Who are your favorite religious thinkers?
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  Who are your favorite religious thinkers?
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Author Topic: Who are your favorite religious thinkers?  (Read 1226 times)
World politics is up Schmitt creek
Nathan
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« on: March 09, 2019, 11:40:07 PM »
« edited: March 09, 2019, 11:59:45 PM by Amy Sexgoddess Klobuchar »

Your actual favorites, not the ones you trot out to own people on uselectionatlas dot org slash FORUM.

I like to say that my favorite theologians are Vatican II figures like Balthasar and Rahner, interwar Jewish thinkers like Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, and various Doctors of the Church and Anglo-Catholic luminaries, and I do like and admire all of those people, but judging by whose books I actually have on my shelves and whose ideas my mind goes to first when I discuss religion, the answer is probably C.S. Lewis and Simone Weil. They're figures of more or less the same generation who are both pretty peripheral within the world of formal academic theology but enjoy a wider popular readership than most theologians; I'm much more comfortable with Lewis than with Weil because Lewis wasn't a self-hating Jew; I've read a profusion of Lewis's books and essays quite recently but haven't actually sat down and read Weil's work in a couple of years (the last time was when I was writing a paper on the psychology of French and Polish Holocaust rescuers; Weil wasn't a Holocaust rescuer but her initial roll-over-and-die psychological reaction to the establishment of the Vichy regime was a relevant case study anyway).

Certain well-known Buddhist figures such as Thich Nhat Hanh also come to mind as people I esteem very highly as moral philosophers, but their non-moral beliefs are much further removed from my own.
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DC Al Fine
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« Reply #1 on: March 10, 2019, 11:12:21 AM »

Lots of Evangelical Anglicans; Packer, Stott, Ryle etc.

I haven't read enough Calvin to call him a "favourite", but I'm becoming fond of him. What's interesting about Calvin us that he writes surprisingly little about the doctrines he is most known for. He seem much more interested in prayer and the nature of the sacraments than election, if words devoted to a topic is a fair measure.
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HillGoose
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« Reply #2 on: March 10, 2019, 03:17:28 PM »

Ayn Rand, she understood that God was invented by the man to scare us into paying taxes.
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FEMA Camp Administrator
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« Reply #3 on: March 10, 2019, 03:25:42 PM »

Jesus Christ is near the top.
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Small L
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« Reply #4 on: March 10, 2019, 06:49:03 PM »

Right now my favorite is Gregory of Nazianzus. The Cappadocian Fathers are a whole world of Christian thought I was missing out on for most of my life. Every Christian should read Basil the Great's sermons on wealth (especially one who thinks Ayn Rand's thought has anything to offer). Teresa of Avila and Thomas à Kempis are tried and true favorites.
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World politics is up Schmitt creek
Nathan
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« Reply #5 on: March 10, 2019, 07:24:04 PM »

Teresa of Avila and Thomas à Kempis are tried and true favorites.

For me as well. And one of my regrets about grad school is not having gotten to read more of the Cappadocians.
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afleitch
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« Reply #6 on: March 11, 2019, 08:12:57 AM »

Quaker Dr Anna Bidder. Pretty much forgotten.
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Georg Ebner
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« Reply #7 on: March 12, 2019, 05:59:44 PM »

Genesis, SOCRATES, PLATO, Synoptists, JOHN, PAUL, AUGUSTINE, BERNHARD, DANTE, ItalianHumanists, MONTAIGNE, GRACIAN, FrenchMoralists, DESCARTES, PASCAL, HAMANN, KANT, GOETHE, GermanRomanticists, DOSTOEVSKI, PROUST and GOMEZ DAVILA.
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Kleine Scheiße
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« Reply #8 on: March 13, 2019, 12:30:54 PM »

Sri Aurobindo, Thomas Merton, Swami Vivekananda, Jeffery D. Long, Helena Blavatsky, Aldous Huxley
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Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers
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« Reply #9 on: April 19, 2019, 07:26:51 PM »

Buddha-also know has Metta Wrld Peace, Jesus and Dr. King.
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The world will shine with light in our nightmare
Just Passion Through
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« Reply #10 on: April 19, 2019, 08:29:16 PM »

Søren Kierkegaard, C.S. Lewis, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Karen Armstrong, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Leo Tolstoy if he counts as a "religious thinker."
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John Henry Eden
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« Reply #11 on: May 13, 2019, 07:32:16 AM »

Thomas Aquinas, St.Augustine , C.S Lewis, Chesterton, Peter Kreft, and Edward Feser.
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World politics is up Schmitt creek
Nathan
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« Reply #12 on: May 13, 2019, 03:05:45 PM »
« Edited: May 13, 2019, 03:13:12 PM by Hugo Award nominee »

Thomas Aquinas, St.Augustine , C.S Lewis, Chesterton, Peter Kreft

Some great figures on this list! Kreeft's persona is too much of a culture warrior for me but I've met him and actually found him pretty cool in person.

Quote
, and Edward Feser.

ayy lmao

Also, I forgot to mention that my vote for the greatest theologian of all time goes to Kalonymus Kalman Shapira. The Esh Kodesh is not a systematic work and at points it's not even coherent, but the circumstances under which Shapira was writing (being the religious leader of the Warsaw Ghetto) mean that any success at doing theology at all automatically makes him one of the all-time greats. The fact that much of it is coherent and insightful puts him on top.
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Dr. MB
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« Reply #13 on: May 13, 2019, 05:47:11 PM »

L. Ron Hubbard
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TJ in Oregon
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« Reply #14 on: May 15, 2019, 12:40:11 AM »

Thomas Aquinas, St.Augustine , C.S Lewis, Chesterton, Peter Kreft, and Edward Feser.

^Pretty much this.

I never found Kreeft to be all that good though; reading his arguments felt like an exercise in un-jumbling those of others.

Feser is a tad bit testy, but very much an interesting guy to read, and frankly one of the most convincing.

Oh, and I like Hillaire Belloc as well.
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Some of My Best Friends Are Gay
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« Reply #15 on: May 15, 2019, 05:16:14 PM »

Does Stephen Woodford (RationalityRules) count?
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World politics is up Schmitt creek
Nathan
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« Reply #16 on: May 15, 2019, 05:42:01 PM »


I googled him and the very first thing to come up was a video titled "Ben Shapiro calmly EDUCATED by Stephen Woodford". Not my preferred style by a long shot, but I'm sure Shapiro had it coming.
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Some of My Best Friends Are Gay
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« Reply #17 on: May 15, 2019, 07:16:35 PM »


I googled him and the very first thing to come up was a video titled "Ben Shapiro calmly EDUCATED by Stephen Woodford". Not my preferred style by a long shot, but I'm sure Shapiro had it coming.

While I don't agree with him on everything, I think he's a genuinely intelligent guy who understands what he's talking about. that video on Shapiro was actually quite good and made some very decent arguments against Shapiro's views on religion, in spite of the clickbait title.
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Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers
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« Reply #18 on: May 22, 2019, 01:20:14 PM »
« Edited: May 22, 2019, 01:35:02 PM by olowakandi »

Martin Luther's movement (William Shakespeare's satire, to make fun of the monarchy) and Charles Dickens (who also used satire): "Oliver Twist" and "Christmas Carol", started the movement away from Papacy and monarchism; as a result, towards secularism.  That Lincoln, Karl Marx and Kennedys expanded on.

Since the decline of the Catholic Church, after, Pope John Paul II, Evangelism, is becoming more of religion, instead of Catholism.
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they don't love you like i love you
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« Reply #19 on: May 24, 2019, 10:52:29 AM »

Tommy Green


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CatoMinor
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« Reply #20 on: May 24, 2019, 01:05:12 PM »

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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