Cyril O’Regan. Theology and the Spaces of Apocalyptic. ISBN-13: 978-087462-587-5; ISBN-10: 0-87462-589-9. (2009, Lecture 40). 167 pp. Cloth. $15.
Born in Ireland, Cyril O’Regan received his BA and MA degrees in Philosophy in the middle to late 1970s at University College Dublin. He studied Theology and Philosophy of Religion at the Department of Religious Studies at Yale from which institution he received his PhD in 1989. He has held academic positions at the School of Theology, Saint John’s, Collegeville, as well as in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale. For the past ten years he has been on the faculty of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, where currently he is the Huisking Professor of Theology. Professor O’Regan identifies himself as a systematic theologian who is interested in a wide variety of topic areas and contemporary figures in theology, both Catholic and Protestant. He is especially interested in Trinitarian thought, eschatology, and the variety of forms of postmodern theology, and has paid particular attention to modern theologians such as Balthasar, Przywara, and de Lubac. He has published widely on Balthasar, and 2010 will see the appearance of two large manuscripts on Balthasar’s relation to Hegel and Heidegger respectively. Two more volumes on Balthasar are planned. In addition, Professor O’Regan has deep historical interests that extend from Newman and the Tübingen School in the nineteenth century through Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Eckhart in the medieval period to the patristic period. In the patristic period he has done considerable work on Irenaeus and Augustine. The areas of mystical theology and clarification of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are of special interest. In the area of mystical theology Professor O’Regan has written on such figures as Maximus and Eckhart, and is currently working on Ruysbroeck. The second-century figure Irenaeus is a foundation stone for his exploration of the return of Gnosticism in modernity. Two volumes of a planned seven volume series have thus far appeared: Gnostic Return in Modernity (SUNY, 2001) and Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme’s Haunted Narrative (SUNY, 2002). Trained originally as a philosopher, Professor O’Regan has done considerable work in continental philosophy. He is the author of The Heterodox Hegel (SUNY, 1994) as well as numerous other essays on Hegel. Another book on Hegel is well under way and is slated to be the third volume of the Gnosticism in Modernity series. He has published on Heidegger, Jean-Luc Marion, and Kant among others.
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