In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE "JUSTIFIABLE HOMOCIDE" OF ABORTION PROVIDERS: MORAL REASON, MIMETIC THEORY, AND THE GOSPEL James Nash Our land will never be cleansed without the blood of abortionists being shed. (Shelly Shannon) The above quotation is taken, with permission, from a letter written to me by Ms. Shannon. A devout Roman Catholic, she is currently doing time at Federal prison in Kansas, sentenced to 3 1 years for shooting (...) a famous abortion provider. I have also been in touch with Paul Hill, the former Presbyterian minister, who killed the Pensacola abortion doctor, John Britton. Mr. Hill has written extensively on how his Christian faith led him to what he calls the "justifiable homicide" of Dr. Britton. The connection between this kind of religiously-justified violence and the work of René Girard is too obvious to be ignored. The violenct acts and rhetoric that polarize both sides of the abortion debate serve to illustrate our society's collapsing ability to distinguish effectively between "good" and "bad" violence (Girard 1972, 52-3). At the same time, the almost universal condemnation ofthe "religious" proponents ofjustifiable homicide confirms the Girardian claim that in cultures under gospel influence, "acts of violence that once endowed its perpetrators with religious and cultural preeminence radually begin to rob them of it" (Bailie 52-3). Finally, as we shall see, the incoherence of religiouslygrounded efforts to condemn "justifiable homicide suggests that James Nash69 contemporary Christianity is also having increasing difficulty in distinguishing "good" and "bad" violence. But before exploring these issues I want to ask another question, one that will prepare the ground for the application of Girard's theory to abortion violence. What light can moral reason shed on the problem of the "justifiable homicide" of abortion doctors? Are there clear arguments which will convince any reasonable person it is wrong to kill abortion providers in order to protect unborn human life? At first it might appear rather simple to produce such arguments —after all an overwhelming majority of Americans currently believe killing abortion workers is wrong, no matter where they stand on the morality of abortion itself. On the other hand, there is a danger that because the current moral consensus against this type of killing appears to be so strong, we may be misled into a false sense of security. After all, thirty or forty years ago there was little debate about the morality of homosexuality, pre-marital sex, or abortion itself. In fact, there are an increasing number of voices suggesting that violence against abortion providers is justified; the question has in fact divided the pro-life movement. What I will attempt to show in what follows is that the arguments offered by moral reason against shooting abortionists are surprisingly weak. While there is little danger in the foreseeable future that anywhere near a majority of people will view this form of killing as "justifiable," there are, I believe, solid grounds to fear that "moral reason" alone is no longer strong enough to provide compelling arguments against abortion violence. If ethical rationality cannot account for the moral revulsion most people feel at the shooting of abortion doctors, the ground is prepared for another way of understanding and avoiding this religiously—sanctioned violence. I am referring to René Girard's mimetic theory, and at the end of this article I hope to show how it can help us to understand both why some pro-life people have turned to violence, and how this response to abortion can be avoided. For if we come to doubt that moral reason alone can uphold the prohibition against "justifiable homicide," then perhaps we need to develop a different kind of reason, or different kinds of reasons. This will lead, finally, to reflection on some of the radical theological implications of Girard's thought, a dimension of his work which, in my judgment, is too often neglected. 70"Justifiable Homicide " Before going any further, I realize I must define what I mean by "moral reason." My use of this term is simply the common post-Kantian notion that if an action is truly immoral, one will avoid doing it not because offear, custom or human law; rather one's actions will be guided... (shrink)

McEvoy, James There's something distinctive about Australia, not only about its landscape, its vegetation, its wildlife, and its history, but also about the patterns of life and understanding that we, the country's human inhabitants, have developed together. There's something distinctive about Australian culture.

Pragmatism is America’s distinctive contribution to the history of philosophical thought, though there has always been some dispute about exactly what doctrine it is supposed to name. The philosopher and psychologist William James, in a lecture given at Berkeley in 1898, attributed the view to..

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE MAN BLIND FROM BIRTH AND THE SUBVERSION OF SIN: SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT FUNDAMENTAL MORALS1 James Alison I would like to undertake with you a reading of a passage from the Bible, John Chapter 9. I hope that we will see this chapter yield some interesting insights in the light of my attempt to apply to it the mimetic theory ofRené Girard. I'm not going to expound mimetic (...) theory for you: there is no shortage of books in which such expositions are to be found.2 I'mjust going to put the theory to work, with minimal recourse to technical jargon, in a reading from Scripture, hoping that it will be something like an exercise in publicity for the fecund use to which any of you might put mimetic theory. The reading will not be a simple commentary, but an attempt to experiment with the perspective of the reading. That is to say, we're asking "Who is reading this passage?," "With whom do we identify?" And the reason for this approach is to nudge us into beginning to raise certain questions of fundamental morals, how 'This paper was first published in Theology andSexuality 6, March 1997, and appears here by kind permission ofthe editor. With minor alterations this is the author's translation and adaptation ofa talk given at the Instituto Teológico de America Central (ITAC) in San Pedro Montes de Oca, San José, Costa Rica in May 1995. For instance: R. Schwager, Must there be Scapegoats? Violence andRedemption in the Bible (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987); R. Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence: Paul's Hermeneutic ofthe Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992); J. Williams, The Bible, Violence and the Sacred: Liberationfrom the Myth ofSanctioned Violence (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991); Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads (New York: Crossroad, 1995)—this is the most accessible ofthe accounts. James Alison27 we talk about them, or live them in a more or less coherent and convincing way. I can't promise you any great conclusions, because I'm only just beginning to get into this subject. For that reason, I'll begin by saying that what follows is somewhat experimental, and will end with a few hints as to possible future paths to follow. I should also begin by saying that my intention is not to cause scandal, but to provoke a discussion which allows a fuller way ofliving a Christian life. In this sense what I'm trying out is an attempt at a search for a theological method which I have not yet mastered and which, if developed, will, I hope, prove somewhat emancipatory for all ofus. Miracle or theological debate? Let us begin our reading of John 9. At first sight we have an account of a miraculous healing. It is the story of a man blind from birth who receives his sight from Jesus one Sabbath, and then of the consequences of this healing among the people who witness, or hear about, the matter. Ifthe account were to be found in one of the synoptic Gospels, perhaps it might remain at that—there is no shortage of such stories. I have no doubt that in the background to the story we're dealing with an historical incident of a healing carried out by Jesus on a Sabbath. However, here the "miraculous healing" element doesn't receive much emphasis, nor does the Sabbath or rather, the matter ofthe Sabbath does receive a certain weight, as we will see later on, but with some very idiosyncratically Johannine touches. In any case, the purpose of this Chapter is determined by the debate about sin, sight, blindness and judgement within which it is set: these are the jeweller's artwork which show forth, and make sense of, the gem ofthe healing. Let us look at the beginning of the story. Jesus sees a man born blind, and his disciples ask him: "Master, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus answers them: "Neither this man nor his parents. He is blind so that the works of God may be made manifest in him." That is to say, the whole story which follows comes as an illustration... (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the spiritually formative experiences of fifteen female seminary spouses who participated in a phenomenological research study. Graduate theological education is not limited to married, male students. Seminaries are diverse educational institutions that equip married and single students, as well as men and women from every country in the world for gospel ministry. Because of this broad population in theological education, the qualitative proposals in this essay are not generalizable to all schools, (...) students, and settings equally, but the perspectives of these seminary spouses are useful in cultivating a robustly holistic education for students who are married during their academic pursuits. It is the intent here to explore how theology can crossover from the academy to the home so that it is experienced in marriage. The goal then is to equip students, professors, and administrators to actively nurture the faith formation of the second-person of the ministry dyad. In order for these stakeholders to understand how to nurture this faith formation of the seminary spouse, we must first hear and understand the experiences of these wives as they share their reflections on these formational years as a part of their husband's education. (shrink)

Though not part of the corpus of Catholic social teaching, Pope Francis’s Apostolic Exhortation On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World merits attention from a social-ethical perspective. The other-directed quality of Christian holiness draws Francis into the social dimension of the Gospel. The text’s meditation on the Beatitudes and the Last Judgment scene of Matthew 25 tethers holiness to empathy and justice for those who suffer. It also critiques ideologies within the Church whose hierarchy of evils constitutes our (...) holistic response to the call of Jesus. The article places its exposition of Gaudete et exsultate within the context of theological literature on holiness and the early reception of the text in the Church. While the apostolic exhortation has important social content, its passing references to the common good and politics and its lack of explicit treatment of nonviolence represent a missed opportunity to deepen its message about what it means to live a holy life today. (shrink)

Swezey, C. M. Introduction.--The burden of the ethical.--Faith, unbelief, and moral life.--Education for moral responsibility.--The theologian as prophet, preserver, or participant.--Moral discernment in the Christian life.--The place of Scripture in Christian ethics.--The relation of the Gospels to the moral life.--Spiritual life and moral life.--The relevance of historical understanding.--Man--in light of social science and Christian faith.--The relationship of empirical science to moral thought.--What is the normatively human?--Basic ethical issues in the biomedical fields.--Genetic engineering and the normative view of the human.--Bibliography of (...) the writings of James M. Gustafson, 1951-1973 (p. 297-305). (shrink)

Following his successful Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? leading Christian philosopher James K. A. Smith introduces the philosophical sources behind postliberal theology. Offering a provocative analysis of relativism, Smith provides an introduction to the key voices of pragmatism: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, and Robert Brandom. Many Christians view relativism as the antithesis of absolute truth and take it to be the antithesis of the gospel. Smith argues that this reaction is a symptom of a deeper theological problem: an inability (...) to honor the contingency and dependence of our creaturehood. Appreciating our created finitude as the condition under which we know (and were made to know) should compel us to appreciate the contingency of our knowledge without sliding into arbitrariness. Saying "It depends" is not the equivalent of saying "It's not true" or "I don't know." It is simply to recognize the conditions of our knowledge as finite, created, social beings. Pragmatism, says Smith, helps us recover a fundamental Christian appreciation of the contingency of creaturehood. This addition to an acclaimed series engages key thinkers in modern philosophy with a view to ministry and addresses the challenge of relativism in a creative, original way. (shrink)

Is the gospel really good news? What was Jesus' central message, and how can we share it effectively with others? In these five easy-to-use studies, James Choung guides readers though key Scripture passages informed by his groundbreaking book True Story. Discover the four movements of the gospel's Big Story and what they mean for living and sharing the Christian faith.

In The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith, Dr. James F. McGrath seeks to introduce a general audience to the methods historians apply to the study of the life of Jesus. Topics addressed include: how historical study work ; why Jesus' disciples would have wanted to steal his body from the tomb; why later Gospel authors changed elements in Mark's earlier version; and why Christian faith in the resurrection cannot be about what happened to a body almost 2,000 (...) years ago. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article:The Art of Biblical Poetry. By Robert AlterThe‐ Demise of the Devil: Magic and the Demonic in Luke's Writings. By Susan R. CarrettEchoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. By Richard B. HaysJesus and Postmodernism. By James BreechThe Genesis of Doctrine: A Study in the Foundations of Doctrinal Criticism. By Alister E. McGrathOrdination Rites of the Ancient Churches, East and West. By Paul BradshawMystagogy: A Theology of Liturgy in the Patristic Age. By Enrico MazzaLiberation (...) Theology: A Documentary Histoty. Edited by Alfred T. HennellyThe Gospel in a Pluralist Society. By Lesslie NewbiginThe Sacred in Life and Art. By Philip SherrardThe Ideology of the Aesthetic. By Terry EagletonThe Justification of Science and the Rationality of Religious Belief. By Michael BannerReturn to Reason. By James Kelly ClarkThe Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrares, Together with Notes of Schelling's Berlin Lectures. Edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong‘For Self‐Examination’and‘Judge for Yourself’. Edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. HongSimone Weil; Utopian Pessimist. By David McLcllanThe Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick. Edited by Rowan WilliamsThe Apostolic Fathers. By Simon TugwellChristian Spirituality: Post‐Reformation and Modern. Edited by Louis Dupré and Don E. SaliersThe Ignatian Personality of Gerard Manley Hopkins. By David Anthony DownesMissionaries Go Home? A Sociological Interpretation of an African Response to Christian Missions. By E. M. UkaChristian‐Nationalism and the Rise of the Afrikaner Broederbond in South AfricaThe Diocesan Seminary in the United States: A History from the 1780s to The Present. By Joseph M. WhiteThe Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1252 to 1355. Translated by R. A. B. MynorsCatholics Against the Church: Anti‐Abortion Protest in Toronto, 1969–1985. By Michael W. CuneoThe Return of the English Benedictines to London Ealing Abbey: 1896 to Independence. By René KollarThe Theater of Devtion: East Anglian Drama and Society in ttw Late Middle Ages. By Gail McMurray GibsonMary Tudor: A Life. By David LoadesMany Tables: The Eucharist in the New Testament and Liturgy Today. By Dennis E. Smith and Hal E. Taussig. (shrink)

On a certain blindness in human beings.--The gospel of relaxation.--The energies of men.--Habit.--The will.--Philosophy and its critics.--The will to believe.--The sentiment of rationality.--Great men and their environment.--What pragmatism means.--Humanism and truth.--The positive content of religious experience.

One Protestant Looks At Centesimus Annus is an attempt to analyze Pope John Paul II''s centennial encylical on economic justicein context. It relates the early contributions of Reformation thought to the emergence of laissez-faire capitalism. It describes the social gospel as a convergence of the radical implications of 19th century German Protestant scholarship and the harsh economic/social realities of the industrial revolution. Then it compares the economic teachings of the institutional church from Leo XIII and the old Federal Council (...) of Churches to John Paul II and the World Council of Churches one hundred years later. All of this prepares the way for a critical analysis ofCentesimus Annus with a special emphasis on the Pope''s understanding of Christian truth. Finally there is a postscript relating the encyclical to the ethical challenges facing multinational corporations in developing countries. (shrink)

There is a famous passage in the Gospels, where a lawyer questions Jesus with regard to the command to love God with one's whole heart and to love ones neighbour `as oneself.' The lawyer asks, 'And who is my neighbour?' (Luke 10:2 [1]). Is he someone who lives close by or a co-religionist or is he a stranger, a follower of a different faith as Jesus suggests by answering with the parable of the good Samaritan? The 'religions of the book (...) [2],' Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have difficulties answering this question. As their respective histories show, they all manifest a double potential. They show themselves capable of promoting acts of love and extreme self-sacrifice in their followers. But they also have histories marked by religiously motivated struggles, intolerance and acts of brutality. What is the root of this double potential? How can they promote both love and violence? (shrink)

In this paper I defend three points: (1) God loves and desires the salvation of every human person, (2) saving grace is available outside of the Christian church to those who do not hear the gospel but pursue moral goodness and (3) most, if not all, human persons will be saved. I argue that soteriological restrictivism is logically incoherent since its two ideas—every person is loved by God and only those who hear and believe the Christian gospel can (...) be saved—cannot both be true. Throughout I integrate insights from Karl Rahner’snotion of “anonymous Christianity.”. (shrink)

In their insatiable thirst for funding, contemporary universities eagerly cast themselves as important agents of economic well-being. While the particular contexts and forms for this agency may be novel, such a role is not. Historians have long identified the significance of academic institutions to economic development at a number of levels. At the national level, the importance of the Technische Hochschulen and the Land Grant colleges to German and American leadership in the Second Industrial Revolution is well known while the (...) significance of its system of higher education to a putative British industrial decline is more controversial. At the sub-national level, taking the example of Ontario, Canada, McKillop observes that “an adjustment of universities to the conditions and requirements of industrial life was an essential ingredient in economic competition and development,” with no university “untouched by the province’s industrial revolution and the secular gospel of research.” At the municipal level, in their study of three US cities, Kargon and Knowles have seen local institutions of higher education “reacting quickly and creatively to unpredictable demands for expertise.” It is this function of universities, or rather of their professoriates, as sources of local expertise which forms the focus of this paper. (shrink)

This book is of fundamental importance in political philosophy as well as in theology, philosophy itself, and history. The fact that it lacks an Index is unconscionable. The book consists of some one hundred six pages of precious correspondence between Strauss and Voegelin, plus a reprinting of Strauss's famous essays "Jerusalem and Athens" and "The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy," with Voegelin's "The Gospel and Culture" and "Immortality: Experience and Symbol." To complete these essays and letters are perceptive, (...) often brilliant, essays by James Wiser, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Stanley Rosen, Timothy Fuller, Ellis Sandoz, Thomas Pangle, and David Walsh. It would be difficult to find a more profound and stimulating book covering the whole history and understanding of faith and reason in Western intellectual history. (shrink)

Friendship is prominently mentioned, to be sure, in the great books, including very often the great books in political philosophy. In addition to Aristotle, whose treatise on friendship remains unsurpassed as a philosophic examination of this exalted topic, we recall Cicero's great essay De Amicitia, Plato's Phaedrus, plus numerous references in The Republic, The Laws, The Symposium, and many other central dialogues. The Gospel of John contains the great tractate on friendship at the Last Supper just before the Trial (...) of Christ, an intellectual association between politics and friendship that is itself cause of the deepest human reflection. The topic of friendship is most familiar to Augustine and Aquinas and later to Montaigne and Francis Bacon. In short, if we moderns and post-moderns might perhaps have difficulty in associating the notions of friendship and political philosophy, our intellectual tradition did not. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RELIGION AND SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE Paul Ricoeur Université de Nanterre Paris X These are issues that I take very much to heart, so I will risk my own thoughts on the relation between religion and violence, not excluding the violence in and ofreligion. This is to say that I am not evading the objection made by Jean-Pierre Changeux in a recent discussion, namely, that religion as such produces violence. I (...) do not wish to evade the objection nor to hide behind the collateral explanation that it is when religion is detoured by politics that it produces violence. It is the presupposition that religion produces violence that brings me into discussion with René Girard. I encountered his work several decades ago and I have met him intermittently, with moments of distancing and rediscovery. This is the case for me again today regarding one of his later books, The Scapegoat. I cannot forget the dazzling excitement of 1972 when Violence and the Sacred first appeared. And then for me came a moment of hesitation, of doubt: isn't this explanation too psychologizing? Aren't the Gospels too easily exonerated ofthe accusation ofviolence? But I thereafter experienced disappointment with alternative accounts, principally sociological ones, and in particular with the one given by Maurice Bloch in La Violence du religieux. I am going to take the risk of a personal interpretation ofthe intimate relation between religion and violence. My own conviction, at bottom, is that I have been able, by broadening and deepening the issue, to discern the point where this very movement of going deeper bifurcates and branches out toward external violence. I have clarified my position in La Critique et la conviction and in my more recent debate with J.R Changeux, Ce quifait que nouspensons on this complicity between religion and violence. And it was in pursuing the direction opened up in La Critique et la conviction that I rediscovered an 2 Paul Ricoeur interest in The Scapegoat. I found his interpretation not only to be complementary to my own, but its necessary complement. I will now proceed to show how René Girard's thesis is necessary to my own thinking. So now I will go directly to my interpretive proposal, then I will turn to the position of Bloch in La Violence du religieux, a sociological interpretation, in order to come back in the end to Girard. It is by way of reflection on tolerance considered as a progressive initiation that I arrived at the interpretation I am going to present. At its minimal state, we find only the tolerance ofthe intolerant person, who states, "I don't agree with what you believe, I disapprove of it, but I cannot prevent it. I tolerate it in the sense of not being able to prevent it; I would like to prevent it, but I do not have the power to do so." At a second level, tolerance is more positive, saying, "I maintain the conviction that I am the one who has the truth, but I recognize, by way of being accommodating, that you have the right to profess what I hold as false, and I do this in the name ofjustice. That is to say, you certainly have the right, and it is one equal to mine, to profess what you believe, although I take it as false." I would say that the force of the principle ofjustice as thus expressed is this: any other life is worth as much as mine. Let us say that what I recognize here is the right to error. But at this stage I am torn within by the truth that I believe to be unilaterally mine and the justice that entails recognition ofthe other, which I place on another level from that oftruth. I make a further step in pursuing the issue, at a level farther advanced, when I say, "My adversary has perhaps a part ofthe truth but I don't know what it is." I would say that this is the perspectival version oftolerance: the other person sees a side of things, which I cannot see. But our positions cannot be substituted for each other. At this stage there is a... (shrink)

Four developments have been central to the shaping of the field of religious ethics : the shift from Christian ethics to religious ethics, the dis- placement of normative ethics by descriptive, comparative, and analytical ethics, growth in self-consciousness as philosophical assumptions have come to articulation in critical philosophical consciousness, and the ex- tension of the Social Gospel's traditional agenda into more and different practical social issues. However, this "map" of the field, drawn from 35,000 feet, shows that though the (...) changes have, indeed, been significant, the continuities are far more pronounced than is generally admitted. (shrink)

Authority in Morals: An Essay in Christian Ethics. By Gerard J. Hughes On Human Nature. By Edward O. Wilson Democracy and Ethical Life. By Claes G. Ryn The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. By Quentin Skinner. 2 vols. Phenomenology and the Social World: the Philosophy of Merleau‐Ponty and its Relation to the Social Conscience. By Laurie Spurting Philosophical Foundations of the Three Sociologies. By Ted Benton Christianity and the World Order. By Edward Norman. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979, £3.50. The (...) Stoics. Edited by John M. Rist Descartes. By Margaret D. Wilson Physicalism. By K.V. Wilkes Kierkegaard as Educator. By R.J. Manheimer Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. By Søren Kierkegaard, translated and edited by Howard and Edna Hong Parables of Kierkegaard. Edited by Thomas C. Oden Thomas Carlyle: ‘Cahinist without the Theology’. By Eloise M. Behnken The Praise of 'Sons of Bitches’. By James V. Schall The Inner Eye of Love. By William Johnston The River Within. By Christopher Bryant The Religious Imagination and the Sense of God. By John Bowker Old Testament Theology: A Fresh Approach. By Ronald E. Clements What is a Gospel? By Charles H. Talbert Urchristliche Prophetic. By Gerhard Dautzenberg Amphttochii Icontensis Opera. Edited by Cornells Datema Man and Nature in the Renaissance. By Allen G. Debus The Church in Late Victorian Scotland 1874–1900. By Andrew L. Drummond and James Bullock. Ppix, 342, Edinburgh, The St Andrew Press, 1978, £10.50. From Office to Profession: The New England Ministry 1750–1860. By Donald M. Scott Bemard‐Lazare: Anti‐Semitism and the Problem of Jewish Identity in Late Nineteenth Century France. By Nelly Wilson. (shrink)

The objective of the present text is to develop a reflection about the value of human life in today’s society bringing into focus the contrasting perspectives of the ordinary and the extraordinary of life. For that purpose, we emphasize the conception of the Catholic Church from the Second Vatican Council that suggests an attitude of a Pilgrim Church which longs for dialogue with human beings in their ordinary life (we intend to rescue the positive sense of the term "ordinary"), in (...) disadvantage of the triumphalist vision which gives priority to the great deeds of history. In that sense, we establish a dialogue with the literal work Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky whose protagonist Raskolnikov reveals himself through the contemporary dilemma between being and not being extraordinary in the eyes of the society. His moral conscience is tested after a crime he committed. The apex of this revelation takes place after the reading of the Gospel relating to the resurrection of Lazarus shared with Sonia, a flagrant sinner, an ordinary in the eyes of the society represented in the work. In fact, how it happens in the painful passage of Raskolnikov, God makes himself known through the other in borderline situations and we take him into account through the experience which a man of faith realizes when discovering Him to be present. The presence of God in the world is surely not to be understood in the sphere of the extraordinary, what matters is the experience of refuge when we are seduced by the faith. (shrink)

Martin Luther King's legacy as a Black, Baptist preacher and activist is widely known, but his influence in the public sphere has eclipsed his influence in Black Theology. Additionally, since the Black Power movement succeeded the Civil Rights movement, and thereby the Liberationist movement succeeded the Black Social Gospel movement, the foundations King laid became seamlessly integrated into the theology of James Cone and J. Deotis Roberts. Taking King's social analysis, his concern for crucified peoples, and grassroots activism, (...) Cone and Roberts craft the school of Black Theology. Frederick Ware's book, Methodologies of Black Theology outlined the schools of Black Methodology, including the Black Hermeneutical School, which incorporates indigenous sources to inform theology. Walter Strickland II, building upon Ware, argues the Black Hermeneutical School has three schools of interpretive emphasis: Courthouse, Schoolhouse, and Church House. Cone's theology utilises the methodology of the Courthouse while Roberts utilises the methodology of the Church House. This paper argues that Martin Luther King Jr's activism and theology helped develop Cone and Roberts's Black Theological Method. Roberts carries King's legacy as a pastor‐theologian, and Cone carries King's legacy as a social activist. (shrink)

This essay argues that the American psychologist and philosopher William James should be viewed in the Lutheran Reformation’s tradition because this viewpoint offers the hermeneutical key to his philosophy of religion. Though James obviously didn’t ascribe to biblical authority, he expressed the following religious sensibilities made possible by Martin Luther and his contemporaries: 1) challenge of prevailing systems, 2) anti-rationalism, 3) being pro-religious experience and dynamic belief, 4) need for a personal, caring God, and also 5) a (...) class='Hi'>gospel of religious comfort. This essay asks, in one specific form, how religious concerns can hold steady over time but cause very different expressions of faith. (shrink)

There Is a Disciplinary divide between philosophers and historians in how they read Addams’s first book, Democracy and Social Ethics. Philosophers identify Addams primarily as a pragmatist. They often compare and contrast her thinking with that of James and Dewey, and find her a fruitful resource for contemporary discussions about gender, social justice, and peace. Much of this scholarship gives central place to Addams’s Democracy and Social Ethics. Except for nods to her 1892 essay “The Subjective Necessity of Settlements,” (...) philosophers rarely discuss whether her religious sensibilities influenced her theorizing.1 While historians debate Addams’s religious identity, many locate her within the social gospel .. (shrink)

Written in a jargon-free way, Body Matters provides a clear and accessible phenomenological critique of core assumptions in mainstream biomedicine and explores ways in which health and illness are experienced and interpreted differently in various socio-historical situations. By drawing on the disciplines of literature, cultural anthropology, sociology, medical history, and philosophy, the authors attempt to dismantle common presuppositions we have about human afflictions and examine how the methods of phenomenology open up new ways to interpret the body and to re-envision (...) therapy. (shrink)

Employing the techniques of modern economic analysis, Professor Buchanan reveals the conceptual basis of an individual's social rights by examining the ...

This essay discusses Jean-Luc Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure: Deconstruction of Christianity (2008). Nancy’s engagement with Christianity in this work contrasts with the so-called theological turn in phenomenology. This raises probing questions regarding the name of God and the sense of the “divine” in a demythified world, as well as the question of the exhaustion of Christianity and its self-deconstruction. I address Nancy’s exploration of the overcoming of nihilism and the possibility, and “look,” of a faith that is not tied to a god (...) or a master signifier, thereby moving beyond certain ‘orthodox’ oppositions between atheism and Christianity. I use Gérard Granel’s deformalization of phenomenology and the Gospel of James’s “Epistle of straw” to adumbrate a minimalist faith in the world, and I alsoinvestigate Jean Pouillon’s study of the senses of “croire” and Émile Benveniste’s archeology of credere in light of Nancy’s approach to faith. I close with reflections on Nietzsche’s psychology of “the redeemer.”. (shrink)

Several scholars, including Martin Hengel, R. Alan Culpepper, and Richard Bauckham, have argued that Papias had knowledge of the Gospel of John on the grounds that Papias’s prologue lists six of Jesus’s disciples in the same order that they are named in the Gospel of John: Andrew, Peter, Philip, Thomas, James, and John. In “A Note on Papias’s Knowledge of the Fourth Gospel” (JBL 129 [2010]: 793–794), Jake H. O’Connell presents a statistical analysis of this argument, (...) according to which the probability of this correspondence occurring by chance is lower than 1%. O’Connell concludes that it is more than 99% probable that this correspondence is the result of Papias copying John, rather than chance. I show that O’Connell’s analysis contains multiple mistakes, both substantive and mathematical: it ignores relevant evidence, overstates the correspondence between John and Papias, wrongly assumes that if Papias did not know John he ordered the disciples randomly, and conflates the probability of A given B with the probability of B given A. In discussing these errors, I aim to inform both Johannine scholarship and the use of probabilistic methods in historical reasoning. (shrink)

This book is a major contribution to the study of the philosopher F. H. Bradley, the most influential member of the nineteenth-century school of British Idealists. It offers a sustained interpretation of Bradley's Principles of Logic, explaining the problem of how it is possible for inferences to be both valid and yet have conclusions that contain new information. The author then describes how this solution provides a basis for Bradley's metaphysical view that reality is one interconnected experience and how this (...) gives rise to a new problem of truth. (shrink)

Does traditional Christianity involve paradoxical doctrines, that is, doctrines that present the appearance (at least) of logical inconsistency? If so, what is the nature of these paradoxes and why do they arise? What is the relationship between "paradox" and "mystery" in theological theorizing? And what are the implications for the rationality, or otherwise, of orthodox Christian beliefs? In Paradox in Christian Theology, James Anderson argues that the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation, as derived from Scripture and formulated (...) in the ecumenical creeds, are indeed paradoxical. But this conclusion, he contends, need not imply that Christians who believe these doctrines are irrational in doing so. In support of this claim, Anderson develops and defends a model of understanding paradoxical Christian doctrines according to which the presence of such doctrines is unsurprising and adherence to paradoxical doctrines cannot be considered as a serious intellectual obstacle to belief in Christianity. The case presented in this book has significant implications for the practice of systematic theology, biblical exegesis, and Christian apologetics. (shrink)