Some three decades ago Michel Foucault sought to reestablish communication between “madness” and “non-madness” by going back to what he called the “zero point” in history at which the distance between reason and madness was first established. In Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Foucault suggested that returning to this point of initial differentiation requires renouncing all that we as modern persons know to be true about madness and reason. If we are to locate “that realm in which the man of madness and the man of reason, moving apart, are not yet disjunct,” he wrote,

we must speak of that initial dispute without assuming a victory, or the right to a victory; we must speak of those actions re-examined in history, leaving in abeyance all that may figure as a conclusion, as a refuge in truth. … Then, and then only, can we… begin the dialogue of their breach, testifying in a fugitive way that they still speak to each other.

Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed is among the most influential works ever written in religious philosophy. It occupies a unique place in Jewish religious thought. While the majority of subsequent Jewish thinkers have criticized what they understood of Maimonides' text, they have often felt obligated to struggle with his contentions. This obligation constitutes the highest expression of respect in Jewish philosophy.

A holy book arouses the greatest respect even among those (indeed, most of all among those) who do not read it… and the most sophistical reasoning avails nothing in the face of the decisive assertion, which beats down every objection: Thus it is written. It is for this reason that the passages in it which are to lay down an article of faith are called simply texts. The appointed expositors of such a scripture are themselves, by virtue of their occupation, like unto consecrated persons; and history proves that it has never been possible to destroy a faith grounded in scripture.

In the past two decades considerable theological energy has been expended in the construction of various ecological theologies and spiritualities. Process theologians, ecofeminists, and theologians of creation, earth, nature, ecology, and land have been elucidating religious perspectives that they hope will help transform human attitudes toward nature and the environment. These writers have sought to reorient Christianity away from anthropocentric views that claim human dominion over nature, premillennial expectations that embrace the destruction of this world, soteriological preoccupations that focus on individual salvation, and otherworldly assumptions that foster alienation from the earth and nature. Some sanguine observers have seen this recent ferment as the greening of American theology or even the greening of the American churches. At the same time, intellectual historians have paid increasing attention to the history of Western ideas about nature and have debated at length the impact of Christianity's theological heritage on the environmental crisis. Specifically, a number of historians have constructed a genealogy of American conservationist and preservationist thought by tracing out a line that includes, among others, George Catlin, Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson.

On the afternoon of 6 September 1952, the readers of the Boston Pilot—the voice of the Roman Catholic archdiocese—found on the front page of their usually staid weekly the text of a trenchant letter from the Holy Office in Rome. The text, dated August 8, addressed a group of Boston Catholics who had kicked up a fuss over the ancient theological dictum, extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“outside the church there is no salvation”)—a phrase going back to St. Cyprian in the third century and one of the pillars of orthodoxy for Christian believers.