Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. - Böcker

Reading both philosophical and theological texts, this book presents an argument against nostalgia: against the myth of a Golden Age, against the posture that sees "modernity" as a problem to be solved.This book about nostalgia raises the question of why it has become such a dominant and influential posture in contemporary philosophical and theological writing. The author notes the presence of the word "after" in a great many contemporary academic titles, and notes a spiritual sort of alienation that many feel in the "modern age." Out of this scholarly discontent emerges one of two related attempts: the attempt to return to a pre-modern manner of thinking and being (nostalgia); and the playful flight into some vaguely defined "postmodernity" (utopia). In either case, the common perception is that modernity is a problem, a problem to be avoided or escaped.Bringing philosophical and theological texts into conversation with one another, the book discovers a startling similarity in the accounts of modernness offered in these disparate idioms. Both are telling a story-a story which, the author argues, is as seductive as it is misguided.

Argues that the underlining of erotic matters in Plato's dialogues marks the most significant moment in his career.Socrates was wise, because he knew that he did not know anything; this has long been the prevailing wisdom of the Socratic-Platonic tradition. In Plato's Middle Period-spanning dialogues such as Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, and Phaedrus-Socrates consistently claims to have knowledge in one area: the erotic. This book argues that the underlining of erotic matters -in what it refers to as Plato's Erotic Period-marks the most significant and dramatic moment in Plato's career. Plato's attention to the erotic in this period calls for a fundamental reassessment of many of the most important Platonic ideas: his complicated quarrel with poetry, his dubious doctrine of forms, his alleged hostility to the body and embodiment. In the Erotic Period, Plato's views are much richer, and infinitely more complex, than the many caricatures of his thought allow.

Father Matthew Kelty was an especially beloved monk at the historic Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Perhaps best known as Thomas Merton's colleague and confessor in the year prior to Merton's death, Father Matthew was also an enormously gifted spiritual writer in his own right, one whose homilies at Gethsemani attracted a wide following. This is the first book-length study of Matthew Kelty's life in relation to his spiritual writings and his profound reflections on the virtues of the monastic life in the modern age.

Anne Carson (b. June 21, 1950, in Toronto, Canada) is one of the most versatile of contemporary classicists, poets, and translators in the English language. In Reach without Grasping, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. explores the role played by generic transgressions on the one hand, and by embodied spirituality on the other, throughout Carson’s ambitious literary career. Where others see classical dichotomies (soul versus body, classical versus Christian), Carson sees connection. Like Nietzsche before her, Carson decries the images of the Classics as merely bookish and of classicists as disembodied intellects. She has brought religious, bodily erotics back into the heart of the classical tradition.

Anne Carson (b. June 21, 1950, in Toronto, Canada) is one of the most versatile of contemporary classicists, poets, and translators in the English language. In Reach without Grasping, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. explores the role played by generic transgressions on the one hand, and by embodied spirituality on the other, throughout Carson’s ambitious literary career. Where others see classical dichotomies (soul versus body, classical versus Christian), Carson sees connection. Like Nietzsche before her, Carson decries the images of the Classics as merely bookish and of classicists as disembodied intellects. She has brought religious, bodily erotics back into the heart of the classical tradition.