Словари
Различные книги в жанре СловариOld Man Dreaming
The most fruitful and most profound understandings of vision and visioning processes are not in organizational theories or management techniques. They are instead in the Bible and Christian theology, claims the author of this book. To explain his case, the author analyzes and challenges the views of management experts and consultants regarding vision and visioning processes in secular and church organizations. He interprets key biblical stories and texts about vision, and explores a theology of vision and place of vision in theology and the church. On the basis of his experience and studies, the author shares his vision of his own Presbyterian Church's present realities and its pathways to the future.
Remembering the Reformation
In 1517, Martin Luther set off what has been called, at least since the nineteenth century, the Protestant Reformation. Can Christians of differing traditions commemorate the upcoming 500th anniversary of this event together? How do we understand and assess the Reformation today? What calls for celebration? What calls for repentance? Can the Reformation anniversary be an occasion for greater mutual understanding among Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants? At the 2015 Pro Ecclesia annual conference for clergy and laity, meeting at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, an array of scholars–Catholic and Orthodox, Evangelical Lutheran and American Evangelical as well as Methodist–addressed this topic. The aim of this book is not only to collect these diverse Catholic and Evangelical perspectives but also to provide resources for all Christians, including pastors and scholars, to think and argue about the roads we have taken since 1517–as we also learn to pray with Jesus Christ «that all may be one» (John 17:21).
Eugene Kennedy
For two decades, Eugene Kennedy was one of the church's fiercest critics in the sexual abuse crisis, with frequent articles in National Catholic Reporter. This book–written as an appreciation by one of Kennedy's former students at Loyola University of Chicago–recalls and assesses his huge literary output throughout fifty years of active research and writing. Kennedy's entire career can be seen as an extension of Vatican II. Topics in the tremendous arc of his career include a career-starting book on improving seminaries, inspiring books about faith in the twentieth century, leadership in the 1972 study by United States Catholic bishops, books on how to do counseling at the parish level, ongoing reviews of how the church put Vatican II in motion, and his last book, which is a gentle collection of blogs as he fondly reminisced about his life. In the middle of all this, he was a successful novelist and political commentator whose editor was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. And much, much more.
Silentium
With this collection of meditative, personal, memoir, and lyrical essays and narrative poetry, Connie T. Braun explores the multi-valences of silence within themes of loss, displacement, identity, heritage, and faith. Reflecting on her childhood in Canada, and her ancestral Mennonite homeplace, these pieces form a memoir about her maternal grandparents' and her mother's life in Poland, their experiences of war and displacement, and their eventual immigration and acculturation. In these pages, and in consecutive travels to Poland, the author invites the reader to accompany her as she traverses the territory of old and new worlds, war and peace, the landscape of dispossession, and the mass forced migrations of World War II within the ground of holocaust. Braun conveys through story that not only words, but silences, speak meaning. Private memory within the historical record reveals people caught up in catastrophe striving to survive with their humanity intact. These are stories crafted from silence and language, memory and obscurity, faith and doubt, chaos and hope, the past, and future possibility. Telling and listening to stories performs the acts of mourning and witness, and attests to the regenerative and transcendent qualities of narrative.
Meeting Jesus the Christ Again
The religion of Jesus or the religion about Jesus? The cross as Christ's atoning sacrifice or as a courageous, prophetic martyrdom? With a pastoral/prophetic voice and insights derived from a lifetime in parish ministry and theological education, Meeting Jesus the Christ Again encourages the reader to rethink these and other hotly disputed issues of Christian faith. Taking a big-picture perspective and seeking common ground, Chesnut points us toward a «neo-classical» faith. This engaging book calls us back to the vital center of historic Christian faith.
Programmed by God or Free to Choose?
Are we in fact more than just inert clay in the divine Potter's hands? This book seeks to prove conclusively from Scripture that mankind's freedom to seek God was not retracted at the fall, and that all humanity's sins were borne on the cross by the Lord Jesus Christ. The five points of Calvinism under scrutiny, often known by their acronym, TULIP, are a resume of doctrines formulated at the Council of Dort in 1619. This council maintained that the fall of Adam resulted in the inability of man to seek, or even to desire to seek, God. The Council of Dort declared that only those who have received prior regenerating grace are in fact capable of seeking Him. As you read this book, you will see that God has sovereignly decided to preserve genuine human freedom of choice, and that this brings Him glory and delight. You will also see that predestination is not about who is destined to become a Christian, but about whom a Christian is destined to become.
Lessons from Laodicea
"I'm rich and I don't need a thing," bragged the early Christians in the big city of Laodicea. The Apostle John, however, saw their affluence and arrogance through a theological lens. He declared them to be bankrupt, «lukewarm Christians» whom God would gladly gargle and spit out. Today, the mainline church in the West finds itself in a dominant culture of Laodicean affluence, where even faith is a commodity to be consumed. While the gospel spreads and thrives in the global South and East, the Western mainline church looks longingly back at Christendom and forward in fear. As Christians living in a North American culture that highly prizes the unholy Trinity of individualism, consumerism, and secularism, we require a new kind of missional leadership to «pray» attention to what God is doing in the world around us. This book names the challenges and promises inherent in partnering with the Holy Spirit in order to offer missional leadership in a culture of affluence. It is about both living in Laodicea and leaving it behind. We are no longer in a Babylonian captivity but a Laodicean one. This work helps chart a course for Christians who long to let go of «country club religion» and instead belong to a community that helps equip missionary disciples, resistant to the dominant culture and resplendent in the love of our triune God.
Faith, Form, and Fashion
This is a detailed examination of the theological innovations of Kevin Vanhoozer and John Franke. Each proposes that doctrinal and systematic theology should be recast in the light of postmodernity. No longer can Christian theology be foundational, or have a stable metaphysical and epistemological framework. Vanhoozer advocates a theo-dramatic reconstruction of Christian doctrine, replacing the timeless propositions of the «purely cerebral theology» of the Reformed tradition in favor of a theology that does justice to the polyphony of multiple biblical genres. Franke holds that theology is part of a three-way conversation between Scripture, tradition, and culture, with an uncertain outcome. This study shows that each of these proposals is based on misunderstanding and exaggeration, and that the case against foundationalism is unclear and unpersuasive. It is argued that Vanhoozer's appeal to revelation as divine speech-acts is not as radical as he thinks, and his epistemology is weak. In the hands of postmodernity, Christian theology abandons its exactness and the standards of care that are a notable feature of doctrinal constrictions. The book will be of importance to those with interest in Reformed theology or Christian theology more generally. It provides a clear assessment of the impact of the postmodern mindset on theology.
A Spreading and Abiding Hope
Every tradition has its surprising voices, its thinkers who look at things slightly differently than most. Evangelicalism is no exception. Many surprising evangelical voices end up being embarrassments of one sort or another: everyone can choose their favorite example of this phenomenon! Rather than seeking to expose these sorts of negative surprises, this book explores the surprising voice of the late evangelical theologian A. J. Conyers. Conyers's political theology is a resource for a robust evangelical theopolitical imagination. By learning from Conyers, evangelicals can overcome common weaknesses and engage in a more thoroughly Christian, biblical, and evangelical approach to the modern world and its various institutions and challenges. Conyers speaks beyond evangelicalism as well. His vision of the modern world, including its development and major challenges, provides insight into contemporary political theology. His work on the nation-state, free-market capitalism, and the notions of toleration and vocation speaks into and advances important debates. Thus Conyers's evangelical political theology provides both the evangelical tradition itself, as well as political theology as a broader discipline, with a compelling and challenging vision.
Richard Hooker
Although by common consent the greatest theologian of the Anglican tradition, Richard Hooker is little known in Protestant circles more generally, and increasingly neglected within the Anglican Communion. Although scholarship on Hooker has witnessed a dramatic renaissance within the last generation, thus far this has tended to make Hooker less, not more accessible to general audiences, and interpreters have been sharply divided on the meaning of his theology. This book aims to draw upon recent research in order to offer a fresh portrait of Hooker in his original historical context, one in which it had not yet occurred to any Englishman to assume the label «Anglican,» and to bring him to life for all branches of the contemporary church. Part One examines his life, writings, and reputation, puncturing several old myths along the way. Part Two seeks to establish Hooker's theological and pastoral vision, exploring why he wrote, how he wrote, whom he was seeking to persuade, and whom he was seeking to refute. Part Three analyzes key themes of Hooker's theology–Scripture, Law, Church, and Sacraments–and how they related to his late Reformation context. Finally, the concluding chapter proposes Hooker's method as a model for our confused contemporary age, combining fidelity to Scripture, historical awareness, and a pastorally sensitive pragmatism.