Books by "Anthony J. Steinbock"
4 books found
Love, Subjectivity, and Truth interprets Marcel Proust's masterpiece as an inquiry into love and the meaning of life, especially the question of whether love can be trusted or ought to be transcended. Drawing upon both the existential tradition and the ancient arguments for skepticism, it displays and evaluates what In Search of Lost Time can show us about how to navigate our emotional lives.
The ascension of Christ is usually taken for granted and often neglected. Indeed, it represents that forgotten dimension of faith in its reach beyond the categories, concepts, and concerns of our mundane existence, even in the church. This book is written with the conviction that there are further riches to be discovered. Christ’s ascension indelibly marks the limitless horizon of Christian life. It reminds us that the mission of evangelization is unconfined, always moving beyond, upward, outward, in the vitality of the risen Christ who already occupies every dimension of time and space. Properly understood, the ascension is a fundamental aspect of the catholicity of faith and enables it to breathe more deeply in its experience of “the boundless riches of Christ” (Eph 3:9).
The title of this collection of essays is Thinking Faith: Moods, Methods, and Mystery, and it might need a word of explanation. The aim is to suggest something of what is involved in thinking faith, while indicating examples of my modest contribution over all these years. Given the exuberant data of faith, beliefs, doctrines and tradition, the task of the theologian is always to reflect on what is so richly given, and to communicate in the most telling fashion its meaning. There are certainly moods that colour the way we think, even though theological writing must show an intellectual concentration of some kind. That is quite compatible with a great variety of approaches, sometimes more hopeful, sometimes more sober, defensive and argumentative. There is also the question of methods. The strange thing about a particular theological method or style of thought is that it is seldom an explicit series of procedures. It is something more spontaneous and formed through the practices of many years. Quite clearly, in this collection of writings a number of methods is implied. Whatever the mood, whatever the method, the mystery remains-of God, Christ, and who we are in that light. To this degree, theology is a way of thinking within mystery, not outside it. In this respect, doing theology is humbling for us theologians when confronted with the limited span of our knowledge-and our poor capacities to express it. There always remain infinite expanses of what is not yet given us to see, so to leave theologians, inarticulate, in splendid defeat. And yet so much has been given, even in the most routine life of the Church, in its Scriptures its sacraments, and in the luminous witness of the many who have gone before us, and live now in the light.
Winner, 2015 CSCP Symposium Book Award Moral Emotions builds upon the philosophical theory of persons begun in Phenomenology and Mysticism and marks a new stage of phenomenology. Author Anthony J. Steinbock finds personhood analyzing key emotions, called moral emotions. Moral Emotions offers a systematic account of the moral emotions, described here as pride, shame, and guilt as emotions of self-givenness; repentance, hope, and despair as emotions of possibility; and trusting, loving, and humility as emotions of otherness. The author argues these reveal basic structures of interpersonal experience. By exhibiting their own kind of cognition and evidence, the moral emotions not only help to clarify the meaning of person, they reveal novel concepts of freedom, critique, and normativity. As such, they are able to engage our contemporary social imaginaries at the impasse of modernity and postmodernity.