Encountering Images of Spiritual Transformation

Download or read book Encountering Images of Spiritual Transformation written by James M. Morgan and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2013-02-27 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humans are lovers, and yet a good deal of pedagogical theory, Christian or otherwise, assumes an anthropology at odds with human nature, fixed in a model of humans as "thinking things." Turning to Augustine, or at least Augustine in conversation with Aquinas, Martin Heidegger, the overlooked Jesuit thinker Bernard Lonergan, and the important contemporary Charles Taylor, this book provides a normative vision for Christian higher education. A phenomenological reappropriation of human subjectivity reveals an authentic order to love, even when damaged by sin, and loves, made authentic by grace, allow the intellectually, morally, and religiously converted person to attain an integral unity. Properly understanding the integral relation between love and the fullness of human life overcomes the split between intellectual and moral formation, allowing transformed subjects--authentic lovers--to live, seek, and work towards the values of a certain kind of cosmopolitanism. Christian universities exist to make cosmopolitans, properly understood, namely, those persons capable of living authentically. In other words, this text gives a full-orbed account of human flourishing, rooted in a phenomenological account of the human as basis for the mission of the university.