "God" or "The Highest One" would be worthy of our devotion not least because orienting ourselves toward it would be salvific in just this way.

Religious Studies Review, 2010

Metaphysics as a whole, giving the proper context to Aristotle's discussion of God in Book 12 of the Metaphysics-a context which, McInerny argues, corrects misunderstandings both of Aristotle himself and of Thomas's use of Aristotle's works. McInerny's book is a valuable resource 1) for philosophers and theologians alike interested in religious epistemology, and 2) as an incisive, evaluative commentary on the most influential Thomists of the twentieth century on the topic of the relationship between Thomas and Aristotle.

Introduction to KNOWING THE LOVE OF GOD: LESSONS FROM A SPIRITUAL MASTER by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. (DeKalb, IL: Lighthouse Catholic Media, 2015).

Religious Studies Review, 2009

sophical questions of evidence, the individuation of persons, and idolatry. Throughout these analyses there is also a tenor of cultural critique as Steinbock criticises the modern conception of the self and diagnoses the rejection of vertical relations, which he calls idolatry, as the root of much evil in late capitalist societies. So while the book displays academic rigor it is at the same time a plea for a restored cultural sense of the vertical. Phenomenology and Mysticism stands out as an original work in a genre too often reduced to commentaries on classical figures. Steinbock is an acute phenomenologist in his own right, and this work sets a new standard for the interaction between phenomenology and theology/religious studies. While free of obscurantist jargon, the book nonetheless requires some background in philosophy and religious studies. Still, its fresh approach and its original analyses should make it the necessary point of reference for postgraduate students and established scholars alike. Press, 2007. Pp. vii +146. $26.99. In this text, which appears in SCM Press's Controversies in Contextual Theology Series, the authors insist that controversy demonstrates the inherently democratic nature of feminist theology and continually pushes it toward new ways of transgressing and transforming oppressive structures. Each chapter examines various feminist positions with regard to a particular methodological or doctrinal issue: gender and sexuality, feminist theological hermeneutics, the Virgin Mary, Christology, life after death, and the future of feminist theologies. While providing an overview of significant feminist theological positions, the authors emphasize approaches, like postcolonial and queer theologies, that more radically challenge the sexual, metaphysical, and capitalist assumptions of Western theology. Both authors have written extensively elsewhere on the need for Christian theology to take seriously transgressive sexualities, and this is the freshest insight that they bring to the discussions in this text (see especially the chapters on gender and sexuality and on Christology). It remains unclear, however, what audience is best served by this text. There is little new here for the reader who is well acquainted with feminist theologies, yet the discussions of various thinkers assume this acquaintance, and are too brief to serve well as introductory summaries. Moreover, the text would have embodied its argument more fully, and demonstrated the stated aims of the series more successfully, if the authors' voices were more distinct, thus performing the dialogically constructive nature of controversy.

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2017

Psychology entered modern culture at least in part by displacing religion from the center of cultural discourse. Psychology, like religion, promised authoritative understandings of the "good person," "healthy functioning," and "normality/abnormality." The fledgling discipline attracted popular audiences by demonstrating that psychological concepts can wholly replace their religious counterparts. Pioneers of psychological thought thus established the discipline's cultural boundaries through what might be called ideology critique. Franz Anton Mesmer famously challenged Catholic understandings of mental illness by curing patients without recourse to biblically based beliefs. First-generation American psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall, Edwin Starbuck, and James Mark Baldwin reduced Protestant conversion experiences to lawful psychological processes. Most famously, Sigmund Freud proclaimed that psychologists now carried the torch illuminating Western culture's progressive march from irrational superstition toward scientific rationality. Jon Mills' Inventing God reminds us that psychology and religion still vie for cultural territory. Psychologists are thus still motivated to engage in ideology critique as a means of fortifying their discipline's cultural boundaries. Mills writes as a philosopher steeped in the psychoanalytic tradition. He draws on the work of psychoanalysts such as Melanie Klein, Heinz Kohut, and D. W. Winnicott to shed light on the mental processes through which humans "invent god." Mills relies heavily on object-relations theory to explain just how and why humans fashion mental representations (fantasies) to meet deep emotional needs. Mills is not, however, content with simply explaining why humans so commonly believe in beings whose existence cannot be empirically demonstrated. He instead weaves philosophical and psychoanalytic arguments together to make the more aggressive argument that there is no God. To do this, he directly addresses the traditional philosophical objection to such arguments known as the genetic fallacy (which explains that knowledge about the origins of a belief are not relevant to determining the truth or falsity of the belief). Mills argues that genetic accounts are indeed relevant to the philosophical analysis of ideas that cannot possibly arise from external sensory events and are instead anchored solely in the mind's internal processes. As he puts it, "the niggle of 'genetic fallacy' is often used as a red herring designed to obfuscate the argument from origins by making it appear illegitimate when it may have everything to do with why a person prefers a certain belief system and not another…. when we examine the psychodynamics of belief from a psychological lens, we often discover that the need to believe is governed by emotional rhetoric ultimately justified as an argument from desire" (p. 29). Inventing God is like most works attempting to apply psychology to real-life issues faced by the general reading public in that it goes beyond portraying psychology as a strictly empirical discipline and touts its potential to provide a normative cultural vision of its own. Mills advocates his own psychologically informed "secular spirituality" as a healthier response to the emotional needs that ordinarily generate religious fantasies. He argues, for example, that our yearning for divine presence can be better met through more careful attention to aesthetic experience, through heightened ecological sensibility, through more authentic relations with others, and through greater awareness of our efforts to