Hence, I begin with a brief statement
about human existence in its cosmic setting when seen from a process perspective and interpreted in the light of Christian faith.
«Although I am an atheist, I respect all religions and take them seriously as vast symbol systems containing deep
truth about human existence.
The fact of evil in the world and in human experience raises serious questions for any Christian discussion, as much
about human existence as about the reality and activity of God who in Christian faith is affirmed to be nothing other than «pure unbounded love.»
Reinhold Niebuhr criticized this Pelagian vision of individuals and social orders in Moral Man and Immoral Society, replacing it with an Augustinian
realism about human existence that tempered any optimism in human progress.
For this man of tradition, «reconnecting» students and laity with the source means the biblical story and what it
says about human existence.
As thus inclusive, metaphysics is integral existential truth.2 Conversely, integral existential truth necessarily includes metaphysics in the strict sense, as ontology and therefore theology and cosmology, even though metaphysics in the strict sense does not include anthropology, and hence is not the full
truth about human existence — not even as such.
Our nuclear knowledge brings to the surface a fundamental
fact about human existence: we are part and parcel of the web of life and exist in interdependence with all other beings, both human and nonhuman.
And when he was
thinking about human existence itself, he was intent upon saying that a whole human person was compounded of body as well as of soul; in the end, he said, the two would be reunited after the separation which death had brought about.
I believe that stories communicate both the gospel and the truth
about the human existence, but more importantly, they awaken in us something long repressed by our modern culture: life itself is a story.
It is for this reason that it may be argued that these sciences have not exhausted all that is to be said about man, or even touched the most important questions
about human existence.
At any rate, Bultmann always emphasized that it was his task as a Christian theologian to offer answers, whereas the task of a philosopher was only to sharpen the questions (and particularly the question
about human existence).
In such an empty landscape, one wonders what topics are left for students to explore and discuss — certainly, all too few that raise interesting and worthwhile questions
about human existence.
Their dazzling technical spectacles often conceal questions
about human existence, and their artworks strive to give urbanites a new sense of the vitality of life in the natural world, and new realizations of their own connection to the world around them.