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It is not a secret that the political system in the United States is broken. Unfortunately, many Christians are ambivalent about, or worse yet, contributors to that dysfunction. Many know they should do something but don't know what to do or how to do it. Drawing on insights from history, theology, and culture, Worshiping Politics reframes the relationship between faith and politics as one of intentional formation instead of divisive decision-making. When we focus on how we are formed as people and the church in relationship to our various communities instead of what we think and believe in relation to culture and society, it changes the way we engage the world. Unlearning our faulty emphasis on the power of our own intellect and learning how to be formed in grace and love for the world through our everyday lives just might make a different kind of politics possible.
Imaging the Story
"Tell all the Truth but tell it slant." (Emily Dickinson) This course follows the contours of the salvation story through the lens of the arts. Putting visual art and poetry in conversation with the Bible, it seeks to engage the imagination. Rather than analyzing the narrative, the reader is invited to behold it and respond to it through «making»–either verbally or visually. At times, the church has treated the imagination like an embarrassing relative. Yet the Bible is image-rich, drawing widely on the imagination, and we are each made in the image of the creator God. It is time to bring the imagination out of the corner! «For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.» (Eph 2:10 NIV) Whether following it as a group or reading it alone, this course book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the salvation story and the arts. It is particularly for those who feel permission is needed to pick up a paintbrush–or any other creative medium–just for the love of it.
Phenomenology of Human Understanding
The problem of human knowing has been foundational for the enterprise of philosophy since the time of Descartes. The great philosophers have offered different accounts of the power and limits of human knowing but no generally acceptable system has emerged. Contemporary writers have almost given up on this most intractable issue. In this book, Brian Cronin suggests using the method of introspective description to identify the characteristics of the act of human understanding and knowing. Introspection–far from being private and unverifiable–can be public, communal, and verifiable. If we can describe our dreams and our feelings, then, we can describe our acts of understanding. Using concrete examples, one can identify the activities involved–namely, questioning, researching, getting an idea, expressing a concept, reflecting on the evidence and inferring a conclusion. Each of these activities can be described clearly and in great detail. If we perform these activities well, we can understand and know both truth and value. The text invites readers to verify each and every statement in their own experience of understanding. This is a detailed and verifiable account of human knowing: an extremely valuable contribution to philosophy and a solution to the foundational problem of knowing.
Passionate Embrace
Luther, passion, and sensualism? In an age of body worship as well as body loathing, Elisabeth Gerle explores new paths. Protestant ethics has often been associated with work and duty, excluding sensuality, sexuality, and other pleasures. Gerle embarks on a conversation with Martin Luther in dialogue with contemporary theologians on attitudes toward body, sensuality, desire, sexuality, life, and politics. She draws on Eros theology to challenge traditional Lutheran stereotypes, such as the dichotomies between different forms of love, as well as between spirit and body.
Gerle argues that Luther's spiritual breakthrough, where grace and gifts of creation became central, provides new meaning to sex and desire as well as to work, body, and ordinary life. Women are seen in new light–as companions, autonomous ethical agents, part of the priesthood of all.
This had revolutionary consequences in medieval Europe, and it represents a challenge to contemporary theologies with a nostalgic appetite for austerity, asceticism, and female submission. Luther's erotic and gender-fluid language is a healthy challenge to oppressive political structures centered on greed, profit, and competition. A revised Scandinavian creation theology and a deep sense of the incarnational mystery are resources for contemporary theology and ethics.
A Land Full of God
A Land Full of God gives American Christians an opportunity to promote peace and justice in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It shows them how to understand the enmity with brief, digestible, and comprehensive essays about the historical, political, religious, and geographical tensions that have led to many of the dynamics we see today. All the while, A Land Full of God walks readers through a biblical perspective of God's heart for Israel and the historic suffering of the Jewish people, while also remaining sensitive to the experience and suffering of Palestinians. The prevailing wave of Christian voices are seeking a pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, pro-peace, pro-justice, pro-poor, and ultimately pro-Jesus approach to bring resolution to the conflict.
Dialectical Anatomy of the Eucharist
For centuries, Christian theology has understood the Eucharist in terms of metaphysics or in protest against it. Today an opening has been made to imagine the sacrament through the method of phenomenology, bringing about new theological life and meaning. In Dialectical Anatomy of the Eucharist, Donald Wallenfang conducts a sustained analysis of the Eucharist through the aperture of phenomenology, yet concludes the study with poetic and metaphysical twists. Engaging the work of Jean-Luc Marion, Paul Ricoeur, and Emmanuel Levinas, Wallenfang proposes pioneering ideas for contemporary sacramental theology that have vast implications for interfaith and interreligious dialogue. By tapping into the various currents within the Judeo-Christian tradition–Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant–a radical argument is developed that leverages the tension among them all. Several new frontiers are explored: dialectical theology, a fourth phenomenological reduction, the phenomenology of human personhood, the poetics of the Eucharist, and a reinterpretation of the concept of gift as conversation. On the whole, Wallenfang advances recent debates surrounding the relationship between phenomenology and theology by claiming an uncanny way out of emerging dead ends in philosophical theology: return to the fray.
The Authority of the Saints
Pauline Dimech explores whether and to what extent we may attribute authority to the saints, but also how we may ensure that it is the saints, and not the scoundrels, whose influence persists and whose memory endures. The thing that drives her research is the thought that history is full of examples of individuals who held positions of official authority that they did not deserve. Dimech is convinced that Hans Urs von Balthasar can help us clarify the issues surrounding the authority of the saints. Besides establishing Balthasar's involvement with the enterprise, this book tries to establish the theological foundations upon which the authority of the saints would have to be based in theory, and, possibly, already, however implicitly, based in practice.
Contemplating the Future of Moral Theology
Professor Brian V. Johnstone, CSsR, has been quietly and unobtrusively contributing to the intellectual life of Catholicism, especially in the field of moral theology, for nearly four decades. Having published numerous theological articles on many topics, including biomedical ethics, peace and war, and fundamental moral theology, and directed many doctoral dissertations, it is no exaggeration to say that he has dedicated his entire life to teaching and writing theology. In honor of Johnstone's work, this felicitation volume covers a wide range of themes in the Christian moral life with original articles written by internationally recognized theologians. In the spirit of Johnstone's thought and work, each article challenges the reader to reflect upon the present while contemplating the future of moral theology.
Walking the Rift
The Victorian encounter with Africa contains many micro-narratives that call for a questioning of an old consensus. Tentative assumptions as to the motives of early missionaries and colonial personnel often prove less than satisfactory due to stereotypes and unexplored archives. The need for new master narratives that move beyond the old paradigms of Western expansion and African victimization are being called for by scholars of the Global North and South–narratives that allow room for strong evidence of an egalitarian joint endeavor and African cultural vitality without avoiding the investment in imperialism practiced by colonial personnel. Based on extensive archival research, Walking the Rift advocates an alternative proposal–missionaries and administrators caught in the grinding of contradictory opposites. As a professional artist, Alfred Robert Tucker captured this tug-of-war on canvas, but similar dichotomies are found in his approach to marriage contracts, slavery, mission and church organizational structure, alliance with the colonial government and African partnership. Tucker is a representative figure–a prism to shine light on those involved in the British East African project. Like many in the early encounter with Africa, he was neither a consistent imperialist nor a complete egalitarian idealist, but operated in both spheres without creating a third.
Reflections on Mind and the Image of Reality
This collection of brief essays and still briefer commentaries is a personal reflection on some topics that have been thematic in the development of my theoretical work. These essays are not meant to extend the theory into yet-uncharted territory, but rather to draw out some of its implications for clinical neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and everyday life. The point of view guiding these reflections can be found in prior works, but the discerning reader will not fail to see a departure from current models of mind and brain based on circuit board diagrams, modular and computational theories that conflict with a processual account in which the mind/brain is more like a living organism. This perspective, which is often at odds with common sense and folk psychology, has particular relevance to our concepts of the self, the inner life, subjective time, adaptive process, and the world represented in perception.