Philosophy as a way of life has been undergoing a revival in recent years. This essay explores how the central idea of the spiritual exercises can be used to develop an account of philosophy of religion as a way of life. It details some of the contemporary uses and trajectories of philosophy as a way of life. Through engaging the religiously inflected philosophies of Karl Jaspers and Simone Weil, this paper argues that their thought can present an account of philosophy of religion as a way of life that is both ethically and transcendentally oriented.

Since the failed coup attempt in 2016, much academic attention has been devoted to the shadowy and now defunct political alliance between the AKP and the Hizmet community. Yet this scholarship only considers Hizmet as the level of its leadership and overlooks the core followers of Fethullah Gülen—mostly hard-working provincial schoolteachers and administrators. How did these individuals experience the movement’s controversial political dimensions (which were public for some years in advance of 2016) and make sense of it in the context of their daily lives of piety and hard work? In this paper, I present retrospective ethnographic observations from fieldwork undertaken in a Hizmet community in Turkey between 2013 and 2015 and argue for their relevance in understanding the community’s trajectory up to and including the present day. Specifically, I observe a tension in the lives of individuals who were committed to ethical Muslim living but were also implicated—if only through association with Fethullah Gülen—in Hizmet’s pre-2016 political agenda. Recent debates in the anthropology of Islam concerning the place of moral ambivalence in Muslim lives provide a starting point (Schielke 2010, Schielke and Debevec 2012, Fadil and Fernando 2015), whereafter I analyse Hizmet as a monastic community and argue that monastic practises allowed my interlocutors to balance competing empirical realities and maintain ethical coherence in their daily lives. I use the term ‘monastic avoidance’ to explain how Hizmet affiliates embedded themselves in tight-knit communities of piety in order to deflect their complicity in larger politico-religious projects that were associated with deception and illegality.

Webinar presented to Virginia University Center for Excellence in Disabilities & Pediatrics. Aim: to examine children’s early understandings of disability and consider approaches that early year’s and primary/elementary practitioners can use to engage children in discussions around concepts of disability.

Susan Neiman has argued that the problem of evil in modern European philosophy concerns the absence of intelligibility, meaning and justice that threatens the trust in the world we need to understand it and act in it. In light of Frei's reading of H. Richard Niebuhr's theology as theodicy in similar terms, we may read Frei’s own Christological understanding of providence as a kind of theodicy, at once sombre, hopeful and restrained, with a practical, political force.

Review of Daniel Shin's study of the theme of publicness in Hans Frei's theology.

This chapter charts the intersections between addiction recovery, which is increasingly expressed as an identity, , and relgiion, gender and sexuality, categories that are rarely examined together. It demonstrates, first. that recovery spiritulaities are normative in relation to gender and sexuality, and such narratives and language can disempower, obscure and oppress already stigmatized and marginalised actors. It argues that the labour of recovery lies heavy on gendered and sexual miniorities, but also that for many participants, recovery communities and spiritualities are sites of empowerment and autonomy.

A book review outlining Herzfeld's book which addressing issues of ‘What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ and ‘What do we want AI to do’ are the two questions Herzfeld addresses in this book using the lens of Barth's four conditions for an authentic human relationship.

This chapter draws on Augustine’s theology of perfect heavenly bodies including his theological rendering of beauty and fat to consider what apophasis might mean for feminist theological thinking about fatness and women’s fat. Routinely criticized for promoting a flight from the body and its excessive passions and a vision of resurrection bodies as free from the imperfections of the material flesh, Augustine provides an interesting although perhaps unlikely dialogue partner for thinking about this. My claim is that there is much to glean from him, despite the difficulties he presents. There is also much to garner from feminist fat activism and from critical feminist reflections on the fluidity of fat embodiment. Both inform my feminist theological appraisal of fat bodies as unspeakable bodies

An overview of Postliberal Theology, its characteristic concerns and themes, the contributions of key figures, debates about their ideas, its influence, achievement and agenda.

The Bible presents an ambiguous view of fat and fatness. Following normative gendered constructions of corpulence in the ancient world, fat symbolises excess, moral weakness, lack of self-restraint and lavish living, but it also represents divine abundance and is symbolic of life and wellbeing. Indeed, fat criticism in the Bible is reliant upon positive associations of fatness and this encourages us to read both constructions of fatness alongside one another. While negative constructions of fatness in biblical texts lend support to the gendered violence of fat shaming evidencing the ongoing influence of ancient attitudes on contemporary anti-fat attitudes, embracing the ambiguity of biblical texts troubles the contemporary political tendency to polarise fat as either ‘bad’ or ‘good’ and allows for the productive dimensions of fat shame.