The Infinity Affliction

This book covers the main aspects of Simone Weil's thought, drawing on her life where it is relevant for understanding her ideas. It is the fruit of many years engagement with scholars and scholarship on Weil in America, France, and the United Kingdom. The philosophical bases of her social and political thought, of her analysis of the natural world, and of her spiritual journey, as found in Plato, Epictetus, and Kant are uncovered. The authors are especially concerned with controversial aspects of Weil's life and thought: they offer an additional dimension to her understanding of the supernatural; they correct Rowan Williams' misunderstanding of her account of preferential love; and argue against Thomas Nevin's attempt to marginalize her as another example of Jewish self-hatred. The book also presents and assesses the new evidence for Weil's baptism.

Like the River Ganges flowing down from the Himalayas, the entire Buddhist tradition flows down to us from the teachings and deeds of the historical Buddha, who lived and taught in India during the fifth century B.C.E. To ensure that his legacy would survive the ravages of time, his direct disciples compiled records of the Buddha's teachings soon after his passing. In the Theravada Buddhist tradition, which prevails in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, these records are regarded as the definitive "word of the Buddha." Preserved in Pali, an ancient Indian language closely related to the language that the Buddha spoke, this full compilation of texts is known as the Pali Canon. At the heart of the Buddha's teaching were the suttas (Sanskrit sutras), his discourses and dialogues. If we want to find out what the Buddha himself actually said, these are the most ancient sources available to us. The suttas were compiled into collections called "Nikayas," of which there are four, each organized according to a different principle. The Digha Nikaya consists of longer discourses; the Majjhima Nikaya of middle-length discourses; the Samyutta Nikaya of thematically connected discourses; and the Anguttara Nikaya of numerically patterned discourses. The present volume, which continues Wisdom's famous Teachings of the Buddha series, contains a full translation of the Anguttara Nikaya. The Anguttara arranges the Buddha's discourses in accordance with a numerical scheme intended to promote retention and easy comprehension. In an age when writing was still in its infancy, this proved to be the most effective way to ensure that the disciples could grasp and replicate the structure of a teaching.

Aphoristic work on the meditational fundamentals of the yoga school of Indic philosophy.

The Urkommunismus (the ideal place, the common place, the utopia, the pure place of origin) presides over every mysterious, therefore political, penal, social, financial, institutional, corporate doctrine, and dictates its canons, formulas, algorithms. It is the reference of every bureaucracy in its sacrificial, penal ceremonial. On the principle of nothingness, every regime unravels the fear of the word, to confiscate life. Ideally and really. Both “to the East” and “to the West”. In this book the analysis and reading are performed of the writings called “founding”, which mark our age, weighing down, in its models and its offices. The result is the text of the word, as well as the absolute novelty. And here we also discuss the letters of Aldo Moro, the letters of the Red Brigades, the writings of Paul VI, of “Clean Hands”, the European and Italian legislation, the writings of Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, of Giordano Bruno, of Eckhart, of Dante Alighieri, the Rigveda, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishad, the Avesta, the I Ching, Lao Tzu and Tao Te Ching, Lie Zi, Chuang-Tzu, the Bible, Buddha, the Qur’an, Antigone, Medea, the classics of tragedy, the classics of epics, of lyrics, of philosophy, of science, of mathematical logic, Confucius, Mencius, Ma gcig, the Sixth Dalai Lama, Mao, Khomeini, Gandhi, Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping.

In this landmark volume, Blanchot sustains a dialogue with a number of thinkers whose contributions have marked turning points in the history of Western thought and have influenced virtually all the themes that inflect the contemporary literary and philosophical debate today. "Blanchot waits for us still to come, to be read and reread. . . I would say that never as much as today have I pictured him so far ahead of us." Jacques Derrida

'You cannot get far in these essays without sensing yourself in the presence of a writer of immense intellectual power and fierce independence of mind.' - Janet Soskice, from the Introduction to the Routledge Classics edition Simone Weil (1909–1943) is one of the most brilliant and unorthodox religious and philosophical thinkers of the twentieth century. She was also a political activist who worked in the Renault car factory in France in the 1930s and fought briefly as an anarchist in the Spanish Civil War. Hailed by Albert Camus as 'the only great spirit of our times,' her work spans an astonishing variety of subjects, from ancient Greek philosophy and Christianity to oppression, political freedom and French national identity. Waiting for God is one of her most remarkable books, full of piercing spiritual and moral insight. The first part comprises letters she wrote in 1942 to Jean-Marie Perrin, a Dominican priest, and demonstrate the intense inner conflict Weil experienced as she wrestled with the demands of Christian belief and commitment. She then explores the 'just balance' of the world, arguing that we should regard God as providing two forms of guidance: our ability as human beings to think for ourselves; and our need for both physical and emotional 'matter.' She also argues for the concept of a 'sacred longing'; that humanity's search for beauty, both in the world and within each other, is driven by our underlying desire for a tangible god. Eloquent and inspiring, Waiting for God asks profound questions about the nature of faith, doubt and morality that continue to resonate today. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Introduction by Janet Soskice and retains the Foreword to the 1979 edition by Malcolm Muggeridge.

Two thousand years ago a man was sentenced to death for being the Son of God. Since then the events surrounding His last twenty-fours of life have become the focus of scrutiny by Christians and non-Christians alike. Are appropriate answers available to the many questions concerning these events? Is it possible to really know how much Jesus suffered during those final hours of life? Did Jesus really sweat blood in the Garden of Gethsemane? How severe was the Roman scourging? Why was crucifixion the chosen form of execution? Was His cause of death asphyxia, pulmonary embolism, heart failure, or is it still unknown? You may be surprised at the findings of this forensic investigation.

Captain Morgan Passer commands the Rogue Class destroyer Autolycus, charged with an interstellar recon mission to detect traces of the repelled enemy while gathering information for the fortification of Earth's defenses. What the expedition finds instead is a deeply disturbing mystery: a discovery that redefines everything they tought they knew about Earth's place in the galaxy...and reveals deadly new horrors. Former enemies unite for their own survival, and Passer and his intrepid crew seek answers to help them save their people. Instead, they find that the invasion may be over, but the danger is just beginning.

This book is a powerful expression of Jesus Christ given in the midst of the brokenness and hostilities of this world, as experienced by those who are marginalized and persecuted in contemporary society. Drawing on broader sources in the Christian tradition, Farley maintains the power of Jesus of Nazareth as the expression of the Divine Eros in Wisdom, to break powers of sin, and provide a vision of life, which is an alternative Empire to present ways and where love reigns as norm.

Mission to Tibet recounts the fascinating eighteenth-century journey of the Jesuit priest ippolito Desideri (1684 - 1733) to the Tibetan plateau. The italian missionary was most notably the first european to learn about Buddhism directly with Tibetan schol ars and monks - and from a profound study of its primary texts. while there, Desideri was an eyewitness to some of the most tumultuous events in Tibet's history, of which he left us a vivid and dramatic account. Desideri explores key Buddhist concepts including emptiness and rebirth, together with their philosophical and ethical implications, with startling detail and sophistication. This book also includes an introduction situating the work in the context of Desideri's life and the intellectual and religious milieu of eighteenth-century Catholicism.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is known in the English-speaking world principally for the wager (an argument that it is rational to do what will affect belief in God and irrational not to), and, more generally, for the Pensées, a collection of philosophical and theological fragments of unusual emotional and intellectual intensity collected and published after his death. He thought and wrote, however, about much more than this: mathematics; physics; grace, freedom, and predestination; the nature of the church; the Christian life; what it is to write and read; the order of things; the nature and purpose of human life; and more. He was among the polymaths of the seventeenth century, and among the principal apologists of his time for the Catholic faith, against both its Protestant opponents and its secular critics. Why Read Pascal? engages all the major topics of Pascal's theological and philosophical writing. It provides discussion of Pascal's literary style, his linked understandings of knowledge and of the various orders of things, his anthropology (with special attention to his presentation of affliction, death, and boredom), his politics, and his understanding of the relation between Christianity and Judaism. Pascal emerges as a literary stylist of a high order, a witty and polemical writer (never have the Jesuits been more thoroughly eviscerated), and, perhaps above all else, as someone concerned to show to Christianity's cultured despisers that the fabric of their own lives implies the truth of Christianity if only they can be brought to look at what their lives are like. Why Read Pascal? is the first book in English in a generation to engage all the principal themes in Pascal's theology and philosophy. The book takes Pascal seriously as an interlocutor and as a contributor of continuing relevance to Catholic thought; but it also offers criticisms of some among the positions he takes, showing, in doing so, how lively his writing remains for us now.