Contemporary Christian Cultural Values

This book reconstructs the connection between religion and migration, drawing on post-colonial perspectives to shed light on what religion can contribute to migrant encounters. Examining the resources and motives for hospitality as lived in Christian contexts in the Nordic region, it addresses the content of talk about religion in public discourse, the concept having become something of an empty signifier in debates surrounding migration. Multidisciplinary in approach, this volume demonstrates that religion is not, in fact, an empty signifier, but gains substance through practice and interpretation. Considering the undeveloped potentiality of religion and the manner in which the unseen religious perspective in secularity becomes manifest in practice, this volume will appeal to social scientists and scholars of religion with interests in migration, refugee studies, theology, and Christian practice.

Contemporary Christian Culture: Messages, Missions, and Dilemmas studies Christian media, its meanings, and its impact on social perceptions and lived experiences in a multicultural context and from within a communication framework. This interdisciplinary collection expands the dialogue surrounding race, culture, and Christian messages and provides a valuable resource for researchers, educators, and church practitioners who are interested in understanding how racial and cultural identity are impacted by religious media products.

This is a short, accessible analysis of Christianity that focuses on its social and cultural diversity as well as its historical dimensions.

Approaches to Monasticism in the Context of Christian Responses to Modern Culture is a study of how the values and practices of monasticism are being shaped by the shift to a cultural understanding of Christianity in modern times. The values and practices of traditional monasticism are contrasted with those of various expressions of new monasticism against the background of a multicultural and fluid social environment in an effort to find some reciprocal illumination. The study aims to describe monasticism in terms of authenticity and lived religion.

During the last three decades of the twentieth century, evangelical leaders and conservative politicians developed a political agenda that thrust "family values" onto the nation's consciousness. Ministers, legislators, and laypeople came together to fight abortion, gay rights, and major feminist objectives. They supported private Christian schools, home schooling, and a strong military. Family values leaders like Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant, and James Dobson became increasingly supportive of the Republican Party, which accommodated the language of family values in its platforms and campaigns. The family values agenda created a bond between evangelicalism and political conservatism. Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right chronicles how the family values agenda became so powerful in American political life and why it appealed to conservative evangelical Christians. Conservative evangelicals saw traditional gender norms as crucial in cultivating morality. They thought these gender norms would reaffirm the importance of clear lines of authority that the social revolutions of the 1960s had undermined. In the 1970s and 1980s, then, evangelicals founded Christian academies and developed homeschooling curricula that put conservative ideas about gender and authority front and center. Campaigns against abortion and feminism coalesced around a belief that God created women as wives and mothers—a belief that conservative evangelicals thought feminists and pro-choice advocates threatened. Likewise, Christian right leaders championed a particular vision of masculinity in their campaigns against gay rights and nuclear disarmament. Movements like the Promise Keepers called men to take responsibility for leading their families. Christian right political campaigns and pro-family organizations drew on conservative evangelical beliefs about men, women, children, and authority. These beliefs—known collectively as family values—became the most important religious agenda in late twentieth-century American politics.

This volume contains selected papers presented at a conference on Orthodox Christianity and its contemporary European setting. The conference was held in England, at the University of Leeds, in June 2001 and drew together historians, theologians, philosophers, specialists in theological education and political scientists. Countries with an Orthodox Christian history were well represented, as well as Orthodoxy in the diaspora and other Christian confessions by representatives from Western Europe and the United States and Canada. The coherence of Orthodox Christianity and contemporary threats to its coherence formed one main strand for reflection, but discussion also broadened out to consider the nature of religious tradition as such. Part I of the collection brings together papers on such matters as identity, nationalism, globalization, human rights discourse, ecumenical dialogue and competing interpretations of what it means to be European. Part II focuses on Orthodox Christianity in Russia and Part III on the traditionally Orthodox countries of Armenia, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine. The present collection is meant as a contribution to further reflection on Orthodox identity, and relationship between Christianity and culture in Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

This 50th-anniversary edition, with a new foreword by the distinguished historian Martin E. Marty, who regards this book as one of the most vital books of our time, as well as an introduction by the author never before included in the book, and a new preface by James Gustafson, the premier Christian ethicist who is considered Niebuhr’s contemporary successor, poses the challenge of being true to Christ in a materialistic age to an entirely new generation of Christian readers.

Since the 1970s exciting new directions in the study of culture have erupted to critique and displace earlier, largely static notions. These more dynamic models stress the indeterminate, fragmented, even conflictual character of cultural processes and completely alter the framework for thinking theologically about them. In fact, Tanner argues, the new orientation in cultural theory and anthropology affords fresh opportunities for religious thought and opens new vistas for theology, especially on how Christians conceive of the theological task, theological diversity and inculturation, and even Christianity's own cultural identity.