Download or read book Methods for the Study of Religious Change written by A. F. Droogers and published by Equinox Publishing (UK). This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aims to redefine the study of religion as the study of worldviews, of ideas which are active in shaping the world. It argues that the study of religion should focus on people's worldview-making capacities and should contribute to the critical analysis of global problems and the promotion of cultural and spiritual respect across religions.
Download or read book Does God Suffer written by Thomas Gerard Weinandy and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of this book challenges the contemporary view of God and suffering. Calling upon scripture, and the philosophical and theological tradition of the Fathers and Aquinas, he advocates the incarnational truth that the Son of God actually does experience human living, including suffering.
Download or read book Radical Theology written by Jeffrey W. Robbins and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-08 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Radical theology" and "political theology" are terms that have gained a lot of currency among philosophers of religion today. In this visionary new book, Jeffrey W. Robbins explores the contemporary direction of these movements as he charts a course for their future. Robbins claims that radical theology is no longer bound by earlier thinking about God and that it must be conceived of as postsecular and postliberal. As he engages with themes of liberation, gender, and race, Robbins moves beyond the usual canon of death-of-God thinkers, thinking "against" them as much as "with" them. He presents revolutionary thinking in the face of changing theological concepts, from reformation to transformation, transcendence to immanence, messianism to metamorphosis, and from the proclamation of the death of God to the notion of God's plasticity.
Download or read book A Church that Can and Cannot Change written by John Thomas Noonan and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noonan's analysis of the development in Catholic moral teaching on usury, contraception, religious freedom, slave-holding, and divorce.
Download or read book Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds written by David L. Haberman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can religion help to understand and contend with the challenges of climate change? Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworld,edited by David Haberman, presents a unique collection of essays that detail how the effects of human-related climate change are actively reshaping religious ideas and practices, even as religious groups and communities endeavor to bring their traditions to bear on mounting climate challenges. People of faith from the low-lying islands of the South Pacific to the glacial regions of the Himalayas are influencing how their communities understand earthly problems and develop meaningful responses to them. This collection focuses on a variety of different aspects of this critical interaction, including the role of religion in ongoing debates about climate change, religious sources of environmental knowledge and how this knowledge informs community responses to climate change, and the ways that climate change is in turn driving religious change. Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds offers a transnational view of how religion reconciles the concepts of the global and the local and influences the challenges of climate change.
Download or read book Why Christianity Must Change or Die written by John Shelby Spong and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important and respected voice for liberal American Christianity for the past twenty years, Bishop John Shelby Spong integrates his often controversial stands on the Bible, Jesus, theism, and morality into an intelligible creed that speaks to today's thinking Christian. In this compelling and heartfelt book, he sounds a rousing call for a Christianity based on critical thought rather than blind faith, on love rather than judgment, and that focuses on life more than religion.
Download or read book To Change the Church written by Ross Douthat and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times columnist and one of America’s leading conservative thinkers considers Pope Francis’s efforts to change the church he governs in a book that is “must reading for every Christian who cares about the fate of the West and the future of global Christianity” (Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option). Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936, today Pope Francis is the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Francis’s stewardship of the Church, while perceived as a revelation by many, has provoked division throughout the world. “If a conclave were to be held today,” one Roman source told The New Yorker, “Francis would be lucky to get ten votes.” In his “concise, rhetorically agile…adroit, perceptive, gripping account (The New York Times Book Review), Ross Douthat explains why the particular debate Francis has opened—over communion for the divorced and the remarried—is so dangerous: How it cuts to the heart of the larger argument over how Christianity should respond to the sexual revolution and modernity itself, how it promises or threatens to separate the church from its own deep past, and how it divides Catholicism along geographical and cultural lines. Douthat argues that the Francis era is a crucial experiment for all of Western civilization, which is facing resurgent external enemies (from ISIS to Putin) even as it struggles with its own internal divisions, its decadence, and self-doubt. Whether Francis or his critics are right won’t just determine whether he ends up as a hero or a tragic figure for Catholics. It will determine whether he’s a hero, or a gambler who’s betraying both his church and his civilization into the hands of its enemies. “A balanced look at the struggle for the future of Catholicism…To Change the Church is a fascinating look at the church under Pope Francis” (Kirkus Reviews). Engaging and provocative, this is “a pot-boiler of a history that examines a growing ecclesial crisis” (Washington Independent Review of Books).
Download or read book African Perspectives on Religion and Climate Change written by Ezra Chitando and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-12 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book interrogates the contributions that religious traditions have made to climate change discussions within Africa, whether positive or negative. Drawing on a range of African contexts and religious traditions, the book provides concrete suggestions on how individuals and communities of faith must act in order to address the challenge of climate change. Despite the fact that Africa has contributed relatively little to historic carbon emissions, the continent will be affected disproportionally by the increasing impact of anthropogenic climate change. Contributors to this book provide a range of rich case studies to investigate how religious traditions such as Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and indigenous faiths influence the worldviews and actions of their adherents. The chapters also interrogate how the moral authority and leadership provided by religion can be used to respond and adapt to the challenges posed by climate change. Topics covered include risk reduction and resilience, youth movements, indigenous knowledge systems, environmental degradation, gender perspectives, ecological theories, and climate change financing. This book will be of interest to scholars in diverse fields, including religious studies, sociology, political science, climate change and environmental humanities. It may also benefit practitioners involved in solving community challenges related to climate change. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license
Download or read book Social Media and Religious Change written by Marie Gillespie and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-10-29 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers unique insights into the mutually constitutive nature of social media practices and religious change. Part 1 examines how social media operate in conjunction with mass media in the construction of discourses of religion and spirituality. It includes: a longitudinal study of British news media coverage of Christianity, secularism and religious diversity (Knott et al.); an analysis of responses to two documentaries 'The Monastery' and 'The Convent' (Thomas); an evaluation of theories of the sacred in studies of religion and media within the 'strong program' in cultural sociology in the US (Lynch); and a study of the consequences of mass and social media synergies for public perceptions of Islam in the Netherlands (Herbert). Part 2 examines the role of social media in the construction of contemporary martyrs and media celebrities (e.g., Michael Jackson) using mixed and mobile methods to analyse fan sites (Bennett & Campbell) and jihadi websites and YouTube (Nauta). Part 3 examines how certain bounded religious communities negotiate the challenges of social media: Judaism in Second Life (Abrams & Baker); Bah'ai regulation of web use among members (Campbell & Fulton); YouTube evangelists (Pihlaja); and public expressions of bereavement (Greenhill & Fletcher). The book provides theoretically informed empirical case studies and presents an intriguing, complex picture of the aesthetic and ethical, demographic and discursive aspects of new spaces of communication and their implications for religious institutions, beliefs and practices.
Download or read book Urban Religion written by Jörg Rüpke and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-02-24 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: So far religion has been seen as cause for dramatic developments in the history of cities, it has contributed to the monumentalisation of centres and or has given importance to ex-centric places. Very recently, anthropologists have been discovering religion in the contemporary global city. But still awaiting historical investigation is the specific urban character of religious ideas, practices and institutions and the role of urban space shaping this very ‘religion’ in the course of history. The time-span from the Hellenistic age to Late Antiquity was crucial in the establishment of concepts and institutions of ‘religion’ and witnessed extended waves of urbanisation, Rome being central to this. In addressing this problem, this book fills a significant gap in the scholarship on urban religion across time. Taking seriously the proposition that space is condition, medium and outcome of social relations, the development of ‘urban religion’ in lived urban space and urban culture or urbanity offers a lens onto processes of religious change that have been neglected for the history of religion and for the study of urbanism. The key thesis is that city-space engineered the major changes that revolutionised religions. »This stimulating book makes use of archaeology and history to address religion as an essential component of urban life in both the past and the present. -With a strong basis in the ancient Mediterranean as well as an insightful view of modern urban life, Rüpke emphasizes that the practice and performance of religion at the everyday level is as essential in the creation of an urban ethos as the grand temples and institutions promulgated by the elite.« Monica L. Smith, author of Cities: The First 6,000 Years »Jörg Rüpke offers a characteristically original and learned series of reflections on some of the many ways in which the history of religions and the history of cities might be entangled. Urban Religion offers no single overarching thesis, but it is consistently thought-provoking and suggests many intriguing lines of investigation for the future.« Greg Woolf, Institute of Classical Studies, London
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion written by Lewis R. Rambo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 829 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion offers a comprehensive exploration of the dynamics of religious conversion, which for centuries has profoundly shaped societies, cultures, and individuals throughout the world. Scholars from a wide array of religions and disciplines interpret both the varieties of conversion experiences and the processes that inform this personal and communal phenomenon. This volume examines the experiences of individuals and communities who change religions, those who experience an intensification of their religion of origin, and those who encounter new religions through colonial intrusion, missionary work, and charismatic and revitalization movements. The thirty-two innovative essays provide overviews of the history of particular religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, indigenous religions, and new religious movements. The essays also offer a wide range of disciplinary perspectives-psychological, sociological, anthropological, legal, political, feminist, and geographical-on methods and theories deployed in understanding conversion, and insight into various forms of deconversion.
Download or read book Church Identity and Change written by David A. Roozen and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2005-05-02 with total page 678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since colonial days, religious work in American has happened through denominations. At least since the start of the twentieth century, these religious bodies consisted of a fairly tight, intra-denominationally connected system of congregations, regional judicatories, and national offices. This system was the product of more than two centuries of consolidation among Americanbs historic immigrant and indigenous churches. The vast majority of these structures are still in place, retain some semblance of internal coherence, have considerable social and religious significance, and will be with us for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, the stresses upon them today clearly indicate that they are entering an unsettled period of transition. The purpose of this book is to examine the national structures of eight diverse Protestant denominations as a part of that shift. The frame of this study is the relationship between the theological and organizational nature of national denominational structures as they adapt to the changing situation of the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Historical Theology written by Jaroslav Pelikan and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Change is a universal phenomenon that commands the attention of the historian. For Christian theology, change raises special difficulties. How are we to reconcile the notion of the revelation of an unchanging God, who is abiding truth, with the notion of the pervading mutability of all human affairs? This problem, which is as old as religion, is intensified by the Christian belief in the fullness and finality of the revelation made through Jesus Christ. Professor Pelikan begins his study of historical theology with this basic problem and traces the origins of the difficulties that inevitably follow upon the admission of the possibility of change. His investigations lead him to critically examine the dogmatic solution of Vincent of Lerins, the later dialectical interpretation of Abelard, the approach of Thomas Aquinas, and finally, the nineteenth century's Adolf von Harnack to propose a working definition of Christian doctrine and of the task of the historical theologian. Pelikan's work is a perceptive and penetrating study of the interaction of history and theology. Theology must be historical because man is historical. To neglect history, or worse still, to renounce it, is to deny man and theology their common future. Historical Theology is a worthy introduction to a task that must continually seek to weld past, present, and future into a living whole.
Download or read book The Universal Christ written by Richard Rohr and published by Convergent Books. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From one of the world’s most influential spiritual thinkers, a long-awaited book exploring what it means that Jesus was called “Christ,” and how this forgotten truth can restore hope and meaning to our lives. “Anyone who strives to put their faith into action will find encouragement and inspiration in the pages of this book.”—Melinda Gates In his decades as a globally recognized teacher, Richard Rohr has helped millions realize what is at stake in matters of faith and spirituality. Yet Rohr has never written on the most perennially talked about topic in Christianity: Jesus. Most know who Jesus was, but who was Christ? Is the word simply Jesus’s last name? Too often, Rohr writes, our understandings have been limited by culture, religious debate, and the human tendency to put ourselves at the center. Drawing on scripture, history, and spiritual practice, Rohr articulates a transformative view of Jesus Christ as a portrait of God’s constant, unfolding work in the world. “God loves things by becoming them,” he writes, and Jesus’s life was meant to declare that humanity has never been separate from God—except by its own negative choice. When we recover this fundamental truth, faith becomes less about proving Jesus was God, and more about learning to recognize the Creator’s presence all around us, and in everyone we meet. Thought-provoking, practical, and full of deep hope and vision, The Universal Christ is a landmark book from one of our most beloved spiritual writers, and an invitation to contemplate how God liberates and loves all that is.
Download or read book A New Climate for Theology written by Sallie McFague and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2008-04-03 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change promises monumental changes to human and other planetary life in the next generations. Yet government, business, and individuals have been largely in denial of the possibility that global warming may put our species on the road to extinction. Further, says Sallie McFague, we have failed to see the real root of our behavioral troubles in an economic model that actually reflects distorted religious views of the person. At its heart, she maintains, global warming occurs because we lack an appropriate understanding of ourselves as inextricably bound to the planet and its systems. A New Climate for Theology not only traces the distorted notion of unlimited desire that fuels our market system; it also paints an alternative idea of what being human means and what a just and sustainable economy might mean. Convincing, specific, and wise, McFague argues for an alternative economic order and for our relational identity as part of an unfolding universe that expresses divine love and human freedom. It is a view that can inspire real change, an altered lifestyle, and a form of Christian discipleship and desire appropriate to who we really are.
Download or read book A Political Theology of Climate Change written by Michael S. Northcott and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-30 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- 1. The Geopolitics of a Slow Catastrophe -- 2. Coal, Cosmos, and Creation -- 3. Engineering the Air -- 4. Carbon Indulgences, Ecological Debt, and Metabolic Rift -- 5. The Crisis of Cosmopolitan Reason -- 6. The Nomos of the Earth and Governing the Anthropocene -- 7. Revolutionary Messianism and the End of Empire -- Index
Download or read book The Depth of the Riches written by S. Mark Heim and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2000-11 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A constructive new proposal for Christian dialogue with other faiths. Religious pluralism is today the most challenging issue facing traditional Christianity. This constructive work by a leading voice on the subjects of religious pluralism and interfaith relations probes the Christian understanding of God and salvation and offers a new perspective on religious pluralism that affirms unique salvation in Christ while also recognizing the religious ends of other faiths. The questions explored here are both difficult and enlightening. What is the distinctive nature of salvation? Is there a place in Christian theology for recognizing other religious ends in addition to salvation? In pursuit of meaningful answers, S. Mark Heim uses the classical doctrine of the Trinity to develop a theology that allows Christians to respect the possibility that alternative relations with God exist in other religions.
