This chapter explores how a Christian theology keyed to doctrines of creation, sin, and redemption interacts with the vision of life as a planetary phenomenon developed by David Grinspoon’s book Earth in Human Hands. It comments on distinctive human capacities and our limited abilities to anticipate or control relevant outcomes, chronic corruptions that keep us from choosing Earth clearly or consistently, and how hopes for renewal and redemption compare with Grinspoon’s idea of a “Sapiezoic Eon” when we shall manage the planet for good.

This critical introduction presents a biographically structured overview of MacDonald’s writings, providing readers with a sense of his cultural and critical contexts. The editors delineate the three phases of MacDonald’s life and works (early, major, late) and identify the main stylistic and thematic emphases of each. The final section engages influential interpretations of MacDonald, by C. S. Lewis and others, arguing that what has sometimes been perceived as failures of MacDonald’s art is better understood as a kind of ‘generative awkwardness’ resulting from his aesthetic of ‘noble unrest’. The chapters that follow are gestured to as doors into MacDonald’s disruptive vision.

This chapter examines George MacDonald’s lifelong, multifaceted engagement with the fairy tale, arguing that he utilised the genre as a uniquely ‘liminal’ form capable of mediating spiritual truth. The chapter first establishes liminality – the ambiguous, transitional state in a rite of passage – as its primary analytical framework. It then explores the surprising, liminal places fairy tales occupied in MacDonald’s life: as medicine for the dying, as unorthodox lectures, and as a preparation for the message of Christ. Situating MacDonald’s work within the Victorian debate between didactic moralists like George Cruikshank and whimsical aesthetes like Lewis Carroll, the chapter argues MacDonald forged a third path, as articulated in his seminal essay ‘The Fantastic Imagination’. This theoretical foundation is then used to analyse MacDonald’s fairy tales (such as ‘The Golden Key’ and ‘The Light Princess’) as intentionally crafted liminal entities. His fairy tales are not vehicles for simple morals but literary rites of passage, designed to strip characters and readers of commonplace certainties and guide them across thresholds into deeper spiritual and psychological awareness.

Articulating George MacDonald’s theology is a complicated project, given his well-known resistance to theological systems and the allusive character of his writing. Explicit theological statements are replete in his sermons and letters, although they usually emerge suggestively, in contrast to particular foils in Victorian Christianity. In his imaginative works, a variety of fictive voices emerges alongside the voice of a pastoral narrator; these voices are sometimes difficult to distinguish. The variety of sources that shaped his theological imagination and the extent to which he adhered to Christian orthodoxy (variously conceived) remain matters for debate. This chapter distils key themes of MacDonald’s theology across his body of work, including: the generative love of God as the deepest reality, the epistemological priority of ‘childlike imagination’ in response, and the soul-shaping journey of suffering leading to glory. It also notes tensions in MacDonald’s theology regarding divine providence, theodicy, and the possibility of universal reconciliation.

Although MacDonald is chiefly known as a literary figure, he saw himself first and foremost as a preacher, preaching thousands of sermons across his career and publishing five volumes explicitly on spirituality. This chapter explores these sermons, both spoken and unspoken, seeing them as metaphysical landscapes providing a space and a medium for theological reflection and spiritual formation. MacDonald’s theological aesthetic is to be found not only in the synthetic biblical hermeneutic he employed but also in the sense of the transcendent which pervades his sermons; his modus operandi in the sermons is the divine sonship, with an emphasis on ‘our real life with Christ concealed’, a distinctive feature of Scottish spirituality. MacDonald was a spiritual explorer, always in search of the inexhaustible ‘treasures of darkness’.

This chapter examines how Plutarch, in the De E apud Delphos, integrates the Sophist’s ontological distinction between true being and appearances with the Timaeus’ cosmology. It argues Plutarch that uses the Timaeus to answer the Sophist’s unresolved question about the ontological status of images, identifying the Sophist’s ‘that which perfectly is’ with the Demiurge. Thus, the dialogues are mutually illuminating and a genuine Platonic doctrine of the causes must take into account both.

The scope of the book – with a theological focus, Luther’s central teachings of a viable Christian religion engaged in light of his spiritual motivations, biblical interpretation, personal experience of freedom, and critical theological arguments that fueled his reform agendas.

Theology has played an important role in the development of human rights discourse, beginning since at least the mid twentieth century. Although these theological influences were diverse from the start, scholars have highlighted the tensions between theological justifications for, and the universality of, human rights. Theological schools have encountered human rights topics through campus activism and have increasingly engaged with human rights topics in the curriculum. This chapter focuses on two of the ways in which human rights education is integrated into the theological school curriculum: through field education, or placement for practical training within community settings accompanied by space for theological reflection, and courses focused on liberation theology/ies. Both emphasize the importance of context and of reflection. Theological education that trains religious and community leaders to be responsive and reflective advocates for human rights concerns is as important today as it has ever been.

This chapter introduces the main argument and themes of the book, and positions it within earlier and existing scholarship on archaic and classical Greek literature, religion and philosophy. Particular points of focus include the relationship between Greek tragedy, ritual and theology, and influential mid-twentieth-century research on Sophocles (the ’classics’ of Sophoclean scholarship). The chapter also discusses ancient biographical traditions surrounding Sophocles’ religiosity and piety.

This introduces the key themes of Spirituality in Mind, including the concept of entanglement and the importance of attentiveness as both a spiritual practice and a clinical skill. Whereas many books on psychiatry by psychiatrists emphasise controversies and fears, the intention here is to focus on spirituality as casting light on what patients most desire. This book is different from other books on spirituality and psychiatry by virtue of engagement with the humanities (especially theology and religious studies), its concern with the ‘ordinary theology’ of patients and its attention to the invisible assumptions of pragmatic atheism. This does not mean that atheists or agnostics are less likely to be spiritually attentive than those who are spiritual/religious (not infrequently the reverse may be true) and the situated perspective of the author, and of all psychiatrists, is highlighted. An outline of the book as a whole is provided, some clarifications are given in regard to vocabulary (notably in respect of ‘patients’ and ‘theology’) and general remarks are made concerning the clinical case studies.

Broader debates about possible ways of addressing the tensions between science and theology/religion have not often been applied to psychiatry, and yet it is to a large extent scientific research on spirituality and mental health over recent decades that has generated current interest in the importance of spirituality to psychiatry. The four models of relationship between science and religion, developed by Ian Barbour – conflict, independence, dialogue and integration – each have their correlates in the literature on spirituality and psychiatry. However, in clinical practice it is the ‘ordinary’ theology of patients that assumes greater importance than the formal, or academic, theology of philosophical debate. As an example of the importance of a kind of ordinary theology which has been subjected to scientific research, the concept of God images is explored. It is proposed that, in the course of assessment and treatment, a kind of ‘clinical theology’ is needed, in which psychiatrists take into account inner representations of God and other ordinary theological beliefs which inform understanding of a patient’s illness and spirituality.

Referring to the medical model of frenzy sketched out in the first two chapters, Chapter 3 explores the metaphysical problems which it caused. The model’s insistence on the total dependence of the mind on the brain, it argues, placed pressure on a Christian cosmology in which ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ were supposed to be fully separable. Frenzy forced contemporaries to ask how it was possible for the human mind – made in the ‘image of God’ – to be impaired by organic disease. For most early modern Christians, the mind was a part of the soul, and this soul was immaterial, incorruptible, and immortal. Frenzy gave the impression that it invaded every part of the person, but this impression was false. The soul had to be immune to brain disease. This chapter examines the ancient roots of this problem, and examines how early modern England’s preachers, physicians, and philosophers attempted to solve it.