Chasing the Shadow-the World and Its Times

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Christian natural theology is founded on the proper coordination of Scripture and the created world, what was once called "The Two Books" of God. Carrying forward the work he began in The World in the Shadow of God, Radner here reflects on the way that Scripture's creative relationship with temporal experience--ordering history rather than being ordered by history--opens up the natural world to its essential Scriptural meaning. Like the earlier volume, poetic description is offered as a primary vehicle for doing natural theology, which is shown to proceed according to the figural shape of the Bible's own description of the world. "Never sweetly pious, always directly quarried from the particularity of life, Ephraim Radner's poetry beautifully and movingly reflects the straining, searching, God-desiring pathos of natural theology. Shoes and suitcases speak as eloquently--and as obliquely and uncertainly--as the reliable routines of the lowly ant." --R. R. Reno, Associate Professor of Theology at Creighton University "Radner's style in the introduction where he wrestles with the nature of natural theology as that which 'beats us on the head' is one of vast but lightly worn learning in service of spiritual discipline, the life of somehow joyful penitence. . . .It is as though the wandering children of Israel camp on the northern prairies to dream dreams of wild nature which has possessed the familiar (cats, raccoons and small children!) One might call this post-Darwinian theology." --Mark Elliott, University of St. Andrews, School of Divinity "Ephraim Radner is one of our most creative theologians. I applaud his intriguing effort to rescue Christian natural theology from culturally-determined denunciations of the mid-20th century. Radner's poetic celebration of God's shadows in the creation, espied through the orthodox creed, will challenge and delight the adventuresome reader." --Gerald McDermott, Professor of Religion, Ronaoke College "In Chasing the Shadow, Ephraim Radner serves up a rich poetic spread, which echoes in equal measure the Lamentations of Jeremiah, the villanelles of Joyce, and the wit of Eliot. From his very first poem, 'Acrostic Time'--which runs not only from A to Z, but also from Alpha to Omega--Radner invites the reader to imagine a life entirely figured by scripture, reminding us that theology is, in the first instance, a matter of prayer without ceasing." --Michael Cover, Assistant Professor of Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity, Marquette University "Chasing the Shadow defies theological classification. Taking up a thoroughly traditional locus (Natural Theology) and shaping his investigation within an unexpected frame (the Apostles' Creed), Radner breaks through conventional boundaries of exposition and offers us a theological poetics. Chasing the Shadow is deeply personal without self-congratulation, and speaks forward in contemporary voice towards the faith once delivered to the saints." --Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Priest Affiliate, Christ Church Episcopal, New Haven, Connecticut Ephraim Radner is Professor of Historical Theology, Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto. An Anglican priest, he has authored books on ecclesiology, hermeneutics, and theological anthropology, most recently A Time to Keep: Theology, Mortality and the Shape of a Human Life, and Time and the Word: Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures.