Gestures of Grace: Essays in Honour of Robert Sweetman

Gestures of Grace: Essays in Honour of Robert Sweetman. Currents in Reformational Thought series. Edited by Joshua Lee Harris & Héctor Acero Ferrer. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2023.

Available at: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Publisher's Overview:

Gestures of Grace is a celebration of the life and career of Robert Sweetman, H. Evan Runner Chair in the History of Philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies (2001-2023). These essays, written by students and colleagues, testify to the remarkable breadth and depth of Sweetman's research and teaching, from his early scholarly career at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies to his time at ICS. Throughout the volume, there is extensive engagement with Sweetman's influential historical scholarship on topics such as the emergence and development of the Dominican order in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, medieval women authors, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, and indeed on Sweetman's own systematic contribution to the nature and promise of Christian scholarship today.

Praise for Gestures of Grace:

“Joshua Lee Harris and Héctor A. Acero Ferrer’s collection of essays in honor of Prof. Robert Sweetman is a remarkably fine tribute to an outstanding medievalist and Christian scholar who engages in contemporary as well as historical thought. The collection, unlike so many other Festschriften, offers studies by a wide-ranging group of contributors who enter into dialogue with the equally catholic work of the scholar honored. No better tribute could be imagined for so broad, yet scholarly and keenly philosophical a mind, as Sweetman’s.”

—Timothy B. Noone, chair in philosophy, The Catholic University of America

Seeking Stillness or The Sound of Wings: Scholarly and Artistic Comment on Art, Truth, and Society in Honour of Lambert Zuidervaart

Seeking Stillness or The Sound of Wings: Scholarly and Artistic Comment on Art, Truth, and Society in Honour of Lambert Zuidervaart. Currents in Reformational Thought series. Edited by Héctor Acero Ferrer, Michael DeMoor, Peter Enneson and Matthew Klaassen. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2021.

Available at: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Publisher's Overview:

Seeking Stillness or The Sound of Wings pays tribute to Lambert Zuidervaart, one of the most productive Reformational philosophers of the present generation, by picking up the central concerns of his philosophical work--art, truth, and society--and working with the legacy of his published concern to see what more can be understood about our world in light of that legacy. Zuidervaart is an internationally recognized expert in critical theory, especially the work of Theodor Adorno, and a leading systematic philosopher in the reformational tradition. His research and teaching range across continental philosophy, epistemology, social philosophy, and philosophy of art, with an emphasis on Kant, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Habermas. He is currently developing a new conception of truth for an allegedly post-truth society. At the Institute for Christian Studies (2002-2016), Zuidervaart held the Herman Dooyeweerd Chair in Social and Political Philosophy and served as founding Director of the Centre for Philosophy, Religion, and Social Ethics. He was also an Associate Member of the Graduate Faculty and Full Professor, status only, in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, and a member of the Advanced Degree Faculty at the Toronto School of Theology. Zuidervaart is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Seeking Stillness or The Sound of Wings seeks to promote new scholarship emerging from the rich and dynamic tradition of reformational intellectual inquiry. Believing that all scholarly endeavor is rooted in and oriented by deep spiritual commitments, reformational scholarship seeks to add its unique Christian voice to discussions about leading questions of life and society. From this source, it seeks to contribute to the redemptive transformation and renewal of the various aspects of contemporary society, developing currents of thought that open human imagination to alternative future possibilities that may helpfully address the damage we find in present reality. 

As part of this work, Currents in Reformational Thought will bring to light the inter-and multi-disciplinary dimensions of this intellectual tradition, and promote reformational scholarship that intentionally invites dialogue with other traditions or streams of thought.

Contributors:

Ronald A. Kuipers

Robert Sweetman

Janet Wesselius

Hendrik Hart

Calvin Seerveld

Joshua Lee Harris

Michael J. DeMoor

Shannon Hoff

Allyson Carr

Nicholas Wolterstorff

Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin

Rebekah Smick

Henry Luttikhuizen

Lauren Bialystok

Karen Nisenbaum

Martin Jay

Clarence Joldersma

Jonathan Chaplin

Artistic Contributors:

Joyce Recker

Michaeleen Kelly

Linda Nemec Foster

Sue Sinclair

Diane Zeeuw

Deborah Rockman

Jay Constantine

Ron and Miriam Pederson

Janet Read

Tracing the Lines: Spiritual Exercise and the Gesture of Christian Scholarship

ICS is pleased to announce the publication of Tracing the Lines: Spiritual Exercise and the Gesture of Christian Scholarship by Robert Sweetman, ICS's H. Evan Runner Chair in the History of Philosophy. This book is the first in a new series incubated at ICS's Centre for Philosophy, Religion, and Social Ethics, entitled Currents in Reformational Thought. Tracing the Lines explores what Christian scholarship is and should be, with an eye to locating historical resonances with the rich varied tradition of two thousand years of Christian scholarship. Locating his own thought within the reformational intellectual tradition, Sweetman shows how a variety of historical streams of Christian thought have all contributed to informing a contemporary understanding of Christian scholarship. In the end, Sweetman offers an understanding of Christian scholarship as scholarship attuned to the shape of our Christian hearts.

Find it on: Wipf and Stock

Changing to Stay the Same: Meditations on Faithfulness and the Witness of the Institute for Christian Studies

Changing to Stay the Same: Meditations on Faithfulness and the Witness of the Institute for Christian Studies. Robert Sweetman. Allyson Carr and Ronald A. Kuipers, editors. Institute for Christian Studies. 2014

This book collects fifty-two of Bob’s reflection pieces that were written over the course of several years for the ICS electronic newsletter Channel 229. Organized according to the seasons of the church calendar, the collection is intended as a devotional companion through the year, and is dedicated with gratitude to our support community.

Sin Has Its Place, But All Shall Be Well: The Universalism of Hope in Julian of Norwich

Sweetman, Robert. "Sin Has Its Place, But All Shall Be Well: the Universalism of Hope in Julian of Norwich (c. 1342-c. 1416)." In "All Shall Be Well": Explorations in Universalism and Christian Theology from Origen to Moltmann, pp. 66-92. Ed. Gregory MacDonald. Eugene OR: Cascade Books, 2011.

This study of the Shewings of Julian of Norwich explores the nature of the medieval anchoress’ “universalism.” It places the literary forms she used to contruct her text within the framework of medieval rhetorical theory. It does so in order to lay bear the fundamental dynamic of the text. She is not interested in providing our intellects a theodicy by which to fit all of the units of existence within a universal conceptual frame. Rather, she is interested in providing just that basis of plausibility which can ground and so enable hope’s characteristic motion. And Christian hope as she shows is universal in its extension even as graced will is measureless.

Faith Order Understanding: Natural Theology in the Augustinian Tradition - Foreword

Sweetman, Robert. "Foreword." In Faith Order Understanding: Natural Theology in the Augustinian Tradition, by Louis H. Mackey, pp. xi-xxiii. Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies Publications, 2011.

This piece attempts to locate the posthumously published study of natural theology in the Augustinian tradition which follows it within the life work of the American historian of philosophy Louis H. Mackey. It places the study within Mackey’s lifelong attraction to the Augustinian tradition both in its theological and philosophical expressions. It accounts for his attraction in terms of the light that tradition shines on the intersection of philosophy and literature in and through the self-consciously literary way it works with the relationship between language, meaning and reality. It is in this way that the tradition participates in the perennial dialectic of faith and reason. The study shows how Mackey uses the medieval chapters of the Augustinian tradition to identify an “anatomy” of the as yet unbroken tradition within Western philosophy, an anatomy that one finds again in his other philosophical interests: Kierkegaard and Derrida.

Will This Church Have Children?

Sweetman, Robert. "Will This Church Have Children?" Paper presented at the ICS Worldview Conference "Another Brick in the Wall", Oakville, Ontario, September 27, 2008.

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The church like any other institution or group of institutions straddles the line dividing the age of ideology and its characteristic institutional habits from our emerging post-ideological world.  As a result the church too must think about the character of its institutional manifestations. And that means thinking about the pattern of social and cultural change. There are revolutionary, conservative and reformist postures available.  This essay recommends a reformist model and imagines such a model by reference to premodern patterns of political change, in the first place, and the ways in which the meaning of shared cultural symbols change within ancient, medieval and modern contexts, on the second place.  The suggestion is made that such change can be effective if it occurs within the context of a core continuity--that about a given tradition of institutional life that its present members find most precious and worthy.  The point is to hang on to that positive core and to search widely for ways of deepening and building from that core from the resources to be found outside of the tradition, especially within emerging practices that seem most attuned to the tenor of the "new world."  The essay ends by identifying a post-ideological sensibility that feeds secularization and so impedes the church's generational shift from a present leadership formed to the requirements of the age of ideology to ecclesiastical youth whose world is wholly post-ideological.

This is the second of two addresses by Bob Sweetman given at the ICS Worldview Conference titled "Another Brick in the Wall" on September 27, 2008 in Oakville, Ontario, Canada.

Why We Don’t Join Institutions Anymore

Why We Don't Join Institutions Anymore. Robert Sweetman. Presented at the ICS Worldview Conference "Another Brick in the Wall", Oakville, Ontario, September 27, 2008.

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This essay argues that institutions are a perennial feature of human society and culture.  They preserve default positions on how to act together in any number of ways to perform those functions necessary to human living or deemed necessary to human flourishing.  But institutions take on the colour and texture of the age in which they emerge or function. Our most successful institutions, those identified with globalizing capitalism, betray the colours and texture of the age of ideology.  Thus they are aggressively expansive, coercive, hugely complex and very large.  What becomes ever more obvious however is that we no longer trust institutions of the ideological type to steward our common human good.  We are emerging into a post-ideological world.  The institutional experiments most attuned to the new world are very different in colour and texture from those formed in the age of ideology.  They are localized (although tied via new technologies to similar groups worldwide), small, simple and participatory or democratic.  What does this have to say to the Christian community in its institutional life?

This is the first of two addresses by Bob Sweetman given at the ICS Worldview Conference titled "Another Brick in the Wall" on September 27, 2008 in Oakville, Ontario, Canada.

In the Phrygian Mode: Neo-Calvinism, Antiquity and the Lamentations of Reformed Philosophy

Sweetman, Robert, ed., In the Phrygian Mode: Neo-Calvinism, Antiquity and the Lamentations of Reformed Philosophy. Lanham MD: University Press of America, 2007.

Find it on: Amazon

This volume of essays emerges out of a small conference exploring the relationship between Christianity and Greco-Roman civilization, above all that civilization’s characteristic patterns of philosophical thought. All the essays take as their field of investigation the neo-Calvinist current within Dutch Protestantism and the elaboration in the 1920s and 1930s of “Calvinistic” philosophy as one of its most distinctive effects. Opening and closing chapters, penned by the volume editor, frame the essays that make up the body of the volume in terms of the intellectual and spiritual orientation of Protestantism and its scholarly efforts at the birth of neo-Calvinism and “Calvinistic” philosophy, on the one hand, and during that philosophy’s development in the decades between its foundation and the end of the last millennium, on the other.

Beryl Smalley, Thomas of Cantimpré, and the Performative Reading of Scripture: A Study in Two Exempla

Sweetman, Robert. "Beryl Smalley, Thomas of Cantimpré, and the Performative Reading of Scripture: a Study in Two Exempla." In With Reverence for the Word: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, pp. 256-275. Eds. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Barry D. Walfish, and Joseph W. Goering. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

This study uses a number of preaching stories included within Thomas of Cantimpré’s “Book of Bees” to examine Beryl Smalley’s account of the evolution of scholarly approaches to the Scriptures in the context of the rise of the universities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It expands historical understanding of the literal sense of scriptures to account for a performative mode of literal reading in which one’s subsequent living exegetes the scripture that one is or has been studying. The life of St. Francis of Assisi provides an exemplary case in point.

Thomas of Cantimpré: Performative Reading and Pastoral Care

Sweetman, Robert. "Thomas of Cantimpré: Performative Reading and Pastoral Care." In Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality, pp. 133-167. Eds. Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

This study uses a typology of reading modes to examine preaching stories included within the “Book of Bees” of Thomas of Cantimpré in order to identify contrasting modes of reading within Thomas of Cantimpré’s own practice. In so doing, it identifies a mode of reading, performative reading, that emerges from the spiritual orientation to existence implicit within “having faith” and its resulting religious practices, one that contrasts with what might be termed “scholarly reading,” that mode in which one reads for information rather than personal transformation.

Thomas of Cantimpré, Mulieres Religiosae, and Purgatorial Piety: Hagiographical Vitae and the Beguine 'Voice'

Sweetman, Robert. "Thomas of Cantimpré, Mulieres Religiosae, and Purgatorial Piety: Hagiographical Vitae and the Beguine 'Voice'." In A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of Leonard E. Boyle, O.P., pp. 606-628. Ed. Jacqueline Brown and William P. Stoneman. Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996.

This study explores and identifies criteria by which one is able to establish what the thirteenth-century Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré learned from women religious whose spirituality he was attracted to, sought to serve as preacher and confessor, and whose sanctity he sought to promote as a writer of saints’ lives. In so doing it shows how the distinctive character of his interest in Purgatory and in suffrages on behalf of one’s beloved dead cannot be explained by the commonplaces of a person of his religious identity, sex and education, nor by modern psychological expectations, but rather by patterns of piety he discovered among beguines of the Southern Low Countries he ministered to or heard tell of in and around Liège. In so doing the study disputes the widespread assumption found within many feminist and Annales-school histories that male mediations of medieval female religious experience covered over that experience such that it has been lost to us, root and branch.