Eternity and Time's Flow
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Description
Neville returns eternity to the center of consideration by analyzing the obsessive culture that attempts to get along denying it; and he analyzes the nature of time's flow itself, the nature of divine eternity, and the subtle problems of personal immortality. He argues that time and eternity constitute one topic and that, therefore, time itself is beyond understanding, beyond personal grasp, and beyond civilized orientation without a proper comprehension of eternity.
Robert Cummings Neville is Dean of the School of Theology and a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Boston University. He was President of the Metaphysical Society of America in 1989, of the American Academy of Religion in 1992, and of the International Society for Chinese Philosophy in 1992. He is the editor of New Essays in Metaphysics and he is the author of The Tao and the Daimon: Segments of a Religious Inquiry; The Puritan Smile: A Look Toward Moral Reflection; A Theology Primer; God the Creator: On the Transcendence and Presence of God; Recovery of the Measure: Interpretation and Nature; Reconstruction of Thinking; Behind the Masks of God: An Essay Toward Comparative Theology; and The Highroad Around Modernism, all published by SUNY Press.
Reviews
"Neville's opening claim is simply indisputable, that nothing in ancient mythical cosmology, no matter how fantastic, rivals the sort of sweepingly imaginative cosmological claims issuing from the pens of today's most prominent theoretical physicists. Neville writes with the same easy, fluent, and (most of all) authoritative command of ideas and of relevant details employed by Hawking, Feynman, and Bohm. The difference, in Neville's favor, is that he has a comprehensive grasp of the broad philosophical context for the discussion of time, together with a perspective informed by knowledge of major, non-Western contributions toward representing and understanding the problem. " — George R. Lucas, Jr.
"This book deals with the deepest and most complex problems from the broadest perspective (science, philosophy, and the world religions) and produces an answer that is sophisticated, clear, consistent in its argumentation, and relevant to everyday life. The solution to the problem of time and eternity is set within Christian theology yet it is argued throughout within the hearing of the teachings of the other world religions and the challenges of secular modernity. " — Harold Coward, University of Victoria, Canada