Heidegger’s subordination of reason to “care” in Being and Time has exposed him to the charge of irrationalism. Against this view, I argue that Being and Time offers a “normativity-first” account in which reason, as reason-giving (logon didonai), is an ineluctable demand constitutive of authentic selfhood. Examining Heidegger’s rejection of the neo-Kantian equation of reason with logic in his 1929 Kantbuch, I explain the threads that connect what Heidegger calls “pure sensible reason” to his extensive phenomenological account, in Being and Time, of the “everyday” and “authentic” modes of Dasein’s care-structure. As authenticity’s discursive mode, the “call of conscience” is Dasein’s portal into normative space. As the essay “On the Essence of Ground” makes plain, Dasein’s response to the call involves answerability for what it holds to be best in its practical life, hence reason-giving. Such an origin of reason contrasts with rationalism only in eschewing any principle of sufficient reason.

Development is complex. Individual meaning systems are dynamic, and change can happen at any age. But even change is lawful and is conditioned by one’s history of meaning making. Self-fulfilling processes are part of the nature of adaptation. Those that bring positive expectations to social encounters often have new positive social experiences. As argued in the beginning, meaning lies at the center of a rich life. Those who have a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, and a coherent, integrated life story have what can be described as meaningful lives.

This chapter is a unique contribution to the social and emotional intelligences discourse. Culturally relative self-actualization is defined as the transcendence of basic physiological, psychological, and self or group-fulfillment needs that are meaningful and defined by a person’s cultural paradigm. Within a cultural paradigm, the person’s specific living contexts must be taken into account, as many do not have the privilege or ease of satisfying needs as readily as others. This chapter demonstrates how social and emotional intelligences support culturally relative self-actualization.

Chapter 3, ‘God on Earth’, argues that, for John, Jesus’s body is the place where one may see God. It opens with John’s association of Jesus with the tabernacle and the temple, the most comprehensive descriptions of Jesus’s flesh and body in the Gospel, and asks whether one can read Jesus’s body as the literal ‘house of God.’ Evidence for this reading comes from an overview of Israelite and Early Jewish theologies that portray a God who can be in two places at once. John evidences a corresponding understanding of God’s dual presence in his association of the flesh and body of Jesus with the tabernacle and temple and in the Farewell Discourse. The chapter concludes that God can be on earth in Jesus’s body as well as in heaven.

A brief conclusion summarizes the argument as a whole, asserts that God is physically visible in Jesus’s body, considers the impact of this conclusion on Johannine scholarship, and suggests further areas of research.

Recognizing God in Jesus may be the goal of belief, but one must ask whether God himself is available for recognition. Chapter 2, ‘Divine Visibility’, argues that John’s Christology affirms the visibility of God by reconciling the notion of an ‘unseen’ God to the visibility of the Father that Jesus presents. It proposes that John 1:18a is best read as ‘no one has ever [fully] seen God [yet]’. Three pieces of evidence support this claim, chief among them a survey of Early Jewish, biblical, and Rabbinic literature revealing that one may not assume that all – or, perhaps, even many – Hellenized Jews embraced Platonist notions of invisibility. If one reads John’s God as ‘unseen’, rather than as ‘invisible’, the visibility of God in Jesus becomes possible and the tension between the seeing and not seeing God passages can be resolved.

Although nowadays Vaughan Williams is sometimes associated in popular writing with a Romantic musical style, broadly conceived, this is a view that few of his contemporaries would have recognized. Indeed, his own understanding of the term suggests that he saw himself marking a break with the earlier, largely Germanic Romantic tradition that culminated in Wagner and Strauss.  Nevertheless, several important aspects of his musical and aesthetic views form strong continuity with earlier Romantic thought. These include viewing music as (1) self-expression; (2) the expression of a community; and (3) a revelation or intimation of the beyond.  The tension between these three, partially antithetical, conceptions of music informs his creative output in often productive ways that are teased out over the course of this chapter.

Race has always been a central issue in discussions of jazz. A history of the representation of jazz in the American cinema is, in many ways, a history of the representation of African Americans, including their struggle to overcome oppression from whites. But as the title of this paper suggests, jazz is one of several aspects of American culture which has delighted white people and inspired them to appropriate– or to steal– the music of Black people. Many of the early jazz films were built around the white swing orchestras and their followers. In the 1940s and 1950s, biopics told the stories of white jazz artists. Biopics of black artists appeared in the 1960s and later. More recently, jazz has been celebrated as an art that allows musicians and audiences to ascend to a higher plane.

This chapter presents a broadly Augustinian doctrine of God, emphasizing especially the relevance of Augustine’s apophaticism for our understandings of Trinity and Incarnation.

This chapter summarizes the findings of each chapter, recognizing the project’s limitations as well as offering prospects for future research. Finally, in a more speculative register, it describes the implications of the preceding chapters for an account of catechesis guided by the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. Catechesis echoes the incarnation of the Word in its medial position. Bridging heavenly and earthly knowledge, catechesis is a concrete practice that proffers true knowledge of God, the transcendent source of being, from within the finite conditions of material life.

Although the cliché of the melancholic loner often determined his public perception, W.G. Sebald was an author who frequently engaged in conversation. From 1990 onwards, the start of his literary career, he willingly gave over 80 interviews for television, radio, magazines and newspapers in both German and English. In these interviews, Sebald talked about his own writing more openly and in greater detail than anywhere else, yet at the same time he toyed with the fusion of fact and fiction in his decidedly autofictional literature. The interviews also provide Sebald with an opportunity to install a certain authorial image of himself, though at the same time he often attempted to defend himself against misperceptions, such as the classification as a Holocaust author. Last but not least, the interviews show Sebald as an author who - which is by no means the rule in interviews with writers - repeatedly questions and ironizes himself.