The Promise of Christian Humanism: Thomas Aquinas on Hope - Softcover

Dominic F Doyle

9780824524692: The Promise of Christian Humanism: Thomas Aquinas on Hope

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0824524691 ISBN 13: 9780824524692

Publisher: Independent Publishers Group, 2012

This book explores and enriches the tradition of Christian humanism and will be of great interest to many readers, including secular intellectuals, students of modernity, and Christian theologians. Christian faith promotes human flourishing. Despite the suspicions voiced by modern atheism and secular humanism, God offers us something greater than what we could attain on our own. In this remarkable book, Dominic Doyle, in conversation with Charles Taylor, Nicholas Boyle, and Thomas Aquinas, shows how the Christian virtue of hope breathes new life into humanism, enabling believers to approach God as the human good--God fulfills what it means to be human.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

Doyle exposes in masterful fashion how Christian hope, operating on the concupiscent passions and the will and basing itself on faith in a reality 'beyond' the scope of natural reason, can alone sustain the enterprise of bringing God s providential plan for the full development of his creation to completion, because only Christian hope is prepared ahead of time to accept the setbacks, disappointments, and frustrations of a world hemmed in with limitations and sin, by living out this dedication in the cruciform pattern of its Master. Applauding but finding limitations in the outward-turning Christianity of Charles Taylor and Nicholas Boyle, Doyle bases himself rather on the future-oriented stance of John Courtney Murray and Jacques Maritain. Doyle builds on but creatively extends Aquinas discussion of the theological virtues, seeing faith, hope, and charity as the potency, motion, and act of a single human process of development and conversion, culminating in a contemplative attainment and union with God that turns back and nourishes the other virtues and leads the individual to 'act as Christ would act' in every situation, for the full development and transformation of the world. --- Patrick Madigan, Heythrop College

Does hope in a transcendent God help or hinder human flourishing in the world? In this impressively lucid and wide-ranging study, Dominic Doyle explores some of the ways in which contemporary Christian humanism, drawing on Thomas Aquinas' treatment of the virtue of hope, may respond to this question by seeking congruence between faith and reason, Christianity and culture. --- Nicholas Lash, Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity Emeritus, University of Cambridge

Dominic Doyle's The Promise of Christian Humanism presents a lively and learned discussion of the most important topic of theological reflection in the present age our understanding of God's relation to humanity. Doyle's reading of the Thomistic contribution to Christian humanism is at once deeply rooted in the theological tradition and at the same time conversant with contemporary intellectual currents in Europe and North America. Every reader will find instructive Doyle's incisive reading of hope as the virtue most needed today. His penetrating reading of the relation between Christ and culture is fair-minded, intellectually rigorous, and challenging to readers from a variety of intellectual perspectives. This is a book that is a must-read for serious theologians, philosophers, and ethicists. --- Stephen Pope, Boston College

About the Author:

Dominic Doyle is an assistant professor of theology at Boston College's School of Theology and Ministry. A graduate of the University of Cambridge and Harvard Divinity School, he received his doctorate in systematic theology from Boston College. His writing has appeared in Theological Studies, Gregorianum, Irish Theological Quarterly, and Studies in Spirituality. His theological interests include theology of culture, doctrine of God, and theological anthropology. Dominic has received a number of awards, including a John Templeton Award for Theological Promise, the Catholic Theological Society of America's Catherine LaCugna Award to New Scholars, and an Analytic Theology Course Award from the University of Notre Dame's Center for Philosophy and Religion. He has also participated in the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies' Generation in Dialogue Program with Bernard McGinn and in a Wabash Center Workshop on Teaching and Learning. He is presently working on a book on the relationship between positive psychology and the theological virtues. A native of the United Kingdom, he lives in Boston with his wife, Tracy.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.