While focusing on the concept of liberty, this article produces a dialogue between the Talmud and western political theory, and thus expands the canon of political thought. Equipped with three concepts of liberty—negative, positive, and republican—this article offers an original reading to Babylonian Talmud Giṭ 12a–13a. The talmudic passage's pivotal question—whether liberty is necessarily beneficial to a slave—enables us to reconstruct its fundamental, albeit implicit, understandings of both slavery and liberty. The talmudic approach to slavery and liberty emerges as concrete, and hence yields a thick and multi-faceted notion of liberty. Considering that a person might prefer the benefits of slavery reveals a paradox in Isaiah Berlin's negative concept of liberty. Therefore, as this article concludes, his conceptual distinction between two concepts of liberty is unsustainable and needs to be replaced by a concrete and thick notion of liberty.

Dubitatio is a complex figure of speech in which a speaker explicitly weighs her or his options in the course of making a difficult decision. Dubitatio was typically used to display a protagonist's character as revealed in her or his decision-making. In Philippians 1:22–26, Paul uses dubitatio to draw the readers into his deliberations whether to commit suicide in prison. In so doing, he not only reveals to them his own character but their character as well, in as much as it is their inordinate grief over his imprisonment that will ultimately determine Paul's decision. Dubitatio occurs already in Homer, but it was made famous in Greek tragedy, where it largely defined the genre. The tragic dubitatio was parodied in subsequent comedy and, by the Roman period, was beginning to appear in other genres, including political oratory, various poetic genres, history, and epistle. Paul's apt use of dubitatio in Phil 1:22–26 shows an obvious familiarity with the figure. By attending to Paul's use of dubitatio in Phil 1:22–26, we can arrive at a fresh and convincing interpretation of this challenging crux interpretum.

The study proposes an analysis of the concepts of ousia and hypostasis in the theology of the Council of Antioch which condemned Paul of Samosata in 268 CE. The authentic reports preserved from the assembly unveil the fact that the synodals who condemned Paul of Samosata employed the two terms interchangeably to denote the individual entity or person rather than the common essence or nature of the Father and Son. Additionally, they defended Christ's divinity before time and simultaneously assumed a certain subordinationism. The study additionally explores the Sitz im Leben of this theology, an accepted language embraced in the Eastern part of the Roman world in the third century. The article further traces the elements of this Antiochene theology in the fourth century in what was traditionally viewed as the “Arian” councils held in Antioch in 341 and 345 as well as in such authors as Eusebius of Caesarea and the Homoiousians. While Antioch 341 and 345 distanced themselves from Arianism, it is more coherent to interpret them, together with Eusebius and the Homoiousians, through this new hermeneutical lens, namely Antioch 268, rather than the traditional polarization between Nicaea and Arianism.

Coleridge directed his Aids to Reflection (1825, 1831) to young men preparing for Christian vocations, missionaries in particular, and planned, but did not write, a seventh supplementary essay, which may be reconstructed from Coleridge's œuvres, to correct what he thought was inadequate preparation. Missionaries are educators whose preparation must include scientific biblical criticism: Christianity evolves with culture generally. Anthropography is required in order to foster inter-cultural exchange, including insight into a tradition's metaphors. Missionaries engage in proselytism, insists Coleridge, in the strictly limited sense of conversion through the exemplary conduct of the missionary as a fully realized human being.

In Jewish philosophy, be it medieval or modern, a comprehensive Jewish theological discourse about Christianity is conspicuously absent. There are, however, two prominent exceptions to this rule in modern Jewish philosophy: The Italian Sephardic Orthodox Rabbi Eliah Benamozegh (1823–1900) and the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929). In both men's thought, Christianity plays a pivotal (and largely positive) role, so much so that their Jewish philosophies would not be the same without Christianity, which has no precedent in Jewish thought. Though Rosenzweig was not aware of his Sephardic predecessor, there are some striking parallels in the two thinker's Jewish theologies of Christianity that have far-reaching interreligious implications. These parallels concern as well the basic paradigm for a positive evaluation of Christianity—the paradigm of the fire (particularist Judaism) and its rays (universal Christianity)—as well as the central flaw both of them attribute to Christianity: a built-in disequilibrium that threatens the success of its legitimate mission. These parallels are all the more striking as two thinkers arrived at their conclusions independently and by different paths: the one (Benamozegh) took recourse to Kabbalah, the other (Rosenzweig) to proto-existentialist philosophy. A comparative study of these two protagonists’ Jewish theologies of Christianity seems thus imperative.

An “interreligious epilogue” at the end of the article exposes the contemporary need for a reassessment of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity from a Jewish perspective—especially in light of the deep theological revision that characterizes the approach of the Catholic Church towards Jews and Judaism following “Nostra Aetate”—but at the same time delineates the theological limits of the current Christian-Jewish interreligious endeavor. In this light, the pioneering theology of Christianity in the works of Rosenzweig and Benamozegh might yield some relevant insights.

A small number of scholars have noted T. S. Eliot's anticipation of the hermeneutical theory later articulated by the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. Eliot similarly concerns himself with the epistemological assumptions of positivism in the human sciences and the implications of objectivizing texts and other cultural phenomena by adopting the attitude of the scientific observer. For both thinkers, this represents an approach to social life which either distorts or altogether misses the truth claims of those whose ideas are to be interpreted. Furthermore, Eliot develops a theory of understanding that is similar to the historicizing of interpretation that one finds later in Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. However, among those who have observed these affinities, a key difference has been neglected. In his effort to confront such secularizing forces in the human sciences, Eliot comes to embrace an intellectualist philosophy of history, which relies on a tenuous dualism between the metaphysical and the physical, while Gadamer's philosophy of history collapses the dichotomy between the world of ideas and the existential realm. Thus, Eliot ultimately identifies what transcends history exclusively with the realm of the spirit. This essay argues that as the mature Eliot struggled with the empirically reductive tendencies of the human sciences and aimed to save religious truth from their deterministic assaults, he increasingly retreated to an intellectualism that misconceived the ultimate basis of religious truth. Consequently, the existing literature neglects the intellectualism that defines Eliot's understanding of truth within history and the more concrete understanding of that encounter that one finds in Gadamer's thinking.

There are few social scientists who have done as much scholarly research on religion as Christian Smith. Over the past three decades, he has interviewed hundreds of people, fielded numerous surveys, and written dozens of books. And in recent years, he has pushed beyond the boundaries of empirical social research into the neighboring domains of social theory, philosophy, and theology. Anyone who studies or cares about religion will want to know what he has to say about it.