Speaking Differently: Essays in Theological Anthropology

"The essays in this collection do not seek to uncover a comprehensive theological anthropology. Instead, they hope to move the reader within a theological anthropology to fill out what we have learned from more recent scholarship about the importance of attending to difference and context. In their several ways and discrete approaches they attempt to do this under the heading of 'difference'. To speak about difference is, at least, to raise the question of the 'other'. But 'the question of the other is not, of course, a question; it is a complex of questions'. It asks, for example, whether unity has priority over plurality; what is the relationship between identity and difference; to what extent is my being constituted by that of another; is God as 'Other' somehow mediated through my relationship with other people; does the alterity or otherness of those around me call forth an ethical relationship from me; and might the radical otherness of the divine call forth from me a religious relationship.

Each of the chapters or essays within this collection seeks to address some of these questions." Phillip Tolliday