Faith Religion Theology

This thoroughly updated text offers students and adults an overarching perspective. The "Faith" section focuses on the nature of human faith and Christian faith. The "Religion" section examines the personal and social value of religion, religious belief and behavior, and offers an overview of major world religions. The "Theology" section includes an analysis of the theology/faith relationship. Suggested readings and study questions, excellent end notes and index add to the value of this edition.

This 2005 book asks: how will theology and the religions be studied in higher education in the coming century?

Identifies what is most radically distinctive about Christian belief. Addressed to a non-technical audience, the book helps the reader examine the most basic questions concerning Christian faith.

A comprehensive theological framework for assessing the significance of eating, demonstrating that eating is of profound economic, moral and theological significance.

The return to religion has perhaps become the dominant cliché of contemporary theory, which rarely offers anything more than an exaggerated echo of a political reality dominated by religious war. Somehow, the secular age seems to have been replaced by a new era, where political action flows directly from metaphysical conflict. The Faith of the Faithless asks how we might respond. Following Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding, this new book builds on its philosophical and political framework, also venturing into the questions of faith, love, religion and violence. Should we defend a version of secularism and quietly accept the slide into a form of theism—or is there another way? From Rousseau’s politics and religion to the return to St. Paul in Taubes, Agamben and Badiou, via explorations of politics and original sin in the work of Schmitt and John Gray, Critchley examines whether there can be a faith of the faithless, a belief for unbelievers. Expanding on his debate with Slavoj Žižek, Critchley concludes with a meditation on the question of violence, and the limits of non-violence.

"As the Christian movement nears the end of its second millennium, it faces a crisis that could not have been anticipated at the close of the first thousand years—or, indeed, by most of our own great-grandparents. … "Since the most conspicuous dimensions of the waning of Christendom have to do with material decline (the decline in church membership and active attendance of Sunday services, the decline in financial and physical prosperity, the decline of influence in high places), such analyses as there are usually belabor the obvious: something drastic is happening to the churches! … "Throughout most of its long history, Christianity has not required of its adherents that they should think the faith. The historical accident of its political and cultural establishment 15 centuries ago… ensured that a thinking faith would be purely optional for members of the church. … "But thought-less faith, which has always been a contradiction in terms, is today a stage on the road to the extinction, not only of Christianity itself, but of whatever the architects of our civilization meant by 'Humanity.' Only a thinking faith can survive. Only a thinking faith can help the world survive! " ——From the Preface

Agreeing with scholars such as David Tracy, Martin Marty, and Rheinhold Niebuhr, Michael and Kenneth Himes affirm that there is indeed such a thing as public theology and take up the task of proposing themes and the framework for bringing theology into dialogue with societal issues and concerns. A great resource for those wishing to understand the social implications of religious belief.