Chapter 3, ‘God on Earth’, argues that, for John, Jesus’s body is the place where one may see God. It opens with John’s association of Jesus with the tabernacle and the temple, the most comprehensive descriptions of Jesus’s flesh and body in the Gospel, and asks whether one can read Jesus’s body as the literal ‘house of God.’ Evidence for this reading comes from an overview of Israelite and Early Jewish theologies that portray a God who can be in two places at once. John evidences a corresponding understanding of God’s dual presence in his association of the flesh and body of Jesus with the tabernacle and temple and in the Farewell Discourse. The chapter concludes that God can be on earth in Jesus’s body as well as in heaven.

A brief conclusion summarizes the argument as a whole, asserts that God is physically visible in Jesus’s body, considers the impact of this conclusion on Johannine scholarship, and suggests further areas of research.

Recognizing God in Jesus may be the goal of belief, but one must ask whether God himself is available for recognition. Chapter 2, ‘Divine Visibility’, argues that John’s Christology affirms the visibility of God by reconciling the notion of an ‘unseen’ God to the visibility of the Father that Jesus presents. It proposes that John 1:18a is best read as ‘no one has ever [fully] seen God [yet]’. Three pieces of evidence support this claim, chief among them a survey of Early Jewish, biblical, and Rabbinic literature revealing that one may not assume that all – or, perhaps, even many – Hellenized Jews embraced Platonist notions of invisibility. If one reads John’s God as ‘unseen’, rather than as ‘invisible’, the visibility of God in Jesus becomes possible and the tension between the seeing and not seeing God passages can be resolved.

Although nowadays Vaughan Williams is sometimes associated in popular writing with a Romantic musical style, broadly conceived, this is a view that few of his contemporaries would have recognized. Indeed, his own understanding of the term suggests that he saw himself marking a break with the earlier, largely Germanic Romantic tradition that culminated in Wagner and Strauss.  Nevertheless, several important aspects of his musical and aesthetic views form strong continuity with earlier Romantic thought. These include viewing music as (1) self-expression; (2) the expression of a community; and (3) a revelation or intimation of the beyond.  The tension between these three, partially antithetical, conceptions of music informs his creative output in often productive ways that are teased out over the course of this chapter.

Race has always been a central issue in discussions of jazz. A history of the representation of jazz in the American cinema is, in many ways, a history of the representation of African Americans, including their struggle to overcome oppression from whites. But as the title of this paper suggests, jazz is one of several aspects of American culture which has delighted white people and inspired them to appropriate– or to steal– the music of Black people. Many of the early jazz films were built around the white swing orchestras and their followers. In the 1940s and 1950s, biopics told the stories of white jazz artists. Biopics of black artists appeared in the 1960s and later. More recently, jazz has been celebrated as an art that allows musicians and audiences to ascend to a higher plane.

This chapter presents a broadly Augustinian doctrine of God, emphasizing especially the relevance of Augustine’s apophaticism for our understandings of Trinity and Incarnation.

This chapter summarizes the findings of each chapter, recognizing the project’s limitations as well as offering prospects for future research. Finally, in a more speculative register, it describes the implications of the preceding chapters for an account of catechesis guided by the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. Catechesis echoes the incarnation of the Word in its medial position. Bridging heavenly and earthly knowledge, catechesis is a concrete practice that proffers true knowledge of God, the transcendent source of being, from within the finite conditions of material life.

Although the cliché of the melancholic loner often determined his public perception, W.G. Sebald was an author who frequently engaged in conversation. From 1990 onwards, the start of his literary career, he willingly gave over 80 interviews for television, radio, magazines and newspapers in both German and English. In these interviews, Sebald talked about his own writing more openly and in greater detail than anywhere else, yet at the same time he toyed with the fusion of fact and fiction in his decidedly autofictional literature. The interviews also provide Sebald with an opportunity to install a certain authorial image of himself, though at the same time he often attempted to defend himself against misperceptions, such as the classification as a Holocaust author. Last but not least, the interviews show Sebald as an author who - which is by no means the rule in interviews with writers - repeatedly questions and ironizes himself.

This chapter compares Heidegger’s transcendental approach to social ontology with that found in Husserl. I argue that Husserl and Heidegger are united by the idea that ’the world’ or ’transcendence’ constitutes the most basic form of intersubjectivity, but that their different understandings of the concept of the world lead to divergent conceptions of both subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In short, Husserl takes the world to involve irreducible references to others since perceptual objects can only appear as real or as transcendent if we assume that they possess an inexhaustive number of unperceived aspects that are, in principle, available to other (transcendental) subjects. Heidegger, on the contrary, rejects both Husserl’s interest in objectivity and his notion of the transcendental subject. Instead, he claims that Dasein’s relation to the world must be understood in terms of practical and affective engagement within a field of possibilities, that is, in terms of existential projections. Accordingly, the most basic form of intersubjectivity is found in the transcendental necessity that the same field of entities can be subjected to a multitude of existential projections.

Here I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s account of the way we experience others in and through their attitudes and engagements. I show how he rejects all accounts of originally experiencing of the other as an analogue, whether consciously or by way of analogical appresentation. He is keenly aware of the original and intercorporeal expressivity of others, in which our being animated is already our being expressive and in which our bodies can best be compared with works of art. What is expressed is inseparable from the way it is expressed. He goes on to show that our comportment at once expresses our unique styles and our original enculturation. Though we are exposed to the gazes of others, Merleau-Ponty makes a compelling case against Sartre that we can never be objectified as mere things. The experience of the other is of a unique and transcendent existent who can always shatter our preconceptions.

Historically, mental health care was provided within a religious context. As scientific approaches to the study of mind and brain developed from the seventeenth century onwards, the spiritual and religious elements of care became separated from the biological, psychological and social elements. The rift grew under the combined influences of biological reductionism, Darwinism, behaviourism and psychoanalysis. In the later twentieth century, a new wave of scientific research on spirituality and religion began to reverse this trend. Spirituality came to offer a more subjective and individualised approach to transcendence, which did not necessarily require religious affiliation. Psychiatrists have found a more positive place for spirituality in both clinical practice and research. This has been reflected internationally, in professional organisations, policy, debate and training. A growing evidence base demonstrates the positive benefits of spirituality/religion for mental health, and patient-centred care requires that spiritual/religious issues be addressed with sensitivity and respect.