A record of the 2015 Building Bridges Seminar for leading Christian and Muslim scholars, this collection of essays explores the nature of divine and human agency through themes of creation’s goal, humankind’s dignity and task, and notions of sovereignty. Part I sets the context for the book with “Human Action within Divine Creation: A Muslim Perspective” by Mohsen Kadivar of Duke University and “On the Possibility of Holy Living: A Christian Perspective” by Lucy Gardner of Oxford University. The rest of the book includes paired essays—one from a Muslim perspective, one from a Christian perspective—that introduce scriptural material with commentary to aid readers in conducting dialogical study. In her conclusion, coeditor Lucinda Mosher digests the illuminating small-group conversations that lie at the heart of the Building Bridges initiative, conversations that convey a vivid sense of the lively, penetrating but respectful dialogue for which the project is known. This unique volume will be a valuable resource to scholars, students, and professors of Christianity and Islam.

This book sets out a thematic presentation of human action, especially as it relates to morality, in the three most significant figures in Medieval Scholastic thought: Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham

This book presents and evaluates the understanding of political form in the work of Pierre Manent. The study of political form is Manent’s central philosophical task. He is interested in the nature of man, in the action that makes us human, and thus in politics and political action as privileged windows into human nature and what it is to be human. Manent places himself in the classical political tradition, with its foundations in human nature and in a politics that accords with nature. He also situates himself within a triangle of faith, philosophy, and politics, all of which interest him as part of the reality of things even as he avoids an exclusive commitment to any one vertex in his investigation. The book first examines the major influences on Manent; the overarching questions that guide his work on political form, the “theologico-political question” and the question of the “modern difference” with the ancient view of man and politics; and his two intertwined paths of inquiry into political events and political thought. Manent describes political forms as “the modes of human association that no science has taken as its specific object.” City, empire, Church, national monarchy or nation-state, and modern state are the principal forms that he examines. The book discusses Manent’s thinking on each form in turn together with the tensions that propel the changes or motion in political form that Manent sees as driving and revealing the course of European political development. Using the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, Russell Hittinger, Étienne Gilson, Robert Sokolowski, and Francis Slade, the book evaluates Manent’s insights into the modern state and political condition, which he judges to be exhausted, as well as his call for the preservation of the form of the “nation marked by Christianity.”