This essay examines the link between eros and metaphysics in “The Seducer’s Diary.” It argues that Johannes approaches seduction as a performative rather than strategic medium, in which the goal is not conquest but a way of playing with reality. The diary, on this reading, allows us to explore the erotic structure of our most fundamental experiences of mediation and serves as a key to understanding the spiritual dimensions of aesthetic existence.

This chapter focuses upon the Holy Spirit’s renovating work in the heart of the individual believer. Wholly by grace, the Spirit turns sinful humanity from the love of nothingness to the love of God, creating in the hearts of those being redeemed Christ’s own human desires.

After a general survey attention is first paid to the transformations Shintoism has undergone over the centuries, with its present stress on the environment used to illumine tensions in Christianity between the transcendent and the immanent. With Buddhism two very different forms are contrasted, Zen and Pure Land. With the former modern American, English and European appropriations are first analysed, including the work of Jack Kerouac, Charles Johnson, D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts. Thereafter, a positive value is assigned to Zen aesthetics (especially in its positive evaluation of impermanence), while a more critical assessment is offered of its ’emptiness’ doctrine. Various versions of Pure Land are then discussed. Not only is Karl Barth’s negative judgement firmly rejected but also its notions of grace treated as illuminating for Christianity’s own approach to the subject.

This article discusses David Tracy’s implicit and explicit reflection on the church as a community of Christian praxis. The church is both a social and a theological reality, just like its theological partner-reality ‘the world’. This means that no concrete expression of the Christian church may pronounce itself wholly or uniquely adequate to its theological field; neither can any boundary between ‘church’ and ‘world’ be rendered theologically determinate or fundamental. So Tracy’s thinking focuses on the centre of the church, not on its boundaries. As gift and sacrament, the church participates in God’s grace as disclosed in God’s self-manifestation in Jesus Christ. In bearing witness to this event, the church’s critical and self-critical praxis of love is borne upon mystical-prophetic discourses and dialogues with otherness without and within. Ecclesiology, therefore, emerges only in fragments and not as a closed system. Tracy’s ecclesiology is everywhere a function of an account of God and reality. A Christian church that learns a Tracyean route to naming God aspires actively, contemplatively, and fragmentarily to realise itself in answering fashion as an ‘institution of love’.

Abstract: There is a fundamental need to understand and improve the errors and uncertainties associated with estimates of seasonal snow analysis and prediction. Over the past few decades, snow cover remote sensing techniques have increased in accuracy, but the retrieval of spatially and temporally continuous estimates of snow depth or snow water equivalent remains challenging tasks. Model-based snow estimates often bear significant uncertainties due to model structure and error-prone forcing data and parameter estimates. A potential method to overcome model and observational shortcomings is data assimilation. Data assimilation leverages the information content in both observations and models while minimising inherent limitations that result from uncertainty. This chapter reviews current snow models, snow remote sensing methods, and data assimilation techniques that can reduce uncertainties in the characterisation of seasonal snow.

Thomas Wyatt lived in an environment where it was unwise, if not impossible, to speak one’s thoughts plainly. This chapter explores how Wyatt’s life at court, and his career as an ambassador, informed his tendency towards irony, obliquity, and indirection in his verse. As a close reading of his diplomatic correspondence demonstrates, Wyatt learned to speak in blank phrases, proverbs, and clichés, not just from his ambassadorial profession, but from contemporary writings on counsel, courtiership, and literary style. What is more, these influences seem to have inspired a theory of making in which, for Wyatt, the message of a poem is to be found, neither in its matter, nor in its form, but in its suggestive implications—in the sense of “grace,” to use his term, that the poem may evoke for its reader. By tracing the effects of this “grace” throughout Wyatt’s lyrics—and especially in poems such as “What Vaileth Trouth” and “They Fle From Me”—I argue that Wyatt anticipates later theories of aesthetic autonomy by shifting the reader’s attention away from the contingent materials of his poetry and towards the imaginative space that a poem may seem to open up.

What motivates gratuitous behaviour? What characterizes its expression? Who benefits from and who is excluded from our favour? In this chapter, we tackle the long-standing anthropological puzzle of how to attend to manifestations of spontaneity, free will to act, and sympathy – that is, manifestations of favour. We argue that acts of favour constitute a significant ethical dimension of social life. We show how favours perform the intermediary and balancing work between incommensurable values, interests, obligations, and ethical sensibilities that underpin our lives. Favours can mediate, for example, between the calculative values of the market and those of friendship and kin relations, between the divine grace and performing good deeds; or in the situations of radical distress, when the question of life and death is at stake. Ultimately, if human sociality is grounded in the exchange of sentiments and gratitude mediated by the ethical labour of favours, then favours need to be considered as one of the key articulations of the ethical condition of social life.

The chapter on sacraments in general and baptism and confirmation in particular, follows the formulation of the decree of the seventh session, from the list of heretical propositions idenifying their authors and meanings, to the conciliar discussions of them, to the draft decrees, and their final wording. It points to misunderstanidngs and polemical stances that ecumenical dialogue can help to bridge.

The Council of Trent addressed the topics of original sin and justification in two decrees, developed in succession. The Decree on Original Sin reaffirms a broadly Augustinian understanding of original sin, its effects, and its remedy in baptism. What remains after baptism is not sin in the strict sense. The Decree on Justification lays out the path from sin to grace to glory. Emphasis lies on both the constant and decisive role of grace and on the way grace engages rather than nullifies the agency of the justified. The Decree on Justification in particular not only rejected errors, but expounded Catholic teaching.

The introduction to this volume captures virtue's dizzying variety by explaining its roots in classical ethics, transformation through theological appropriation, and engagement with global wisdom traditions. We propose that the work of Shakespeare patches together virtue's many realizations, active both on the horizontal axis of Aristotelian capacity and dynamism and the vertical axis of Judeo-Christian valuation. Threading together exemplary passages from Shakespeare and previews of the volume's contributions, the introduction proposes that Shakespeare creates virtue ecologies -- worlds that allow for person-affirming capacities to be tested and flourish. Alive to virtue's textual and performative dimensions, we establish a vocabulary and background for the essays that follow.

Greggs examines how creaturely gratitude has been disrupted by the Fall, but is restored by grace. Rather than accepting the Thomist or Calvinist account of gratitude as an obligation, stemming from the Fall, Greggs sees true creaturely gratitude as movement within grace, in anticipation of redemption; an outpouring of thankfulness into all areas of life.

Civil war has beset France yet again. Victor Hugo reacts to the slaughter of the Commune in 1872 by telling – like Vergil, Lucan, and Augustine – a story from the past. Quatrevingt-treize is set during the Terror (1793) following the French Revolution. Paradigmatic characters and places instantiate ideologies that have mapped positions since ancient Rome. As in Augustine, no history has managed to overcome civil war. Christianity has merely enabled the shift to a new form of domination in monarchy. A new republic is needed that will refound France – a universal paradigm like Rome – on secularized Christian values that will finally bring new order to the world.

In Purgatory where Dante learns how all the purposes of the journey thus far which had progressed from the terrifying dark mountainside, through Hell and into Purgatory, are achieved in his finally passing beyond the whole purgatorial mentality itself into a place of the recovery of the original innocence of Eden. Here Dante learns from Beatrice that the burdens of sin can be finally laid down in the Earthly Paradise, and that he should now have learned, at last, how to smile. For here, she says, sin no longer has any place on the agenda of Dante’s recovery, which takes the form of a redemptive act of memory, recalling the innocence lost in Eden; and now, with the recovery of that true memory, he is now able truly to narrate the journey thus far. Now he can write the Comedy.

Paul’s gospel of divine self-sacrifice, according to this chapter, is rejectable by humans. In fact, many people do reject it, for various reasons, even after careful reflection. Most scholarly attention to Paul on God focuses on his position on divine grace and promised triumph, in a way that neglects his position on divine frustration and failure in redemptive purpose. This chapter counters that neglect with a presentation of Paul’s case for human frustration of God and God’s redemptive aim. It identifies how this case bears on Paul’s understanding of the divine redemption of humans, and it observes how many commentators have missed the important role of human frustration of God in Paul’s theology. The chapter thus acknowledges a role for human power in redemption, according to Paul, as a response to the gospel of divine self-sacrifice. The result does not compromise, however, Paul’s understanding of redemption by divine grace through faith in God. The human power in question enables God to be blameless, by Paul’s lights, in the human frustration of the intended divine redemption for humans. The chapter identifies how divine election works in this context.