@EgoDeath
Recently the poster called "EgoDeath" has been asking (over and over) for a reading list about religion. I honestly don't know why he wants my advice on books to read, since he also says I am untrustworthy and not worth listening to.
But I think that sometimes when someone asks you for something, the best response is just to give it to him.
This is a list off the top of my head, not meant to be definitive, and completely personal. It is meant to be about religion, in a historical way, not ideological -- that is, to understand what Christianity is, not to pass judgment on it. I hope that others will add to it, to make a more useful and well-rounded list.
~ Plato, Symposium and Phaedrus. These are the founding documents about how Eros works to attract us to God. Western thought, including Christianity, would be very different without them.
~ Dante, The Divine Comedy. A systematic and dramatic presentation of Christian ethics and metaphysics. The Durling/Martinez translation or the Ciardi translation have good footnotes.
~ R.T. Wallis, Neoplatonism. The standard introductory text.
~ Marcia Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition.
~ Emile Male, The Gothic Image, and others. Pointers to how religious art works. My private theory is that the religious world view is a kind of art.
~ Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. Mostly Thomas Aquinas' writing about aesthetics -- it provides a readable example of how the Aristotelian/Thomist tradition saw the world of the senses.
~ Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism.
~ Kevin Fischer, Converse in the Spirit. On Jacob Boehme and William Blake. Glenn Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, on Hegel and Boehme. David Punter, Blake, Hegel, and Dialectic. These three together provide a fascinating view of how mystical minority traditions in Christianity provide an alternative to the common "sky-daddy" view of God that we all love to hate.
Again, this is off the top of my head. These are books that I have enjoyed, but I am not saying anybody has to read them -- just replying to a request. After EgoDeath has had a chance to insult this group, I may add more.
But again, I hope people will add their own to the list.
Recently the poster called "EgoDeath" has been asking (over and over) for a reading list about religion. I honestly don't know why he wants my advice on books to read, since he also says I am untrustworthy and not worth listening to.
But I think that sometimes when someone asks you for something, the best response is just to give it to him.
This is a list off the top of my head, not meant to be definitive, and completely personal. It is meant to be about religion, in a historical way, not ideological -- that is, to understand what Christianity is, not to pass judgment on it. I hope that others will add to it, to make a more useful and well-rounded list.
~ Plato, Symposium and Phaedrus. These are the founding documents about how Eros works to attract us to God. Western thought, including Christianity, would be very different without them.
~ Dante, The Divine Comedy. A systematic and dramatic presentation of Christian ethics and metaphysics. The Durling/Martinez translation or the Ciardi translation have good footnotes.
~ R.T. Wallis, Neoplatonism. The standard introductory text.
~ Marcia Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition.
~ Emile Male, The Gothic Image, and others. Pointers to how religious art works. My private theory is that the religious world view is a kind of art.
~ Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. Mostly Thomas Aquinas' writing about aesthetics -- it provides a readable example of how the Aristotelian/Thomist tradition saw the world of the senses.
~ Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism.
~ Kevin Fischer, Converse in the Spirit. On Jacob Boehme and William Blake. Glenn Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, on Hegel and Boehme. David Punter, Blake, Hegel, and Dialectic. These three together provide a fascinating view of how mystical minority traditions in Christianity provide an alternative to the common "sky-daddy" view of God that we all love to hate.
Again, this is off the top of my head. These are books that I have enjoyed, but I am not saying anybody has to read them -- just replying to a request. After EgoDeath has had a chance to insult this group, I may add more.
But again, I hope people will add their own to the list.
