You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Communities of Faith is a collection of essays on the multicultural Christian spirit and practices of churches around the world, with particular attention to Africa and the African diaspora. The essays span history, theology, anthropology, ecumenism, and missiology. Readers will be treated to fresh perspectives on African Pentecostal higher education, Pentecostalism and witchcraft in East Africa, Methodist camp meetings in Ghana, Ghanaian diaspora missions in Europe and North America, gender roles in South African Christian communities, HIV/AIDS ministries in Uganda, Japanese funerary rites, enculturation and contextualization principles of mission, and many other aspects of the Christian world mission. With essays from well-known scholars as well as young and emerging men and women in academia, Communities of Faith illuminates current realities of world Christianity and contributes to the scholarship of today's worldwide Christian witness.
"Culture's influence upon Christianity is easier to discern in retrospect than in prospect. If history is our guide, one thing is sure: This age will be as syncretistic as any other?How is the gospel being contextualized in the contemporary world? To what degree are these new contextualizations syncretistic? This book attempts to answer these questions by defining and analyzing contextualization and syncretism."-Gailyn Van Rheenen
How does Christ call his people to engage the societies, cultures, and politics of the nations they call home? From prioritizing patriotism over faith to withdrawing from the public sphere entirely, the struggle to navigate the intersection of an earthly and heavenly kingdom remains an ongoing challenge for Christians around the world. Bridging cultures and time periods, Dr. Surya Harefa brings Abraham’s Kuyper’s ecclesiology to bear on questions of Japanese Christian engagement within the political sphere. Harefa offers a contextually robust exploration of evangelical Japanese approaches to ecclesiology and political involvement. Taking care to place Kuyper’s conception of the church ...
Power and Identity in the Global Church: Six Contemporary Cases applies contemporary sociological, theological, and New Testament insights to better understand how God’s people can, do, and should interact in the field, thereby laying the groundwork for better multicultural approaches to mission partnership. The authors—six evangelical anthropologists and theologians—also show that faithfulness in mission requires increased attention to local identities, cultural themes, and concerns, including the desire to grow spiritually through direct engagement with God’s word. In this context, failure to attend to power imbalances can stunt spiritual and leadership growth. Attending to those imbalances should make Christian churches more truly brothers and sisters in Christ, equal members of the one global body of which Christ alone is the head.
It is no secret that Christianity has been widely rejected in Japan with less than two percent of the population identifying as Christian. The dominant worldview in Japan is deeply animistic, with beliefs such as the Japanese mana-concept, ki (気), the Japanese soul-concept, and the concept of God/god(s), kami (神), being deeply rooted in the culture and fundamentally influencing society. Dr Martin Heißwolf, with his years of experience in Japan, critically examines Japanese animism in light of core Christian beliefs, such as the concepts of “peace” and “salvation.” Central to Japanese people’s rejection of Christian truth is the diametric opposition of its supernatural message to the natural focus of Japanese animistic folk religion. Heißwolf’s meticulous study is framed squarely within missiological thought and praxis so Christians serving in Japanese contexts are better able to communicate the message of the gospel by more fully understanding Japanese people, people by whom God wants to be known.
The cross carries the polar memories of history. One memory is the terrible violence imposed on Jesus, and the other is the memory of faith in the midst of the deepest abyss in human history. A theology of the cross contextualizes the dangerous combination of these memories in the present reality of life and death. A theology of the cross is thoroughly preoccupied with the agency of God, but not in a way that deals with the systematic apologetics of the knowledge of God. It deals with the knowledge of God before it becomes knowledge. It is the matter of the living and dying of our life. This book explores theologians of the cross in a global flow and proposes an intercontextual perspective of theology.
Human freedom has been the source of both the high points of humanity as well as of its low points, thus giving rise to the impression that it is a somewhat ambivalent concept. According to Martien Brinkman, the major factor in this ambivalence is the rather narrow meaning that the concept has received in the course of history. Freedom is, for the most part, understood as ‘freedom from’ or ‘freedom to’ but only rarely as ‘freedom for’. However, it is precisely this latter understanding that is closest to the Christian understanding of freedom, which Brinkman defines as ‘internal attachment’. In his view Christian freedom is at bottom characterized by that to which one commits oneself in trust. He sees primarily the Christian theology of baptism, with its accent on ‘dying’ and ‘rising’ with Christ as the model for the way in which one acquires freedom. Brinkman illustrates this in this study by means of a great number of biblical images and images borrowed from the historical debates between Augustine and Pelagius and Luther and Erasmus.
Pt. 1. Introduction -- pt. 2. Business and technology -- pt. 3. Politics, governance and foreign policy -- pt. 4. Social issues -- pt. 5. National identity -- pt. 6. Conclusions.
None
From the contents: Andre DROOGERS: Religious reconciliation: a view from the social sciences. - Hendrik M. VROOM: The nature and origins of religious conflicts: some philosophical considerations. - Michael McGHEE: Buddhist thoughts on conflict, Reconciliation' . and religion. - Tzvi MARX: Theological preparation for reconciliation in Judaism. - Agus Rachmat WIDYANTO: Interreligious conflict and reconciliation in Indonesia."