Steven Schroeder – författare

This book is an attempt to critically embrace a tradition--a culture--in which the author was formed and against which he has often found himself in resistance, using academic disciplines in which he is well versed but about which he is deeply suspicious. This book began to come together as a book in a series of lectures on the history of Western thought at Shenzhen University in the People''s Republic of China, an opportunity to cultivate disciplined criticism that might afford a second look at traditions behind the West which are being embraced all too quickly. In a time of acceleration, this book offers a meditation on the virtue of hesitation.The book is an invitation to philosophy and the history of ideas, but it is also a sustained critical reflection on the religious dimensions--explicit and implicit--of those ideas, with enough utopian vision left to imagine a city in which violence is not necessary.

Four Truths is not a traditional scholarly work. It consists of three short stories and a verse drama built around the four noble truths of Buddhism--each followed by a prose reflection in the form of a series of theses. The text is complemented by thirteen images from a series of ink brush paintings done by Macao artist Debby Sou Vai Keng in response to the book. It is an invitation to conversation rather than a systematic philosophical or theological argument--though it is an invitation in the scholastic tradition of academic theses that will appeal to students of comparative religion and philosophy and could serve as an entry point for discussion in ethics and moral philosophy as well as philosophy of religion.

Inspired by the commonplace books and epistolary tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which writers ranged through science, philosophy, music, theology, poetry, and anything else that struck their fancies, this book is a collaboration, an improvisation in two voices. Drawing on a variety of traditions and a cloud of witnesses, from Amos Wilder, Paul Ricoeur, and Theodor Adorno to Michael Taussig and Zhao Dongming, along with wide-ranging riffs on Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the authors search reality's mysteries with wit and insight.

This book takes up the philosophical task described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and F.D. Maurice as digging toward the common humanity that is the ground of value. The book is an essay in philosophy defined by time (its focal point is the nineteenth century), space (its focal point is Britain), and persons (it is concerned especially with Maurice's contribution to social theory). The first chapter explores the Victorian Age as historical context and background for Maurice's work. The second explores Coleridge's thought as philosophical context and background. The third explores a range of Maurice's theological works that spans his entire career. The fourth turns, finally, as Maurice did, to the practice of adult education as the place of social transformation and, more particularly, the contested terrain where human nature and human souls are turned to work in the world as persons, not hands.

This extended essay joins an old conversation at the intersection of freedom and necessity. Though it takes place at the beginning of the twenty-first century by the “Christian” reckoning that has become an integral part of European identity, it will at times read like a conversation between classical Greece and nineteenth-century Europe. The cast consists of characters drawn from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Plato as well as the authors themselves - Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, MacIntyre, and Nussbaum. Some of these writers have been associated with displaced, displacing claims of universality; but each is in place and in time in ways that are instructive for ethics. Myth, the matter of stories, becomes also the matter of critical reflection, which in turn is subjected to critical reflection. Every fragment of philosophy is a contribution to the reflection, and it is nothing if it is separated from the matter - the stories, the myths, and the characters (including us) who both make them and live in them.

This book is a study of the Lutheran Peace Fellowship (LPF), which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1991, and its impact on the social teaching of the Lutheran Church in the United States. Schroeder documents LPF's development as a case study of the relationship between the Church's "edge" and the shape it takes in the world. That pacifism has never been the majority position in the Lutheran tradition does not mean, Schroeder asserts, that it has been irrelevant or insignificant to the understanding of Lutheran identity and theology. Contents: Foreword, John Backe; Living Our Life; Doing What the Reformers Did; A Word That Matters; Where Is the Church?; A Community and a Perspective; Becoming More Organized?; Beginnings Everywhere; Afterword, Bonnie Block.

This book is a study of the Lutheran Peace Fellowship (LPF), which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1991, and its impact on the social teaching of the Lutheran Church in the United States. Schroeder documents LPF's development as a case study of the relationship between the Church's 'edge' and the shape it takes in the world. That pacifism has never been the majority position in the Lutheran tradition does not mean, Schroeder asserts, that it has been irrelevant or insignificant to the understanding of Lutheran identity and theology. Contents: Foreword, John Backe; Living Our Life; Doing What the Reformers Did; A Word That Matters; Where Is the Church?; A Community and a Perspective; Becoming More Organized?; Beginnings Everywhere; Afterword, Bonnie Block.