Religious thought does only express abstract truths. It also captures relationships and these are served by means of metaphors. Metaphors condition the religious imagination as well as theological thinking. One of the key concepts of biblical faith is the covenant between God and Israel, itself a crossover between a literal and a metaphorical view of the relationship. The covenant is served by a series of metaphors – husband/wife, king/people, parent/child, shepherd and more. Covenantal metaphors took shape in a context in which Israel alone was considered to have a valid relationship with God. Historically, there has been a decline in covenantal theology for two millennia, since the end of the period represented in the Hebrew Bible. The twentieth century witnessed a revival of Jewish covenantal theology. Proponents of such a theological view happen to also be proponents of religious pluralism in relation to other faiths. This presents an interesting challenge that has not been previously tackled. How does one apply the biblical covenantal metaphors, that came into being during a period of religious exclusivism in an era of religious pluralism? Such application must be deliberate, and may lack some of the spontaneity associated with the uses of metaphor. The present essay considers the metaphors above and how they might be expanded and reinterpreted in the context of interreligious pluralism. It also considers the metaphor of the friend, which in and of itself is not one of the stock biblical covenantal metaphors, and its usefulness for the present theological challenge. The metaphor of the friend allows us to develop a contemporary religious approach that can function both vertically, in relation to God, and horizontally, in relation to other peoples and religions.

The article deals with the uniqueness and interconnectedness of human beings. It is argued that the Jewish philosophers Buber, Rosenzweig and Levinas as well as the Buddhist thinker Thich Nhat Hanh emphasize the relatedness of the subject. This is viewed as a welcome correction in a world of extreme individualism.

There is something enormously powerful, even inspirational, about the Akedah story and about Abraham who was, after all, named the Father of Faith. He may be judged as inconsistent – his boldness concerning Sodom and Gomorrah seems to contradict with his silence in the face of God’s command to kill Isaac. However, we might note the contrast and take it as an indication that Abraham sees or understands something that we do not. Similarly, in the light of these stories it is worth rethinking God’s ways and the “strategy” of the Bible. We tend to explain God’s Will with the suggestion that if something happens there must be a reason for it – we treat it like a wound that requires mending; these understandable reactions nevertheless situate us a bit too closely to Job’s comforters. The biblical texts are plain; they do not so much as hint at theodicy. Perhaps the Bible’s unembarrassed directness about God’s ways is testing us, but not in a way acknowledged by the theodicies.

This article presents the consequences of the diversity of positions called pantheism and the different moments of this complex concept. It is pointed out that on the one hand they can confuse, on the other hand they testify to the huge problematic, intellectual, spiritual (religious) wealth associated with this concept. Pantheism is shown here as a view full of internal content and inspirational tensions, contrasted with the poorer and one-sided rather: atheism and theism (or at least tend to impoverish and unify, stronger than pantheism). Among the conclusions, a thesis was proposed, according to which pantheism would operate between atheism and theism, somehow exceeding them – from his point of view – dogmatic „rigidity” and simplifying uniqueness and one-sidedness. Pantheism is also presented as an expression of the belief that the world (in its temporality, naturalness) is not enough for itself, but that also God is not enough (in its „exit”, essence, static, in its nature) for the fullness of its divinity.

The aim of the paper is to describe the categories of love and Nothingness as well as the idea of Deus absconditus, which are presented in The Star of Redemption by Franz Rosenzweig. The analysis of the philosopher’s major work makes it possible to formulate a thesis that Rosenzweig adopted the central cosmogonic and ontological concepts of Jewish mystics – especially the representatives of the Zoharic Kabbalah and the Lurianic school – while constructing his own “star-system”.

Wincenty Lutosławski created a quasi-religious concept of a nation whose members are connected by a bond reminiscent of mystical union. True nations, according to the philosopher, are created by God and their number is limited. It should be added that Lutosławski’s concept was created when Poland was erased from the world map for over 100 years. In order to strengthen the condition of the nation, Lutosławski called for the creation of the Blacksmith Order, whose aim was to be patriotic education. The concepts advocated by the philosopher (e.g., the doctrine of reincarnation) were far from the principles of Catholic orthodoxy.

Dunbar reprezentuje nurt ewolucyjnych badaczy religii, którzy sądzą, że religia pełni funkcje adaptacyjne u człowieka. W artykule prezentuje się jego argumenty na rzecz tezy, że zachowania religijne (religia) w szczególności sprzyjają tworzeniu wspólnot społecznych i pozytywnie wpływają na zdrowie psychiczne jednostek (m.in. koją ból po śmierci bliskich). Dunbar przeanalizował główne funkcje religii szamanistycznej, stanowiącej zaczątek późniejszych religii (w tym hiperdoktrynalnych, jak np. judaizm, katolicyzm, protestantyzm i islam). Rytualne tańce transowe hipotetycznie wpływały na produkcję endorfin w mózgu, co w efekcie sprzyjało spajaniu grup i poświęcaniu się innym, czyli sprzyjało przetrwaniu danej społeczności. Te same funkcje, choć przy odmiennych cechach rytuału, pełnią także wszystkie religie współczesne. W artykule są poruszone też inne zagadnienia: problem określenia momentu pojawienia się religii w dziejach człowieka, kwestia podobieństw oraz różnic w religiach szamanistycznych i hiperdoktrynalnych (ponadto przyczyny przejścia jednej formy religijności w drugą), domniemany początek wiary w życie pozagrobowe, podział religii z uwagi na stopień intencjonalności, problem istnienia języka w świetle wyewoluowania religii, artefakty religijne jako świadectwa religijności człowieka. Dunbar – jako nieformalny religiolog ewolucyjny – wzbogaca coraz liczniejsze badania nad istotą, genezą i funkcją religii, które są podejmowane przez neodarwinowskich teoretyków (biologów, antropologów, psychologów i kognitywistów).

The surprising fallibility of a priori knowledge is explained by the indication of the broad structure of hermeneutical horizon of intuitive and implicitly accepted intellectual convictions, i.e. the relevant tacit knowledge. Non-apodicticity of the results of a priori cognition cannot be used as an argument against the possibility and existence of the cognition. The analyses are based on the example of Russell’s antinomy and the axiom of comprehension in set theory. The conviction of homogeneity of the universe of sets and extensional conception of a set are examples of presuppositions actively present during the historically given process of the creation of mathematics.

Modern rationalism, abbr. neorationalism, is a philosophical orientation to include Frege, Russell, Church, Bernays, Gödel (most distinctly), Quine, Putnam, Kreisel, Chaitin, etc. It claims the existence of abstract entities as classes, numbers, algorithms etc., and mind’s ability to intuitively learn about them. When meaning mathematical entities, we speak of mathematical intuition, being in focus of this paper. The adjective “modern” highlights the difference in relation to the classical rationalism of the 17-th century. The modern one denies the mathematical intuition to possess a perfect reliability, and sees it as a gradable faculty which does not enjoy an assured infallibility. The degree of reliability depends on how close is intuition to an inborn biological equipment (what means nativism in Chomsky’s style), and to sensory experiences. What is called neorationalism in this paper happens to be called mathematical platonism by other authors. However, on account of fallibilism, a certain tilt toward empiricism, and a significant reference to biology, “Platonism” (as lacking these traits) proves to be less fitting term than is “neorationalism”.

The paper deals with aesthetic and religious dimensions of mathematics. These dimensions are considered as closely connected, though reciprocally non-reducible. “Mathematical beauty” is already firmly established as a term in the philosophy of mathematics. Here, an attempt is made to bring forward two additional candidates: “mathematical sublime” and “numinous mathematics”. The last one is meant to designate the recognition of some mathematical practices as inspiring anticipation of the meeting with the divine reality or producing a feeling of its presence. The first one is used here to designate the related feelings in disguise, i.e., being reinterpreted or transferred from the straightforwardly religious to the aesthetic sphere. Taking Kant’s theory of the sublime as a starting point, the paper introduces a related account of it that treats mathematical beauty through mathematical sublimity as a more fundamental category. Within this account, religious experience, the aesthetics of the sublime and mathematical practice are closely interlinked through an appropriate interpretation of the idea of the infinite. Both mathematical and art symbolism are seen as an endeavour to represent the infinite within the finite, which correlates well with the definition of mathematics as “the science of the infinite” (Hermann Weyl).

When speaking on the “logic of God”, we can understand the logic of our reasoning about God or the logic as it is supposedly employed by God. It is rather obvious, at least for believers in God, that we can infer something about God’s logic in the latter meaning, from how the logic operates in the world created by Him. In the present essay, my strategy is to use this narrow window through which we can grasp some glimpses of “God’s ways of thinking”. There are strong reasons to believe that it is category theory that best displays the role of logic in the system of our mathematical and physical knowledge. It gives us a refreshingly new perspective on logic and its various applications, and could be a good starting point for our speculations concerning the “logic of God”. A quick look at category theory and its applications to physics shows that logic can change from theory to theory, or from level to meta-level. This poses the question of the existence of “superlogic” to which all other logics would somehow be subordinated. The fact that this question remains unanswered forces us to face the problem of plurality of logics. Usually, it is tacitly assumed that the role of “superlogic” is played by classical logic with its non-contradiction law as the most obvious tautology. We briefly discuss paraconsistent logic as an example of a logical system in which contradictions are allowed, albeit under the condition that they do not make the system to explode, i.e. that they do not spill over the whole system. Such logic is an internal logic in categories called cotopoi (or complement topoi). I refer to some theological discussions, both present and from the past, that associate “God’s logic” with classical logic, in particular with the non-contradiction principle. However, we argue that this principle should not be absolutized. The only thing we can, with some certainty, assert on “God’s logic” is that it is not an exploding logic, i.e. that it is not an “anything goes logic”. God is a Source-of-All-Rationality but His rationality need not to conform to our standards of what is rational. This “principle of logical apophaticism” is formulated and briefly discussed. In the history of theology at least one attempt is known to reconstruct the “process of God’s thinking”, namely Leibniz’s idea of God’s selecting the best world to be created from among all possible worlds. Some modifications are suggested which we believe Leibniz would have introduced in his reconstruction, if he knew present developments in categorical logic.