Melancholy Theology

All of us some of the time, and some of us all of the time, strive to achieve our own happiness and well-being solely on the dubious strength of our own individual skills, knowledge, willpower, and ingenuity. And we fail, often succumbing to one of the many masks of the capital vice known as Sloth. This volume explores the occasions or consequences of such failures or else strategies for their avoidance. The chapters are loosely connected insofar as they are either inquiries into certain kinds of temptation or confessions of the costs of discovering that one has been thus seduced into sin, or exhortations to prepare oneself to avoid those temptations and their costs. Primary themes include the noetic effects of sin and their impact on interpersonal relationships, forbidden knowledge and self-censorship, duties and rewards of academic mentoring, the theology of creation, chronophobia and existential angst, skeptical theism and its costs, revelation and testimonial knowledge, a common challenge for Judaism and Christianity and Islam, and the philosophy of pessimism and its peculiar temptations.