Thandeka

Using insights from the brain science of emotions, Love Beyond Belief: Finding the Access Point to Spiritual Awareness narrates two millennia of lost-and-found stories about love beyond belief as the access point to the heart and soul of spiritual life. Many of today’s ‘spiritual but not religious’ people – one in four US adults – have found the access point to spiritual experience that Western Christianity lost: unconditional love. Love Beyond Belief tracks the history of this lost emotion. Thandeka (Ph. D., Claremont Graduate University) has written Love Beyond Belief with two goals in mind: to resolve the emotional-deficit problem in so many “corpse cold” (Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words) mainline congregations today; and to offer a primer for “spiritual but not religious” people to build up and network their spiritual communities.

Schleiermacher presents a viable, systematic approach to self-consciousness that unifies thinking, feeling, and life itself—that reconfigures the whole of human experience. He presents a self capable of generating coherence amidst ethnic conflicts and the environmental crisis. This book investigates the philosophic notion of self-consciousness found in the work of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher. Its central focus is on Schleiermacher's Dialektik, a posthumously published series of lectures delivered in Berlin between 1811 and 1831. In these lectures, we find Schleiermacher's most detailed delineation of the two-tiered structure of feeling (Gefühl) that established him as the father of modern Protestant theology. We also find his solution to the gap between the noumenal and empirical self in Kant's theory of self-consciousness that post-Kantian idealists attempt but failed to resolve. Schleiermacher correctly foresaw the nihilistic end to which the philosophical tradition of speculative self-consciousness would lead.