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The issue of homosexual inclusivity within the Catholic Church has been and continues to be at the center of much debate. This thesis analyzes the issue by engaging the document ,“The Pastoral Care of the Homosexual Person” written by Joseph Ratzinger. New exegetical interpretations of both Old and New Testament texts are placed in dialogue with interpretations utilized by Ratzinger in his letter. These interpretations serve to provide an alternative and liberating reading of seminal texts that have been used to oppress and exclude the Queer community from the Catholic Church. Queer theology is then used to draw connections between the experience of Christ and that of the Queer person, in order to argue that in following Christ, Catholic’s must embrace the Queer community as another part of the Cosmic body of Christ.

In this thesis, I argue that the both the Church and the Queer Community will benefit from a reexamination of Church teachings on sexuality. I argue that Church’s current position on sexuality does not uphold its own teaching on the importance human dignity, because a sexual ethic that opposes homosexuality contributes to the marginalization of members of the Queer Community. I then argue that Michael Lawler’s and Todd Salzman’s The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology provides a revisionist theory on sexual ethics that is inclusive of same-sex couples while also paying deference to the fundamental elements of the Church’s teaching on sexual ethics. Having suggested that a revisionist sexual ethic such as Salzman’s and Lawler’s serves as a cohesive response to the Church’s existing position on sexuality, I appeal to Elizabeth Johnson’s framework in Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God. Johnson argues that individuals who experience marginalization are an asset to the Christian Church because they offer unique insights into God. I propose that instead of approaching homosexuality solely in terms of ethics, Johnson’s framework allows us to regard members of the Queer Community in terms of the contributions they have to offer the Church. Finally, I employ David Tracy’s methodology in Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology and propose that in light of postmodernity, we ought to use a pluralistic model when approaching a multiplicity of belief systems as well as when approaching the multi-faceted nature of sexuality. I conclude that in doing so both the Church and the Queer Community will benefit from the Queer Community’s full and open participation within the Catholic Church.

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In Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), Heidegger submits an attempt to think from a more original position within being by presenting ”a deeper form of questioning”. This attempt is supposed to serve as the final transition from what he calls ”the guiding question” to ”the basic question” and with that the final leap from the metaphysical tradition still present in Being and Ttime into ”the second beginning”, free from transcendental thinking. The intention of this essay is to observe how the being-historical questioning is presented in Contributions to Philosophy as it is contrasted with the position of the question in Being and time. In my endeavor to understand ”the questioning”, two of Heideggers lecture courses on Saint Augustine are presented. I show how Heidegger pinpoints Saint Augustine’s turn from searching for God as an object into forming himself into a question, and so in prayer becoming the very thing he is searching for in a deeper form of questioning. Furthermore he claims that Augustine’s ”not knowing” (nescio) has been consistently misread as a lack of knowledge, whilst it is in fact a pre-requisite for the real break through of true knowledge. I suggest that Heideggers re-reading of nescio can be helpful in trying to understand the preparation for the Event of the second beginning of which the questioning is a part.

The aim of this thesis is to find out whether Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus can be equated with a conceptual system or ”Begriffsschrift”, and what the function of such a representative system would be. How can solipsism, idealism and realism be understood given that interpretation? Wittgenstein’s early philosophical inquiry revolved around the same problem with which Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell had dealt with. But according to Georg Henrik von Wright, Wittgenstein forcefully questioned their idea that logic can constitute a general foundation and Wittgenstein was particularly against the idea that mathematics requires a foundation of logic. The thesis discusses how this can be deduced from a close reading of Russell’s introduction to the Tractatus. The results from this reading coupled with a review of the concepts of solipsism and subject give a divergent interpretation on what is complex and what can only be shown. The study indicates that what solipsism disclose is that a variable that consists of ”I”, referred to a subject, cannot be equated with a variable ”x” because ”I” include an unwanted function which gives rise to a nonsensical generality.

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<p>Uppsatsen skrevs under HT18. </p>

In this thesis, I use the work of Friedrich Nietzsche to offer a detailed account of existential sin. I show that existential sin as a form of self-understanding is deeply embedded in the Christian theological tradition, and that Nietzsche’s account of existential sin should be understood as part of this same tradition. In my reading of On the Genealogy of Morality I show that we need to place sin in close relation to bad conscience, guilt and the genealogical method itself. However, despite being grounded in Christian thought and dependent upon the figure of the Christian God in its origin and emergence, I follow Nietzsche in positing that existential sin continues to exist after the death of God. It is by considering sin as not only a form of self-understanding, but also as a cultural memory, that we can make sense of this claim. For Nietzsche existential sin is at its root a mistaken understanding of human nature that has taken hold of us through Christianity. However, I argue that we need to consider existential sin as a socio-historical answer to the ontological problem of meaningless suffering. Existential sin responds to a fundamental experience of the human condition. With this in mind, in the final chapter of the thesis I examine possible avenues of redemption from post-Christian sin. What options are open to the person suffering from post-Christian sin-consciousness if she cannot turn to religious narratives? I argue that Nietzsche’s redemptive method of genealogy is not sufficient, and that life-affirmation is too demanding. However, a weaker version of life-affirmation in which meaningless suffering is affirmed as necessary, but not desired, does provide a promising alternative answer to the problem of meaningless suffering.

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