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The soul's immortality and its repeated earthly births are not new ideas in Western thought. They are implicit in the Pythagorean and Platonic traditions, as well as in some branches of esoteric Judaism and Cabbala. But it was not until the early years of this century that the West was given a detailed, modern, evolutionary philosophy of human life based on the reality of reincarnation and karma. This turning point occurred when Rudolf Steiner began to make public the results of his spiritual scientific researches. He viewed the revelation of reincarnation and karma as one of his most important life tasks. Steiner's contribution, however, remains unique in its understanding of the human bein...
Samuel Schuman examines the place of religious colleges and universities, particularly evangelical Protestant institutions, in contemporary American higher education. Many faith-based schools are flourishing. They have rigorous academic standards, impressive student recruitment, ambitious philanthropic goals, and well-maintained campuses and facilities. Yet much of the U.S. higher-education community ignores them or accords them little respect. Seeing the Light considers, instead, what can be learned from the viability of these institutions. The book begins with a history of post secondary U.S. education from the perspective of the religious traditions from which it arose. After focusing bri...
"In tribute to the ongoing influence of Robert Benne, director of the Center for Religion and Society at Roanoke College, fourteen of his friends and colleagues have produced A Report from the Front Lines, in which they consider the role of theology in the public arena at this turn of the twenty-first century. They speak powerfully to the cultural paralysis of the Western world, where educated leaders claim that morality must not interfere with science or public policy, by showing the relevance of orthodox Christianity to humanity's most pressing problems. The constant theme weaving through the volume is Benne's own conviction that Christians can and must engage in the public square with positions forged out of their religious commitments, using arguments whose presuppositions allow room for special revelation, but whose resultant logic is translated into a shared universal rationality." --Book Jacket.
From one of America's foremost historians, Inventing America compares Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence with the final, accepted version, thereby challenging many long-cherished assumptions about both the man and the document. Although Jefferson has long been idealized as a champion of individual rights, Wills argues that in fact his vision was one in which interdependence, not self-interest, lay at the foundation of society. "No one has offered so drastic a revision or so close or convincing an analysis as Wills has . . . The results are little short of astonishing" (Edmund S. Morgan New York Review of Books ).
The Sin of Obedience is one of the few works of fiction or non-fiction that looks profoundly and with deep personal reflection into the training of a Catholic priest. The novel, rich and accurate in detail, is the story of a young prodigy torn with between the rigid religious traditions and convictions of his mother and the more-humanity-oriented respect for freedom of his father. Building on his own experiences, including being the subject of sexual abuse by a seminary teacher, the author unfolds a picture of religious life in which the cornerstones of celibacy and a vow of obedience have forced seminarians and priests to make difficult and often impossible decisions in their own personal lives. This well-crafted story enables the reader to go along with a young boy, seminarian and priest on his idealistic pursuit and mission and the consequences he has to face as a result.
This book focuses on Princeton Theological Seminary and the theologians who taught there from the time of its founding in 1812 to the time of its reorganisation in 1929. It confronts the standard assessment of Old Princeton in the historiography of North American evangelicalism and sets out why a new paradigm is needed. The volume critically engages with the ‘Ahlstrom thesis’ and other more recent scholarship concerning Old Princeton’s relationship to the Scottish intellectual tradition. The contributions seek to move beyond Old Princeton’s alleged indebtedness to Enlightenment thought and advance a more constructive reading of the Old Princetonians, their theology, and their place in the American evangelical experience. The book offers a fresh and more accurate assessment of the theological and philosophical assumptions that held sway at Old Princeton and through the seminary to the American continent and beyond. It will appeal to scholars interested in theology, religious history, and intellectual history.
Broken Knowledge explores the impacts of the scientific and scholarly ideal of the modern university on theological education at Union Theological Seminary from 1887-1926. During this period, the marks of the modern university --specialization, the elective system, professionalization, and the empirical research orientation-- were incorporated into theological education. While vigorously implanting the new university's structural and functional patterns into theological education, the seminary and its theologians strove to bring theological discussions into the arena of secularized academia, to achieve independence from church dogmatism, to expand the scope of theological outlook in social d...
Para evitar la cautividad cultural, los fundamentos de la educaci—n cristiana deben ser repensados por cada generaci—n. De no hacerlo, dice el autor, los educadores cristianos Çcorren el riesgo de perpetuar ideas y pr‡cticas anticuadas, ajenas al evangelioÈ. ÇAl explorar con criterio los diversos fundamentos que han predominado y predominan en el pensamiento evangŽlicoÈ, continœa el autor, Çlos educadores pueden enfrentar mejor las necesidades de hoy y los retos del futuroÈ. En Cuestiones fundamentales de la educaci—n cristiana, el autor mismo se entrega a este proceso de evaluaci—n cr'tica, con importantes resultados. El autor llama a los educadores evangŽlicos a Çreafirmar las verdades b'blicasÈ, que constituyen la Çautoridad esencial para nuestra teor'a y pr‡cticaÈ, y a Çincorporar las verdades de otras disciplinasÈ, proceso que tiene que estar Çsujeto a la continua autoridad de la Palabra de DiosÈ.
A concern for the ethical instruction and formation of students has always been a part of American higher education. Yet that concern has by no means been uniform or free from controversy. The centrality of moral philosophy in the undergraduate curriculum during the mid-19th Century gave way later during that era to the first signs of increasing specialization of the disciplines. By the middle of the 20th Century, instruction in ethics had, by and large, become confined almost exclusively to departments of philosophy and religion. Efforts to introduce ethics teaching in the professional schools and elsewhere in the university often met with indifference or outright hostility. The past decade has seen a remarkable resurgence of the interest in the teaching of ethics, at both the undergraduate and the professional school levels. Beginning in 1977, The Hastings Center, with the support of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, undertook a system atic study of the state of the teaching of ethics in American higher education.
Discipleship or Pilgrimage? is an interpretive history of the field of educational philosophy—what it's been, where it is now, and what it ought to be. Implicit in Johnson's analysis is the belief that educational philosophy will not survive much longer. For educational philosophers to become significant players in the reconstruction of our educational system, they must focus on the classroom, both as instructors in the university classroom and as members of teams preparing prospective teachers. By focusing on the educational philosopher as pilgrim—as an educator engaged in an unending quest for meaning—the author suggests that it is not too late to reconstruct the field.