Editorial

This issue offers noteworthy essays, each hammered out with a specific scholarly context in mind, and most constituting a collection in the area of philosophy of religion.

At the same time the issue is celebrative. Its opening essay intending inimically to mark the 200th anniversary of Kierkegaard is penned by a distinguished Canadian philosopher and cultural critic for the occasion. The essay, later sharpened for this journal, inaugurated the Kierkegaard Circle international conference, “Personages, Objects, and Places in Kierkegaard’s Thought: Why or How They Matter,” held April 2013, to mark that anniversary. The two essays that follow deal with subfields of philosophy of religion, one considering the relevance of praise and blame for a philosophical community and a theological one as well and written for what was clearly going to be a set of essays by this journal on philosophy of religion. The third essay is the 2013 Newman Lecture in Philosophy of Religion to the Canadian Theological Society, surveying the past lectures and proposing a framework for a research program in the area.

The next six essays originate from a theology and rationality workshop, a joint enterprise by two institutions: the Toronto School of Theology and the Systematic and Philosophy of Religion Department at Goethe University, Frankfurt, held in Toronto in 2012. They discuss the nature and inter-religious significance of the rational, considered from monotheistic religious traditions and a secular position. They are occupied with a range of concerns: the possibility of religious beliefs even when not based on arguments, to a transcendent form of rationality, to exposure of rationality as epistemic chauvinism—a Western notion used in meta-philosophical assessments.

The Different Tenor essays are just that—different and unquestionably theological. That on the Church as an essential dimension of theology is Cardinal Ratzinger’s lecture given in 1986 at the Toronto School of Theology. Accompanying it is a richly textured essay that provides a historical-intellectual context for and insights about the theme of the lecture. The short, final essay is on music and redemption, written in Italian and rendered in English to accompany the original.

There is much in this issue of cutting-edge scholarly essays to read and ponder. Some essay have respondents or introductions that assist to that end.