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Christian universalism, or the theory of universal salvation, is increasingly popular among religious thinkers. A small group of scholars has put forward the contentious claim that Kierkegaard was a universalist, despite that he refers in places to the idea of eternal damnation as essential to Christianity. This paper examines the evidence both for and against the view that Kierkegaard was a universalist and concludes that despite Kierkegaard's occasional references to the importance of the idea of eternal damnation to Christianity, there is reason to believe that Kierkegaard may have been a universalist, both in terms of the substance of his thought, including two unequivocal statements in his journals that he believed everyone would eventually be saved and in terms of his rhetorical style which prioritizes the effect his writings would have on the reader over the literal truth of the views they present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The doctrine of universalism, which asserts that all will find salvation in the life to come, can be critiqued on the grounds that it appears to underplay the real and lasting significance of suffering and injustice in this life, potentially placing its adherents in an improper relation to suffering and sufferers. In this essay, I engage with this problem, first, through examining how Karen Kilby's critique of conceptual clarity might problematize the doctrine. I argue, however, in this essay's second part, that the conceptual clarity we might first see is not the full story of universalism. In seeking a fuller story, I approach universalism from the perspective of its practical implications, here borrowing from ideas explored by Simeon Zahl, taking up his call to attend to the concrete outworking of doctrine in human experience. Two possible 'affects' of universalism are suggested, which, in a third part, I argue might nurture in the believer a heightened sensitivity to the wrongness of death and the problem of sin. Universalism, examined from the perspective of its practical implications, problematizes in this life some of the suffering that it might appear to resolve in the next. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper argues that, despite appearance to the contrary, Kierkegaard's writings offer promising argumentational resources for addressing the problem of evil. According to Kierkegaard, however, in order to make use of these resources at all, one must necessarily be willing to shift the battleground, so to speak: from a third- to a genuine first-person perspective, namely the perspective of what Climacus dubs Religiousness A. All (yet also only) those who seek deliberate self-annihilation before God—a God in relation to whom they perceive themselves always in the wrong—shall discover the ideal that an unwavering and in fact unconditional thankfulness (namely, for being forgiven) is to be considered the only appropriate attitude towards God and as such both necessary and sufficient for coming to terms with evil and suffering, at least in the life of someone making that discovery. I will argue that Kierkegaard's (non-)pseudonymous writings provide reasons, at times unwittingly, for adopting the perspective of Religiousness A; however, I will also and ultimately argue that the principle of infinite thankfulness as a corollary of that perspective flounders when it comes to making sense of (the eschatological implications of) the suffering of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines and defends an 'Integral Advaitic' theodicy that takes its bearings from the thought of three modern Indian mystics: Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, and Sri Aurobindo. Their Integral Advaitic theodicy has two key dimensions: a doctrine of spiritual evolution and a panentheistic metaphysics. God has created this world as an arena for our moral and spiritual evolution in which evil and suffering are as necessary as good. The doctrine of spiritual evolution presupposes karma , rebirth, and universal salvation. The doctrines of karma and rebirth shift moral responsibility for evil from God to His creatures by explaining all instances of evil and suffering as the karmic consequence of their own past deeds, either in this life or in a previous life. The doctrine of universal salvation also has important theodical implications: the various finite evils of this life are outweighed by the infinite good of salvation that awaits us all. After outlining this Integral Advaitic theodicy, I address some of the main objections to it and then argue that it has a number of comparative advantages over John Hick's well-known 'soul-making' theodicy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

James Cone's assertion that Christ is Black seems at odds with Karl Barth's retrieval of Kierkegaard's "infinite qualitative distinction" between God and creation. Both were concerned with the sociopolitical implications of theology. Barth saw the impulse to make some human capacity the prompt or measure of divine revelation as directly implicated in the rise of German nationalism, while Cone laboured to understand what the protestant liberalisms and neoorthodoxies of his graduate education could possibly mean for Black victims of White racism. In claiming that Christ is Black, did Cone not breach the infinite qualitative distinction between God and humans – is Cone's Black Christology triumphalist? I argue, rather, that Cone's Black Christology not only escapes the charge of triumphalism, but actually resists triumphalism more successfully than Barth's because of its grounding in Christ's incarnational identification with oppressed humanity within history; a grounding which implicates Cone's subject position without necessarily valorising it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay defends human rights as universal human rights. It argues that this does not imply uniformity, but opens up space for heterogeneity through equal rights for all. It also shows how universalism and particular specificity can be reconciled. To enable this, human rights practice requires cultivating the art of empathic listening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Margery Kempe establishes the authority of her body and pleasures on the grounds of her "singularity," leading her to defend a stance on universal salvation from an expansive conception of Heaven that is surprising in its acceptance of sexual gratifications. Drawn in part from Richard Rolle's self-authorizing singularity that unites the term's meanings of both solitude and exceptionality, Kempe's term is fitted to the circumstances of her own social, worldly life. She presents her achieved solitude not as a turning away from the world, but instead as the world's rejecting her, and specifically her eccentricities. Her life story proposes that the more singular she is, the more people will resist her; and the more that people resist her, the more surely her singular life is confirmed as God-inspired. Her singularity thus brings about the will of God, and her singular life affirms her material body as a glorified body in a realization of Heaven on earth. From her embrace of singularity, Kempe discovers a revaluation of bodily pleasure and a reimagining of community that results in her insistence on a Kingdom of Heaven open to everyone, a community based on the celebration of singularities—however queer—rather than on conformity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay articulates a structural feature and difficulty in the notion of universal humanism: the mechanism of inner exclusion. First, by discussing the historical paradigm of membership in "Israel," a conceptual–theoretical description of inner exclusion comes into view. There then follows a comparative analysis of inner exclusions in three discourses: schematic universal humanism, exemplified in the art installation United Bears, Kant's universal experience of sublime, and the Palestinian Talmud (PT) approach to the divine law. The PT model suspends the impulses of the universalization, let alone the unification of law. This suspension is excluded from within in Kant's universalism of a fully citable law. The applied result of this essay is that historical inclusion of the Jews in universal humanity ignores the conditions that enabled their exclusion from humanity in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Theological Review / Bogoslovska Smotra is the property of University of Zagreb, Catholic Faculty of Theology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article investigates the textual productions of the Cao Đài religion through the annotated translation in English of the earliest Cao Đài text published in Vietnamese on October 15, 1926. With the title Phổ Cáo Chúng Sanh – Đại Đạo Tam Kỳ Phổ Độ (Universal Manifesto [of the] Great Đạo of the Third Era of Universal Salvation), this publication and our translation aim to highlight the translingual practices at play in the production of Cao Ðài exegetic and spirit-medium texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Bentley Hart has recently argued that universal salvation is a metaphysically necessary outcome of God's act of creating rational beings. A crucial premise of Hart's argument is a compatibilist view of free will, according to which God can determine human choices without taking away their freedom. This view constitutes common ground between Hart and the tradition of classical Thomism, which emphasizes the non‐competitive relation between human freedom and God's universal causality. Unfortunately, Thomistic compatibilism undermines the so‐called Free Will Defense, which is often considered to be the only viable way of responding to contemporary criticism of the doctrine of hell. Can the existence of hell be reconciled with God's goodness given a Thomistic conception of rational freedom? This question is of interest not only to followers of Aquinas but to anyone who rejects a 'zero‐sum competition' between freedom and grace, and who also believes that divine revelation confirms the possibility of perdition. The present article proposes an alternative to the Free Will Defense—called The Thomistic Autonomy Defense—which aims to block Hart's arguments for the necessity of universal salvation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thus, Matarazzo continues, in Chapter Three, to look at conceptions of divine judgment in, what he labels, "optimistic soteriologies": those of Sergei Bulgakov, Hans Urs von Balthasar, J. A. T. Robinson, and Marilyn McCord Adams. In Chapter Five, Matarazzo makes an effort of crafting such a position as he suggests and outlines a concept of divine judgment described as a salvific event of "absolute recognition". In this well-written book, James Matarazzo invites the readers to a critical and constructive exploration of nothing less than the concept of divine judgment in Christian theology. [Extracted from the article]

The present study examines Saudek’s novel Diplomats (1921) from three perspectives: first, with regard to the (biographical) circumstances of its creation and publication; second, in the gradual development of its concrete form and fields of meaning; third, with an emphasis on the ways in which it was realized. The middle part of the study is the most dominant, evoking (in excerpts and comments) specific elements and constraints of Saudek’s novel structure — centred on the feminist intermingling of the story of Pygmalion with Christ’s (or apostolic) gestation, in accordance with a tendency of the period to bring together the national and universal horizons of salvation, and to confront the temporal connections and confrontations with stimuli from the outside world. To understand their present and future, the main protagonists of the novel are constructed as initiates in the art of graphology, able to identify the handwriting of famous writers. They believe, moreover, that they can recognize the ‘handwriting of history’: that is, the contours of what is to come. At the same time, they do not want to remain mere contemplative readers of this historical nature, and they go in search of someone who can change the course of the world to meet their ideal, namely that of a peaceful world. They find this in the figure of T. G. Masaryk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores one of the great paradoxes of imperial China: the rise of religions that required qijia (family abandonment) in a society that privileged a patriarchal family system. Grounded in the case of Quanzhen Daoism, the article examines representations of qijia in poetry, hagiographies, inscriptions, and plays to explain the distinctive ways in which this nonscriptural tradition of renunciation configured its relationship with families. It demonstrates that there existed ambivalent, even contradictory, attitudes toward the issue of family, particularly that of parents, in different genres of Quanzhen texts. This ambivalence speaks to irreconcilable family-monastery tensions as the Quanzhen order transformed from a local movement with a few ascetic elites to a nationwide monastic order in the early thirteenth century. In thirteenth-century qijia narratives, Quanzhen apologists deployed flexible renderings of filial piety to validate personal and universal salvation—instead of familial salvation—as the principal goal of a Quanzhen monastic career. Neither the Quanzhen ideology nor its monastic institution truly addressed the interests of natural families. As such, the Quanzhen tradition contrasts sharply with the medieval Buddhism and Daoism, whose apologists conceptualized the family-monastery relations to harness the family interests to the needs of the churches. Despite posing a direct challenge to the patriarchal family system, Quanzhen Daoism developed into one of the two major Daoist schools after the thirteenth century. Its success resulted from the Quanzhen order's salvationist contribution to the crumbling northern Chinese society under Mongol conquest, as well as its initiatives producing texts to promote pro-Quanzhen narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The theme of suffering is intimately tied to the possibilities of the blood as redemptive in theology. Potentially considered a universal pathway to salvation and racial transcendence for people of African descent, "Da Blood of Shesus" asks: Is there redeeming power in the blood for people of African descent? Turning to Womanist and lyrical theologians to postulate an African theological framework which explores redemptive suffering not glorified as inevitable and intricate to the historical Black experience and the church. Lyrical theologians affirm Jesus' redemptive power of the blood in Hip Hop portraying the ways in which the cross reveals the attributes of God. Womanist theologians challenge the "classical" interpretation of redemptive suffering, illuminating the ways it contributes to Black oppression and wretchedness. Arguably, Womanist and lyrical theologians conjointly point towards liberatory and alternatives to examine redemptive suffering for people of African descent by offering sites to scrutinize and nuance the blood as an indispensable pathway to redemption. An African theological perspective decenters the logics of anti-Blackness proposing suffering is inevitable to Black life and the historical Black experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While this article does not presume to answer the old question "Was Socrates of Constantinople a Novatian?", it does offer a hitherto-unnoticed observation that may bear on the question. Socrates, as has been noted, is very reticent to use the term "catholic" in describing the church in his Historia ecclesiastica. This is unlikely to be a stylistic quirk, as a comparison to the history of Sozomen shows. No one yet has connected his reticence to the Novatian Sympronian, who objects to the same term on theological grounds in letters exchanged with Pacian of Barcelona. Given Socrates' reluctance to use the term and Novatian's rejection of the same term, we may well have more evidence suggesting that Socrates was at the very least sympathetic not only to Novatians as a community but to their theological positions as well. In any case, the resistance of both Sympronian and Socrates to the notion of a "catholic" church stands in contrast to the usual interpretation of late antiquity as a period of growing universalism. The article also discusses whether it is even valid to ask whether Socrates was a Novatian or whether this question falls into less useful confessional dichotomies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the south facade of the chapel of St. Margaret of Antioch in Kopčany (Slovakia), there are two stones with engraved symbols. On one of the stones, the signs X, X in a rectangular frame and a schematically depicted face surmounted by three crosses are engraved. On the second stone, only the signs X and some simple lines are carved very indistinctly. Only the signs on the first stone are the subject of the analysis. The sign X can be interpreted as a Christogram. The rectangular frame around the second sign X can be interpreted as a symbol for the whole world or universe. The face with the three crosses can be considered an image of Christ. The signs as a whole composition probably symbolize Christ, his sacrifice, salvation through his death on the cross, the universal effect of salvation and saving from eternal death and perdition. The symbols had probably a protective function for the church and for the community of the faithful who used the church as well as for the buried in the cemetery. For these symbols, their meaning and function can be found analogies made in similarly reduced form and dimensions from the early Middle Ages (6th–10th centuries) in the territory of France, Germany, Switzerland or Austria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jane Lead, a prominent visionary known for her feminist theosophy in the Philadelphian Society, illustrates in A Fountain of Gardens her visions that explicate divine knowledge to secure individuals’ enlightenment and universal salvation. This present research aims to scrutinize the figurative visions in the series of spiritual journals to examine how Sophia Wisdom initiated Lead into a profound understanding of her relationship with God and the celestial kingdom. Writing about her visionary experiences, Lead extensively employs metaphors to render the divine revelations more accessible to her readers. Her visions present a clear view about the connection between humanity and divinity, the means to achieve spiritual perfection, as well as the mystical union between one’s soul and Heavenly Wisdom. Depicting a propitious world under the governance of divine wisdom, Lead conflates Virgin Wisdom with Christ into an androgynous celestial being that can restore humans to a prelapsarian state to endorse women’s spiritual identity—receptive to divine inspiration and qualified for the ministry. Such a depiction conforms to some early modern female mystics’ pursuit of gender equality in the Christian belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author critiques the book "Divine Democracy: Political Theology After Carl Schmitt" by Miguel Vatter. Topics include the author's doubt about the possibility of a democratic political theology on the grounds that Vatter would like to construct it, a discussion of the scientific and polemical meanings of Carl Schmitt's political theology and Vatter's claim that theorists are united by their common debt to an idea of divine democracy that rests on cultural legacy of Christian universalism.

Cheng Xuanying's Expository Commentary to the Daode jing presents the Laozi as the origin of Daoism—a Daoism which, by his time in the seventh century, included many beliefs and concepts coopted from Buddhism. The commentary is representative of chongxuan xue (Twofold Mystery philosophy), which is characterized by the integration of Buddhist concepts and methods into the interpretation of the Laozi. Taking the integration of the Buddhist concept of the bodhisattva as universal savior of limitless compassion, this paper investigates the "why" and "how" of this cooption. The question of why Cheng Xuanying wanted to read the Daode jing as a testimony to Laozi and Dao being a compassionate, universal savior is addressed with a contextualization of the commentary in its time and location: early Tang Chang'an. Next, the paper discusses, in detail, the hermeneutic tools Cheng Xuanying used to achieve his reading. Cheng Xuanying integrated his commentary and the original text of the Laozi in a complex structure, combining the kepan technique, interlinear interpretation, and added structuring comments, in addition to what might be termed "strategic citations". This paper analyzes how he worked with these means to construct arguments and specific readings of the Laozi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on Patristics constituting a crucial resource for rethinking the practice and direction of systematic and philosophical theology in the modern (and postmodern) condition. Topics include crux of the debate about universalism concerning about reassessing the place of Origen in the history of Christianity; and constructive account of the incarnation and Christology calling the prologue to theology.

Copyright of Logos & Pneuma is the property of Logos & Pneuma and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In God's Final Victory: A Comparative Philosophical Case for Universalism, we argue that for every version of the doctrine of hell there is a version of the doctrine of universal salvation that, granted traditional Christian teachings, is more philosophically defensible. This article explores whether a parallel case can be made for preferring universalism to annihilationism. While assuming for the sake of this article that the chief arguments for favouring universalism over the doctrine of hell, developed in God's Final Victory, are strong, we argue that a comparably strong parallel case for favouring universalism to annihilationism can indeed be made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article retrieves Freud's Paul as a forgotten predecessor and untapped critic of the "return to Paul" in contemporary political theology and continental philosophy. Given that Sigmund Freud published Moses and Monotheism in 1939 having barely escaped from Vienna, the text's reception has justly been dominated by the question of Freud's identification with Moses and the relationship between psychoanalysis and Judaism. However, I argue that this narrow focus has obscured the more fundamental problem of the connection between religion and Freud's enigmatic notion of "historical truth," which he works out not through Moses but through Saint Paul. To do so, I first show how Freud's genealogy of monotheism is modeled on the pathogenesis of hysterical symptoms. I then trace how Freud deepens his investigation into the etiology of symptom-formation until he arrives at the notion of historical truth and the archaic heritage that transmits it. Lastly, I demonstrate that Freud presents himself less as a Pauline figure than he does Paul as a proto-analyst. Through this staging, I contend that Freud parochializes the claims of Christianity as symptomatic of a more archaic historical truth that psychoanalysis alone is able to access. Freud's Paul demonstrates that it is not a question of whether but how ostensibly modern secular discourses inherit the theological traditions in which they are imbedded. Reading Freud as a philosopher of religion ultimately offers an indictment of any philosophy or emancipatory politics naively modeled on theological universalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Theology Annual is the property of Holy Spirit Seminary College of Theology & Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Teaching ecumenism in the context of global Christianity raises the question of how to approach the themes of "catholicity" and "conciliarity." This article addresses some of the challenges and possible paths in relation to this topic. At a time when universalism is often (and rightly) denounced, can or should there be room for a sense of the church's universality or catholicity? Or is universality always an instrument in the service of hegemonic (mostly Western) quests for domination? The paper seeks to show how universality entails a mutual, ongoing dialogue in which all parties involved may set the agenda and contribute. This connects to conciliarity or synodality, a much‐discussed theme in Roman Catholicism, in the Orthodox world, and among Protestant churches worldwide. The article presents some of the challenges the churches have been and are facing as they seek to become more authentically synodal churches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Theologica Xaveriana is the property of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

When did the first genocide take place in history? In theory, a universal crime transcends time and space. In practice, the moral imagination demands a specific origin story. In this article, I explain how and why Raphael Lemkin chose to locate genocide's archetypal origins in the early Christian martyrdom at the hands of the ancient Romans. That choice emerged from a dramatic public confrontation with Catholic antisemitism in interwar Poland. Haunted by the charge of Jewish moral parochialism, after the war Lemkin fashioned a cosmopolitan narrative for his discovery of genocide. Today, scholars are consumed by debates about the historical and conceptual relationship between the Holocaust and other genocides. Yet we cannot move forward in that endeavor until we retrieve Lemkin's Polish Jewish past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs about vivid and structured attempts at representing a Christian afterlife. Topics include Purgatory does add complexity to the picture, insofar as it is a post-mortem temporal state towards eternal beatitude; and form of judgement in the sense of condemnation, would be to read it at odds with a fundamental aspect of Christian teaching.

The article analyzes the influence of German thought on Baron Friedrich von Hügel's philosophy of religion. It mentions activities of the British scholar in the networks of Catholic modernism are placed within the broader framework of the international discussion on religion around 1900. It also mentions religious universalism was shaped to a great extent by the encounter of German intellectuals from a liberal Protestant background.

Tash Aw's 2019 novel We, the Survivors narrates the story of a convicted killer, Ah Hock, whose life serves as a lens to refract contemporary Malaysia's postcolonial history and its ethnic and class politics, as well as its location within the circuitry of global capitalism. This article examines Aw's representation of migrancy, class, and inequality in contemporary Malaysian society, reading the text as a critique of global capitalism through its tactical employment of a universalist idiom that appropriates Darwinian ideas about survival, evolution, chance, environment, and competition. The text also reflects on the ethics of novel-writing since Ah Hock's oral testimony is ostensibly mediated by a more privileged character. Aw locates his novel in the pivotal space between national specificity and general universalism while asking critical questions of his own position within the transnational literary marketplace, thereby underscoring the urgent need to re-world the world created by global capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postcolonial theories announce an "exit": the departure from the West as the world's centre of gravity and from Eurocentric hegemonic claims of superiority, turning away from the universal, and placing unheard voices at the centre – those who are excluded from academic, public, and political discourse. Such stories and histories of the margins do not simply represent "other" stories from the "periphery." Rather, the stories of the margins are constitutive for the history of Europe and the invention of European modernity. Today's manifestations of global Christianity are no exception to these dynamics. There are various models of alternative universalisms and conceptions of unity, where the crucial questions are: who defines the unity of the churches and has the monopoly over interpretation and – related to this, but a little more radically – whether such a formulation of unity must necessarily repeat Western grammar or whether there are not entirely other grammars and epistemologies of unity. Postcolonial theories and postcolonial practices in particular offer promising perspectives in dealing with these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Logos & Pneuma is the property of Logos & Pneuma and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In The Pillar and Ground of the Truth Pavel Florensky presents an account of hell, or 'Gehenna', that synthesises two seemingly irreconcilable claims: that God will save all people, and that some people will reject God forever. In insisting that both claims are true, and by recasting standard categories of final judgement, purgation and human identity, Florensky produces a novel contribution in contemporary debates about hell and universalism. I begin by surveying his account, then address two key interpretive questions raised by his critics, and conclude by situating his account within modern western conversations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on universalism that is one of the clearest trends in theology over the last two centuries. Topics include considered that universalist turn raises significant questions, even for those "infernalists" who take it as axiomatic that some number of creatures meet eternal misery such as questions about the purpose of God's creation, the scope of his providence and the place for a pocket of everlasting rebellion and un-love within God's creation.

Copyright of Theological Review / Bogoslovska Smotra is the property of University of Zagreb, Catholic Faculty of Theology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In 2019, a new strategy in wildlife conservation was announced: so-called "rhino impact bonds," designed to support the conservation of African black rhinos, with the ultimate aim of establishing a global "conservation debt market." This essay takes this development in the financialization of wildlife conservation as an object lesson in the mutual imbrication of guilt, debt, and the (non)human in the age of the Anthropocene. To this end, it traces a theoretical trajectory that explicitly frames the figure of "Man" in terms of Schuld, starting with Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. The essay takes Nietzsche's "sovereign individual" to refer not to the human species as a whole but rather a specific "genre" of the human, namely what Sylvia Wynter calls homo oeconomicus. In "overrepresenting" himself as the paradigmatic human, this figure has established capital accumulation as the goal of all human life. From here, the essay turns to Walter Benjamin's characterization of capitalism as a religion whose ultimate aim is not salvation but universal debt/guilt, and finally to Adorno's account of nature conservation as domination. The rhino bonds represent the logical consequence of this trajectory, namely the expansion of the principle of universal debt to the entire natural world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reassesses António Vieira's views on New Christians and Jews. Rather than presenting a reductive portrait of Vieira's philosemitism as merely empathic, positive, and tolerant, I argue that his supportive attitudes included some enduring negative ideas of Jewishness. An analysis of Vieira's pro-converso and prophetic writings (including his Inquisition trial) show that his more ambivalent and dialectical perceptions were ultimately grounded on a theological-political interpretation of Paul's Judeo-Gentile universalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rosenzweig's account of Islamic universalism might lead us to question the extent of that universalism itself. In the context of Islam, it is widely understood that the possibility of redemption is available to "righteous" believers. But what about the world as a whole, the world beyond the realm of righteous believers? These questions have not elicited straightforward responses, as Muslim theologians have long debated the question of who exactly can be saved and admitted into paradise and God's mercy. In the present essay, I consider certain influential Muslim theological approaches to the topic of world redemption, or universal salvation, with a focus on Sunni thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a time in the 1960s it seemed as if one domain in which the global south's enthusiastic struggle to arrogate the mantle of universalism as an exercise in "worldmaking" was the transformation of international law. Though this struggle was ultimately circumvented by great power politics and newer forms of international law and organization, it was a crucial moment. The introductory prosopographical survey that follows seeks to recapture the consensus of a set of northern and southern international lawyers in the 1960s who saw potential in the project of transforming their field to register the aims of a new epoch – the aims of postcolonial states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the spread of the Bahá'í religion—known in Chinese as Datong jiao 大同教)— as a form of religious cosmopolitanism in Republican China (1912–1949). Originating in Iran, its spread to China can be traced to links with the Ottoman empire, British Palestine, the United States, and Japan. By tracking the individuals, connections, and events through which knowledge of the Bahá'í movement spread in China, our study reveals an overlapping nexus of networks—intellectual reformers, liberal Christians, Esperantists, Confucian modernizers, redemptive society activists, and socialists—that shared cosmopolitan ideals. The Bahá'í connections thus serve as a thread that reveals the influence of a unique 'cosmopolitan moment' in Republican China, hitherto largely ignored in the scholarly literature on this period, which has focused primarily on the growth of modern Chinese nationalism. Leading nationalist figures endorsed these movements at a specific juncture of Asian colonial modernity, showing that nationalism and cosmopolitanism were seen as expressions of the same ideal of a world community. We argue that the sociology of cosmopolitanism should attend to non-secular and non-state movements that advocated utopian visions of cosmopolitanism, map the circulations that form the nexus of such groups, and identify the contextual dynamics that produce 'cosmopolitan moments' at specific historical junctures and locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]