Andrew Davison

As one of the foremost contemporary public intellectuals and scholars of our time, Dabashi's interests and writings span subjects ranging from Islamic philosophy and political ideology to Iranian art and Persian literature, from Sufism and Orientalism to Iranian and world cinema and contemporary Arab and Muslim visual arts; and from postcolonial theory and globalization to imprialism and public affairs. There is a direct connection between his theoretical innovations and the angle of his public interventions on the urgent global issues of the day. This book brings together some of his most important writings, especially those that offer new ways of understanding Islam, Iran, Islamist ideology, global art, and the condition of global modernity. The book shows the underlying conceptual themes that unify Dabashi's wide-ranging and brilliantly insightful corpus. --

In recent decades, powerful telescopes have enabled astrophysicists to uncover startling new worlds and solar systems. An epochal moment came in 1995, when a planet – 51 Pegasi b – was located orbiting a star other than our own sun. Since then, thousands of new planets have followed, and the question of life beyond earth has become one of the principal topics in discussions between science and religion. Attention to this topic has a long history in Christian theology, but has rarely been pursued at any depth. Writing with both passion and precision, Andrew Davison brings his extensive knowledge of Christian thought to bear, drawing particularly on the thought of Thomas Aquinas, as well as his training as a scientist. No book to date better prepares the Christian community for responding to evidence of other life, if it is found. And yet, we do not need to wait for that to have happened before this book shows its worth. In thinking about planets, creatures, and ecosystems beyond our planet, Davison already reinvigorates our theology for the earth.

Few ideas have excited greater interest among theologians in recent decades than the idea of 'participation'. In thinking about creation, it is the notion that everything comes from, and depends upon, God, inviting the language of sharing, or of an exemplar and its images; in thinking about redemption, it points to the restoration of that image, and is expressed in the language of communion with God and with the redeemed community. In this volume, Andrew Davison considers these themes in unprecedented breadth, investigating the fundamental character of participation as it can be applied to a wide range of theological topics. Exploring what it means to know, to love, to do good, and to live together well, he shows how these ideas animate a particular understanding of human life and how we relate to the world around us. His book offers the most comprehensive survey of participation to date, contributing to detailed discussions of these themes among academic theologians.

From the dawn of Western thought to the present day, The Love of Wisdom tells the story of philosophy as something intensely theological, both in its insights and its wrong turns. The book will be invaluable for any student of theology or intellectual history, and for anyone who wants to see the intellectual cogency of the Christian faith at its best. The intellectual tradition of the Church emerges clearly from this book as one of the glories of the Christian inheritance. Andrew Davison argues that Christian thinkers will be more faithful to Christian teaching, not less, if they pay attention to philosophy. Our thinking is always philosophical, since we cannot think without categories or assumption. Our philosophy may as well, therefore, be good philosophy. By bringing our philosophy out into the open we can bring them under theological judgement. Clear and articulate, this book provides the philosophical background to Christian theology down the ages, and examines the intellectual climate of our own times.

Every organism shapes its ecological home or environment. Although theological interest in this phenomenon of niche construction has focused so far on human beings and their settings, contemporary biology presents us with the phenomenon of every creature as a maker. This paper asks what Christian theology is to make of that observation, drawing particularly from traditions of scholastic theology associated with Thomas Aquinas. Various existing categories can be expanded to integrate this ubiquitous activity of fashioning and adaptation in niche construction. We look first at organisms as causes, then as agents, and finally as participating in the sort of subcreation that has previously been discussed in relation to human beings.

The thesis of this book is that sociopolitical phenomena, including those that are represented, coded, even quantified as empirical data, should be approached with the same degree of close, particularist, context-sensitive attention and the same kind of ethical responsibility as that accorded to poetic (literary) texts. Such an approach not only dissolves naive binaries like objective/subjective and empirical/nonempirical but allows deeper awareness of their marginalized and subaltern dimensions. Drawing on resources from decolonial, poststructural, and critical theory, literary texts, historical narratives, DH analytics, and empirical social science, political theorist Andrew Davison challenges basic presuppositions about objectivity, originality, and data and demonstrates the intellectual and ideological value of inter-/transdisciplinary analytical techniques.

Gratitude is a complex notion, which bears upon both well-being and significant contemporary discussions in philosophy. In this article, I consider what may be contributed to our understanding of gratitude by examining it in terms of biological roots. In doing so, I will refer to forms of reward and recognition found across nature in biological mutualism. One can situate human gratitude within this matrix, whatever else might also be said in addition. Speaking about such roots can be undertaken in a considered way. Judgement and assessment in this territory, however, are strongly shaped by deeply held metaphysical and metaethical dispositions and assumptions. For some, the ethical and distinctively human only begins when the natural is left behind; for others, the ethical and distinctly human is rooted in the natural, even if it also goes beyond it. What we make of attention to the roots of gratitude will therefore likely be shaped, possibly quite profoundly, by underlying convictions.