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While a rational consciousness grasps many truths, this book argues for an even richer knowledge through a confrontation with the stuff of visions and dreams. Spanning both Buddhist and European forms of visionary experience, the book pursues the symbolic, nonrational depths of such phenomena, reawakening the intuitive, creative impulses that power greater understanding. The book argues for a combination of psychoanalysis and anthropology to illuminate the relationship between personal symbolism and religious experience. The book begins with Buddha's visionary trances wherein, over the course of four hours, a person is able to witness hundreds of thousands of their past births and eons of world evolution, renewal, and disappearance. It then connects this fracturing of empirical and visionary time to the realm of space. The book follows the unconscious motivations underlying rapture, the fantastical consumption of Christ's body and blood, and body mutilation and levitation, bridging medieval Catholicism and the movements of early modern thought as reflected in William Blake's artistic visions and poetic dreams. It develops the term “dream-ego” through a discussion of visionary journeys, Carl Jung's and Sigmund Freud's scientific dreaming, and the cosmic and erotic dream-visions of New Age virtuosos, and it defines the parameters of a visionary mode of knowledge that provides a more elastic understanding of truth. This book translates the epistemology of Hindu and Buddhist thinkers for western audiences while revitalizing western philosophical and scientific inquiry.

This book flips convention on its head and argues that science uncovers awe-inspiring, enduring mysteries, while religion, long regarded as the source for such mysteries, is a biological phenomenon. It argues that religion, just like spoken language, is an evolutionary adaptation. Conversely, it makes the case that science is the source of perplexing yet beautiful mysteries, however natural the search for answers may be to human existence. The book attempts to undo our misconception of scientific inquiry as an executioner of beauty, making the case that science has won the battle with religion so thoroughly it can now explain why religion persists. The book also draws deep lessons for humans flourishing from the very existence of scientific mysteries. It concludes that it is these latter wonderful, completely public truths that reveal a universe worthy of awe and wonder.

For theorists in search of a political theology that is more responsive to the challenges now facing Western democracies, this book tenders a new political economy anchored in a theory of value. The political theology of the future, Carl Raschke argues, must draw on a powerful, hidden impetus—the “force of God”—to frame a new value economy. It must also embrace a radical, “faith-based” revolutionary style of theory that reconceives the power of the “theological” in political thought and action. Raschke ties democracy’s retreat to the West’s failure to confront its decadence and mobilize its vast spiritual resources. Worsening debt, rising unemployment, and gross income inequality have led to a crisis in political representation and values that twentieth-century theorists never anticipated. Drawing on the thought of Hegel and Nietzsche as well as recent work by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Joseph Goux, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou, among others, Raschke recasts political theology for a new generation. He proposes a bold, uncompromising critical theory that acknowledges the enduring significance of Marx without his materialism and builds a vital, more spiritually grounded relationship between politics and the religious imaginary.

This book laments the current debate over religion in America, in which religious fundamentalists have set the tone of political discourse—no one can get elected without advertising a personal relation to God, for example—and prominent atheists treat religious belief as the root of all evil. Neither of these positions, the text argues, adequately represents the attitudes of a majority of Americans who, while identifying as Christians, Jews, and Muslims, do not find fault with those who support different faiths and philosophies. In fact, the text goes so far as to question whether fundamentalists and atheists truly oppose each other, united as they are in their commitment to a “code of codes.” In this view, being a religious fundamentalist does not require adhering to a particular religious creed. Fundamentalists—and stringent atheists—unconsciously believe that the methods we use to understand the world are all versions of an underlying master code. This code of codes represents an ultimate truth, explaining everything. Surprisingly, perhaps the most effective weapon against such thinking is religious moderation, a way of believing that questions the very possibility of a code of codes as the source of all human knowledge. The moderately religious, with their inherent skepticism toward a master code, are best suited to protect science, politics, and other diverse strains of knowledge from fundamentalist attack, and to promote a worldview based on the compatibility between religious faith and scientific method.

This book argues that genealogical interventions into the political economies of Western cultural memory do not go far enough in relation to the imagined founder of Christianity, the apostle Paul. It explains how Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud saw Christianity as metaphysical escapism, with Nietzsche calling the religion a “Platonism for the masses” and faulting Saint Paul for negating more immanent, material modes of thought and political solidarity. The book integrates this debate with the philosophies of difference espoused by Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. It then challenges the idea of Paulinism as a pop Platonic worldview or form of social control. It also unearths Pauline legacies from previously repressed sources that provide resources for new materialist spiritualities and new forms of radical political solidarity. It argues that these liberate “religion” from inherited interpretive assumptions and that they allow philosophical thought to be manifested in a new, risky, and radical freedom.

This book offers an interpretation of Nietzsche’s engagement with the work of Paul the Apostle, reorienting the relationship between the two thinkers while embedding modern philosophy within early Christian theology. Paying careful attention to Nietzsche’s dialectics, the text situates the philosopher’s thought within the history of Christianity, specifically the Pauline dialectics of law and faith, and reveals how atheism is constructed in relation to Christianity. Countering Heidegger’s characterization of Nietzsche as an anti-Platonist, the book brings the philosopher closer to Paul through a radical rereading of his entire corpus against Christianity. This approach builds a compelling new history of the West resting on a logic of sublimation, from ancient Greece and early Judaism to the death of God. This book discovers in Nietzsche’s philosophy a solid, tangible Pauline structure and virtual, fragile Greek content, positioning the thinker as a forerunner of the recent “return to Paul” led by Badiou, Agamben, Žižek, and Breton. By changing the focus of modern philosophical inquiry from “Nietzsche and philosophy” to “Nietzsche and Christianity,” the book initiates a major challenge to the primacy of Plato in the history of Western philosophy and narrow certainties regarding Nietzsche’s relationship to Christian thought.

Taubes, Badiou, Agamben, Žižek, Reinhard, and Santner have found in the Apostle Paul's emphasis on neighbor-love a positive paradigm for politics. By reexamining Pauline eschatology, this text suggests that neighbor-love depends upon an orientation toward the messianic event, which Paul describes as the “now time” and which he imagines as “awakening.” The book compares the Pauline dialectic of awakening to attempts by Hellenistic philosophers to rouse their contemporaries from moral lethargy and to the Marxist idea of class consciousness, emphasizing the apostle's radical spirit and moral relevance.

This book takes readers on a journey across Eastern and Western philosophical and religious traditions to discover a beauty and purpose at the heart of reality that makes life worth living. Guided by the ideas of ancient thinkers and the insight of the philosophical historian Pierre Hadot, this book treats philosophy not as an abstract, theoretical discipline, but as a living experience. For centuries, human beings have struggled to know why we are here, whether a higher being or dimension exists, and whether our existence is fundamentally good. Above all, we want to know whether the search for God and the good will bring happiness. Following in the path of the ancient philosophers, the book directly connects conceptions of God or an Absolute with notions of the good, illuminating diverse classical texts and thinkers. It explores the Bible and the work of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Maimonides, al-Farabi, and al-Ghazali. It reads the Tao Te Ching, I Ching, Bhagavad Gita, and Upanishads, as well as the texts of Theravada, Mahayana, and Zen Buddhism, and traces the repercussions of these works in the modern thought of Alfred North Whitehead, Iris Murdoch, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor. While each of these texts and thinkers sets forth a distinct and unique vision, all maintain that human beings find fulfillment in their contact with beauty and purpose. Rather than arriving at one universal definition of God or the good, the book demonstrates the aesthetic value of multiple visions presented by many thinkers across cultures.

In the Old Testament, God wrestles with a man (and loses). In the Talmud, God wriggles his toes to make thunder and takes human form to shave the king of Assyria. In the New Testament, God is made flesh and dwells among humans. For religious thinkers trained in Greek philosophy and its deep distaste for matter, sacred scripture can be distressing. A philosophically respectable God should be untainted by sensuality, yet the God of sacred texts is often embarrassingly sensual. Setting experts’ minds at ease was neither easy nor simple, and often faith and logic were stretched to their limits. Focusing on examples from both Christian and Jewish sources, from the Bible to sources from the Late Middle Ages, Aviad Kleinberg examines the way Christian and Jewish philosophers, exegetes, and theologians attempted to reconcile God’s supposed ineffability with numerous biblical and postbiblical accounts of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and even tasting the almighty. The conceptual entanglements ensnaring religious thinkers, and the strange, ingenious solutions they used to extricate themselves, tell us something profound about human needs and divine attributes, about faith, hope, and cognitive dissonance.