UPHOLDING THE HUMANUM: SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY'S FOUNDATIONAL CHARACTER1

Theologians in the liberal tradition have developed the distinctive method of critically correlating Christian revelation with critical interpretations of history, texts and social realities. Non‐foundationalists react to this stance by developing theological anthropologies for which interdisciplinary correlation is deemed unnecessary. In response, this paper argues for a retrieval of a philosophical anthropology that address the advances made in the fields of genetics and evolutionary biology, though aware of the secularizing failings of theological liberalism. In contrast to the anti‐religious materialism of scientists such as Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker, human freedom needs to be argued on the basis of complexity science and the emergent systems it explains. Both correlationist and non‐foundationalist theological strategies are unable to respond to the threat to human freedom posed by scientific materialism. The science of emergent complex structures is the most plausible research programme for constructing a viable theological anthropology. To uphold the humanum is to uphold human freedom based on a scature. This leads me to suggest that theology is best characterized as foundationalist in the general sense of its universal scope.     

THE ARTIFICIALITY OF GERMAN IN MODERN YIDDISH POETRY

One of the chief debates in Yiddish linguistics and literary criticism concerns the issue of daytshmerish (Germanesque). Specifically, scholars question the incorporation of lexical elements from New High German into the literary language of modern Yiddish. After examining the arguments of the major Yiddish linguists and literary critics who pronounced on this subject, this article will highlight examples of this so‐called “borrowing” in the poems of the American Yiddish “sweatshop” poet Morris Rosenfeld (1862–1923). In particular, it will show the way in which these Germanic elements, specifically lexical ones, function on a stylistic level in Rosenfeld’s poetry and contribute to his general poetics.     

THE ESCHATOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF GOD

In this essay, I show how Thomas Aquinas circumscribes epistemological questions concerning both the possibility and character of our knowledge of God within a larger eschatological framework that acknowledges the beatific vision as the ultimate good that we desire as well as the ultimate end for which we were created. Thus, knowledge of God is possible and actual on Aquinas's view because it is eternally rather than merely temporally indexed—that is, properly attributable to the blessed in heaven and only derivatively attributable to persons of faith. I further argue that interpreting Aquinas's account of faith in the light of his account of the beatific vision allows us to carve out polemical space for the theologically realist claim that there can be and in fact is objectivity in our knowledge of God, whether that knowledge comes through faith (in this life) or the beatific vision (in the next life).