Религия: прочее
Различные книги в жанре Религия: прочееWe Shall Not Be Moved
As Protestant denominations are fracturing over whether to ordain gays and lesbians, this work looks at The United Methodist Church's conversations about the issue, in light of Methodism's historic contests over the leadership of African Americans and women, to see what can be learned from these earlier periods of change. Using the uniform context of the Methodist General Conference, where denominational policy is set, the book analyzes transcripts of floor debates in key years of these struggles, letting those who argued for and against the changes speak for themselves.
Those arguments are read through the lens of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose theory offers a sophisticated model that goes deeper than simple «resistance to change» in articulating a dialectic between social structures and agents that predisposes both to reproduce existing power relationships. This interdisciplinary, historical study seeks to move beyond conscious motivations for the exclusion of these three groups and uncover deeply embedded, misrecognized social dynamics. In exploring these groups' stories, this book examines who holds power in Methodist churches, how changes in authority structures occur, and why it is such a long and painful process.
From Your Gods to Our Gods
The global world debates secularism, freedom of belief, faith-based norms, the state's arbitration of religious conflicts, and the place of the sacred in the public sphere. In facing these issues, Britain, India, and South Africa stand out as unique laboratories. They have greatly influenced the rest of the world. As single countries and together as a whole, the three have moved from the colonial clash of antagonistic religions (of your gods) to an era when it has become impossible to dissociate your god from my god. Today both belong to the same blurred reality of our gods. Through a narrative account of British, South African, and Indian court cases from 1857 to 2009, the author draws an unconventional history of the process leading from the encounter with the gods of the other to the forging of a postmodern, common, and global religion. Across ages, borders, faiths, and laws, the three countries have experienced the ambivalent interaction of society, politics, and beliefs. Hence the lesson the world might learn from them: our gods promise an idealized purity, but they can only become real in the everyday creation of mixed identities, hybrid deities, and shared fears and hopes.
Feminine Registers
Women have been adding their voices to the proclamation of the gospel for as long as there has been a gospel to proclaim, but only in the last half-century have these voices become part of the official catalogue of Christian preaching. Diagnosing the distinctiveness of women's voices and exploring the richness they convey about the presence of God requires a detailed look at the meaning-making strategies used by those who preach and those who listen. Register provides a tool for analyzing not only the theological and semantic contributions of women, but also demonstrates how gender impacts the meaning-making possibilities of the sermon. Feminine Registers offers a gendered analysis of preaching that does not rely on essentialist claims about gender and moves the analysis of the preaching beyond sermon content to include the relational dynamics operating between the communicating parties and the medium used to communicate. A critical examination of this constellation of meanings, influenced by gender-related issues of authority and self-disclosure, helps illuminate the production of meaning within the church and expands the homiletical possibilities for the Christian faith.
Drinking from the Wells of New Creation
"Dearborn provides us with the gift of deep insight into the heart of God and the ways of the Spirit to open our eyes, our hearts, our homes, and our lives to God and others. Through profound theological reflection interwoven with compelling stories, this book draws us into God's healing love and new creation. I pray God uses this great book to release the vision of Amos to which I've dedicated my life." –John Perkins author of Let Justice Roll Down
Speak Thus
In its various forms, speech is absolutely integral to the Christian mission. The gospel is a message, news that must be passed on if it is to be known by others. Nevertheless, the reality of God cannot be exhausted by Christian knowledge and Christian knowledge cannot be exhausted by our words. All the while, the philosophy of modernity has left Christianity an impoverished inheritance within which to think these things.
In Speak Thus, Craig Hovey explores the possibilities and limits of Christian speaking. At times ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical, these essays go to the heart of what it means to be the church today. In practice, the Christian life often has a linguistic shape that surprisingly implicates and reveals the commitments of people like those who care for the sick or those who respond as peacemakers in the face of violence. Because learning to speak one way as opposed to another is a skill that must be learned, Christian speakers are also guides who bear witness to the importance of churches for passing on a felicity with Christian ways of speaking.
Through constructive engagements with interlocutors like Ludwig Wittgenstein, George Lindbeck, Jeffrey Stout, Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, Thomas Aquinas, and the theology of Radical Orthodoxy, Hovey offers a challenging vision of the church–able to speak with a confidence that only comes from a deep attentiveness to its own limitations, while also able to speak prophetically in a world weary of words.
Walk Together Children
Walk Together Children: Black and Womanist Theologies, Church, and Theological Education draws on the long religious, cultural, and singing history of blacks in the U.S.A. Through the slavery and emancipation days until now, black song has both nurtured and enhanced African American life as a collective whole. Communality has always included a variety of existential experiences. What has kept this enduring people in a corporate process is their walking together through good times and bad, relying on what W. E. B. DuBois called their «dogged strength» to keep «from being torn asunder.» Somehow and someway they intuited from historical memory or received from transcendental revelation that keeping on long enough on the road would yield ultimate fruit for the journey.
Sex, War, and "Sin"
An examination of the Hebrew Scriptures reveals the ethical situations in ancient Israel as a structural analysis, and exposes a covenantal triangle that features a dynamic of giving and receiving, taking and paying penalties, as a meme for human relationships. This can be applied to groups as well as individuals and is surprisingly applicable to life in the twenty-first century. Two senses of «Law»–natural scientific discoveries and the rules laid down by a divine creator–lead to frames for considering these covenantal relationships, and even the existence of «Sin.» Are we bound to obey the rules laid down by God, or may we decide what is best for us?
Religion and Doctor Who
Doctor Who has always contained a rich current of religious themes and ideas. In its very first episode it asked how humans rationalize the seemingly supernatural, as two snooping schoolteachers refused to accept that the TARDIS was real. More recently it has toyed with the mystery of Doctor's real name, perhaps an echo of ancient religions and rituals in which knowledge of the secret name of a god, angel or demon was thought to grant a mortal power over the entity. But why does Doctor Who intersect with religion so often, and what do such instances tell us about the society that produces the show and the viewers who engage with it? The writers of Religion and Doctor Who: Time and Relative Dimensions in Faith attempt to answer these questions through an in-depth analysis of the various treatments of religion throughout every era of the show's history. While the majority of chapters focus on the television show Doctor Who, the authors also look at audios, novels, and the response of fandom. Their analyses–all written in an accessible but academically thorough style–reveal that examining religion in a long-running series such as Doctor Who can contribute to a number of key debates within faith communities and religious history.
Most importantly, it provides another way of looking at why Doctor Who continues to inspire, to engage, and to excite generations of passionate fans, whatever their position on faith.
The contributors are drawn from the UK, the USA, and Australia, and their approaches are similarly diverse. Chapters have been written by film scholars and sociologists; theologians and historians; rhetoricians, philosophers and anthropologists. Some write from the perspective of a particular faith or belief; others write from the perspective of no religious belief. All, however, demonstrate a solid knowledge of and affection for the brilliance of Doctor Who.
The Identity of Jesus Christ, Expanded and Updated Edition
This is a book about Jesus of Nazareth. It is not a book about «story,» nor about «narrative theology.» Hans Frei was not a theologian of story or of narrative in any general way, and this book is neither about the narrative quality of our existence and the gospel's relation to that quality, nor about the narrative shape of the Scriptures as a whole and the call on us to place ourselves within that narrative. Rather, this is a book about the way in which Jesus of Nazareth's identity is rendered by the Gospels–largely the Synoptic Gospels, particularly the Gospel of Luke, and especially in the passion and resurrection sequences–by means of a certain kind of narrative. –from the Foreword by Mike Higton
Understanding Religious Pluralism
Our contemporary world is fast becoming religiously diverse in a variety of ways. Thanks to globalization and migration, to mention only two current worldwide trends, people of diverse and sometimes mutually hostile faiths are now sharing neighborhoods and encountering one another's religious traditions on a daily basis. For scholars in religious studies and theology the issue to be examined is whether religious diversity is merely the result of historical development and social interaction, or whether it is inherent in the object of belief–part of the very structure of faith and our attempts to understand and express it.
The essays in this volume range from explorations of the impact of religious diversity on religious studies to examples of interfaith encounter and dialogue, and current debates on Christian theology of religion. These essays examine not only the theoretical issues posed by religious pluralism to the study of religion and Christian theology but also concrete cases in which religious pluralism has been a bone of contention. Together, they open up new vistas for further conversation on the nature and development of religious pluralism.