This innovative MA draws on Liverpool Hope University internationally renowned research expertise. It will develop understanding of vital issues from two innovative perspectives. Firstly, a creative focus on hermeneutics – the interpretation of texts - through theological, critical, and philosophical approaches. Secondly, a global approach with a reflective philosophical and theological focus on the devotional, and spiritual wisdom of Christian, Jewish, Islamic, African and Indic traditions.
Students will examine such vital themes as: being and nothingness; God and the Absolute; the soul, the self, and otherness; evil and suffering; ethics and aesthetics; the mystical and the apophatic. In all of these areas, students will be encouraged to question rigid boundaries between theology, spirituality and philosophy.
Through students' studies, they will deepen their critical understanding of ways in which texts and ideas critically reflect and shape traditions of wisdom rather than detached intellectual enquiry. This approach affirms the idea that theology articulates rational structures of meaning as much as philosophy undergirds a holistic 'way of life'.
