Theological Reflection And The Pursuit Of Ideals

Contemporary thought is marked by heated debates about the character, purpose and form of religious thinking and its relation to a range of ideals: spiritual, moral, aesthetic, political and ecological, to name the obvious. This book addresses the interrelation between theological thinking and the complex and diverse realms of human ideals. What are the ideals appropriate to our moment in human history, and how do these ideals derive from or relate to theological reflection in our time? In Theological Reflection and the Pursuit of Ideals internationally renowned scholars from a range of disciplines (physics, art, literary studies, ethics, comparative religion, history of ideas, and theology) engage with these crucial questions with the intention of articulating a new and historically appropriate vision of theological reflection and the pursuit of ideals for our global times.

Contemporary thought is marked by heated debates about the character, purpose and form of religious thinking and its relation to a range of ideals: spiritual, moral, aesthetic, political and ecological, to name the obvious. This book addresses the interrelation between theological thinking and the complex and diverse realms of human ideals. What are the ideals appropriate to our moment in human history, and how do these ideals derive from or relate to theological reflection in our time? In Theological Reflection and the Pursuit of Ideals internationally renowned scholars from a range of disciplines (physics, art, literary studies, ethics, comparative religion, history of ideas, and theology) engage with these crucial questions with the intention of articulating a new and historically appropriate vision of theological reflection and the pursuit of ideals for our global times.

Pro Ecclesia is a quarterly journal of theology published by the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology.

The world is one of increasing diversity and pluralism. Our world is one of the different and of the many. Even the individual personality and the social self are increasingly diverse and plural. This is especially evident in racial and ethnic identities. The Ohioan, the New Yorker, the Texan, all became, after the cauldron of the Civil War, the American. Now the American is continually being hyphenated: Native-American, African-American, Latino-American, Asian-American, and a host of other hyphens. In the academy, the dichotomy between the fox who knows many things, and the hedgehog who knows one big thing (Archilocus), is giving way to different combinations and variations of learning, teaching, and expertise, as demanded by and reflecting the diversity and complexity of society and world. While these differences and pluralisms can lead to fragmentation, these fractures can also be creative. The ethnically hyphenated person who straddles two cultures need not be marginal to both, but can use the riches of his/her diverse experiences to cross-fertilize the cultures of which they are now part and parcel. The other, the different, especially the poor, must not be marginalized, pushed to the margins of society as outcasts; they need to be empowered for their betterment and for the common good of society. The academic, well-versed in several disciplines, should not be considered master of none, but can bring the insights of one discipline to tame the fundamentalism of another discipline and to expand the horizons of all. In one form or another, to a greater or lesser extent, this is what I have tried to do in the essays gathered in this second collection, the first being Critical Intersections (2006).

This collection explores the highly contested relationship of religious studies and theology and the place of each, if any, in secular institutions of higher education. The founding narrative of religious studies, with its sharp distinction between teaching religion and teaching about religion, grows less compelling in the face of globalization and the erosion of modernism. These essays take up the challenge of thinking through the identity and borders of religious studies and theology for our time. Reflecting a broad range of positions, the authors explore the religious/secular conceptual landscape that has dominated the modern West, and in the process address the revision of the academic study of religion and theology now underway.

Theological Reflection and Christian Ministry James & Evelyn Whitehead Topics ranging from Tradition and the minister to the broad concerns of theology in conversation with culture.

World Magazine Book of the Year Creative Quarterly Professional Graphic Design Runner-Up Christianity Today's Book of the Year Winner ECPA Top Shelf Book Cover Award "This book will make no attempt to defend God. . . . If you are looking for a book that boasts triumphantly of conquest over a great enemy, or gives a detached philosophical analysis that neatly solves an absorbing problem, this isn't it." Too often the Christian attitude toward suffering is characterized by a detached academic appeal to God's sovereignty, as if suffering were a game or a math problem. Or maybe we expect that since God is good, everything will just work out all right somehow. But where then is honest lament? Aren't we shortchanging believers of the riches of the Christian teaching about suffering? In Embodied Hope Kelly Kapic invites us to consider the example of our Lord Jesus. Only because Jesus has taken on our embodied existence, suffered alongside us, died, and been raised again can we find any hope from the depths of our own dark valleys of pain. As we look to Jesus, we are invited to participate not only in his sufferings, but also in the church, which calls us out of isolation and into the encouragement and consolation of the communal life of Christ. Drawing on his own family's experience with prolonged physical pain, Kapic reshapes our understanding of suffering into the image of Jesus, and brings us to a renewed understanding of—and participation in—our embodied hope.