Why Read? – serie

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is known in the English-speaking world principally for the wager (an argument that it is rational to do what will affect belief in God and irrational not to), and, more generally, for the Pensées, a collection of philosophical and theological fragments of unusual emotional and intellectual intensity collected and published after his death. He thought and wrote, however, about much more than this: mathematics; physics; grace, freedom, and predestination; the nature of the church; the Christian life; what it is to write and read; the order of things; the nature and purpose of human life; and more. He was among the polymaths of the seventeenth century, and among the principal apologists of his time for the Catholic faith, against both its Protestant opponents and its secular critics.Why Read Pascal? engages all the major topics of Pascal's theological and philosophical writing. It provides discussion of Pascal's literary style, his linked understandings of knowledge and of the various orders of things, his anthropology (with special attention to his presentation of affliction, death, and boredom), his politics, and his understanding of the relation between Christianity and Judaism. Pascal emerges as a literary stylist of a high order, a witty and polemical writer (never have the Jesuits been more thoroughly eviscerated), and, perhaps above all else, as someone concerned to show to Christianity's cultured despisers that the fabric of their own lives implies the truth of Christianity if only they can be brought to look at what their lives are like.Why Read Pascal? is the first book in English in a generation to engage all the principal themes in Pascal's theology and philosophy. The book takes Pascal seriously as an interlocutor and as a contributor of continuing relevance to Catholic thought; but it also offers criticisms of some among the positions he takes, showing, in doing so, how lively his writing remains for us now.

This book offers an excellent, accessible introduction to the life and thought of Father Pavel Florensky, one of the most prominent religious philosophers of Russia's highly creative Silver Age at the beginning of the twentieth century. Florensky, an Orthodox priest, died in Stalin's gulag in 1937. His writings were long suppressed in the Soviet Union, and Western Protestant and Catholic theologians have known little about him.John Burgess argues that it is time to give Florensky his due. His worldview is as important today as it was during his lifetime: a deep sensitivity to the beauty of the natural world; a conviction that the religious cult—acts of worship and ritual—make human culture possible; and an understanding of the Christian faith as, above all, a way of seeing God's glorious presence in all of creation.The book takes a unique approach by examining Florensky not primarily as an academic philosopher but rather as an Orthodox priest and theologian, who speaks out of his personal religious experience to communicate the Christian faith to people who are seeking truth but do not yet know church life. The book makes an original contribution to Florensky scholarship and literature, especially in the United States, where his colleagues Sergei Bulgakov and Nicholas Berdiaev have been better known.John Burgess is a Protestant theologian who has lived and travelled in Russia, and has visited key places associated with Florensky. The author's experience, even as an outsider, of Orthodox worship and practice—its liturgical cycles, iconography, seasons of fasting and feasting, and monasteries and holy sites—has enabled him to understand Florensky's admonition that one must enter into Orthodoxy in order to understand it (and Florensky's) thinking.

Why Read Shakespeare? treats Shakespeare as a dramatist who thinks philosophically through stories. Written for students and general readers, the book argues that Shakespeare is worth reading because of the provocative answers he offers to three philosophical questions: What is love? Do human beings have free will? And why does political authority command obedience?This book addresses each question alongside one of Shakespeare’s genres. In comedies like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night, Shakespeare depicts love as hopelessly irrational, shaped by impulse and imagination. The tragedies explore free will in the religious world of the Reformation, where characters such as Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Romeo, Juliet, and Hamlet make choices of their own, even when they are bound by the dictates of fate, providence, and plot. The histories, especially Richard III and those of the Second Tetralogy, argue that political authority depends less on bloodline or divine sanction than on the compelling performance of authority. The epilogue turns to Measure for Measure to show how these problems overlap.The book is ideal for readers new to Shakespeare, instructors seeking accessible conceptual approaches, and students looking for routes into Shakespeare's historical contexts and relevance.

Why Read Shakespeare? treats Shakespeare as a dramatist who thinks philosophically through stories. Written for students and general readers, the book argues that Shakespeare is worth reading because of the provocative answers he offers to three philosophical questions: What is love? Do human beings have free will? And why does political authority command obedience?This book addresses each question alongside one of Shakespeare’s genres. In comedies like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night, Shakespeare depicts love as hopelessly irrational, shaped by impulse and imagination. The tragedies explore free will in the religious world of the Reformation, where characters such as Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Romeo, Juliet, and Hamlet make choices of their own, even when they are bound by the dictates of fate, providence, and plot. The histories, especially Richard III and those of the Second Tetralogy, argue that political authority depends less on bloodline or divine sanction than on the compelling performance of authority. The epilogue turns to Measure for Measure to show how these problems overlap.The book is ideal for readers new to Shakespeare, instructors seeking accessible conceptual approaches, and students looking for routes into Shakespeare's historical contexts and relevance.

Why Read Wilde? is an engaging and essential introduction to one of the most important and enigmatic writers of the nineteenth century. It argues that Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is our Victorian Contemporary whose writing tells us as much about ourselves as the nineteenth-century audiences he entertained, flattered and satirised.Neil Sammells opens by describing the fascinating, ballistic arc of his life and his descent from literary and public stardom to disgrace, prison, exile and poverty. The book follows Wilde from Dublin, Oxford and London to America where he became a celebrity Influencer on artistic taste and interior design. It describes his ideas on art, their modernity, and how they shaped The Picture of Dorian Gray and his comedy dramas, especially The Importance of Being Earnest. It also looks at how he has lived on in the work of contemporary writers, filmmakers, and rock and pop musicians, inspired by his dandyism, wit and attitude, and examines the complexity of mapping Wilde onto contemporary definitions of sexuality or acceptability.This concise guide will be an invaluable resource for students of Irish Literature, nineteenth-century literature, fin de siècle literature, decadence, and literature and gender studies, and of interest to the general reader who wishes to know more about Wilde, his times, and his enduring relevance.