Gabriel Marcel's Theory of Religious Experience (American University Studies)

This work presents an intensive, illuminating and fascinating analysis and interpretation of Gabriel Marcel's basic thought on human existence and its ultimate religious meaning. It focuses on Marcel's examination of religious experience as rooted in the human condition, lived by beings who are basically incarnate, in situation, continually en route, beset by tension, contradiction, and ambiguity. It presents Marcel's masterly intuitive-descriptive examination of such real-life religious acts as hope, fidelity and witness. It pays full attention to Marcel's early Metaphysical Journal, truly a basic work, too often neglected in assaying this great, neglected thinker. Marcel, along with Martin Buber, is one of the founders of 20th-century dialogical (I-Thou) philosophy.