You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
It has often been noted that poetry is a particularly suitable medium when it comes to understanding the connection between theology and biography. Needless to say that this is particularly exciting in the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the poems he wrote during his imprisonment by the Nazis. Although any one of his ten poems should be read within their respective historical and biographical context, they are also rounded, self-sufficient pieces of work that cannot be 'explained' by the biographical and theological prose that surrounds them. They rather serve as a sort of creative and perhaps sometimes even critical interlocutor to these contexts. This is why the contributors to this volume...
This book is a collection of scholarly essays that place Dietrich Bonhoeffer in conversation with the Dutch Neo-Calvinist tradition of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck. The essays engage in theological ethics and historical theology in an effort to frame ongoing dialogue in relation to issues of public theology. While Bonhoeffer and Neo-Calvinism represent distinct theological traditions, there is value in placing their respective ideas in conversation for the purposes of creative insight, theological understanding, and practical application. Contributors represent perspectives from North America and the Netherlands. Taken together, the essays offer an important contribution to this unique field of theological inquiry.
Racism at the End of White Christian America -- The Theological Origins of White Supremacy -- Part II. Who Is Christ For Us Today? -- Witnessing White Theology -- Narrating Black Theology -- Part III. Where Do We Go From Here? -- An Ethic of Responsibility -- Remembrance, Repentance, Reparation.
Kairos is used in the New Testament to signify a pivotal moment in history: a critical time of judgement and opportunity where chaos must be faced and one must change their ways before it becomes irreparable. Confronted by the Covid-19 pandemic and mandatory isolation, John de Gruchy felt a similar need to adapt and respond. In doing so, he found a deepening in his desire for authentic humanity, genuine community, and the opportunity affirm his conviction that true humanity is rooted in God, wisdom, and the struggle for justice.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in one of his last prison letters that he had come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. In Taking Hold of the Real, Barry Harvey engages in constructive conversation with Bonhoeffer, contending that the shallow and banal this-worldliness of modern society is ordered to a significant degree around the social technologies of religion, culture, and race. These mechanisms displace human beings from their traditional connections with particular locales, and relocate them in their proper places as determined by the nation-state and capitalist markets. Christians are called to participate in the profound this-worldliness that...
“Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself.” These are words Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke to his brother a few months before he began training future pastors in the ways of discipleship. For several years he had been speaking out against war. Near the beginning of the anti-Semitic Nazi regime, he called on his fellow Christians to speak out against a state that was engaging in oppressive measures, to respond to victims of oppression, and to be willing to suffer, as a church, if it was required to stop such oppression. His vision for training disciples was rooted in pure doctrine, serious worship, a new kind of monasticism, and the Sermon on the Mount. Bonhoeffer was convinced that through the living presence of Jesus and the explosive teachings of the Sermon on the Mount “lies the force that can blow all this hocus-pocus sky-high—like fireworks, leaving only a few burnt-out shells behind.” This is the legacy of this extraordinary theologian that this book seeks to recover—exploring how this was lived out in a world full of Nazis.
C. S. Lewis famously penned the phrase “God in the Dock” and proposed that there was a “great divide” between ancient and modern humans, in that our ancestors would have rightly seen themselves “in the dock” before God, while we moderns have placed God there before us. But what if what God's love most desires for us, the gospel or “good news” of the only way of life for humanity, has been “in the dock” before us from the time of Adam and Eve? And what if it is also the case that the gospel is often “in the dock” as though it is not good—even for the church? This book builds upon and expands the “life and death” stakes Lewis proposed by demonstrating that the gospel way of faith itself has been placed in the dock by us and in many ways ruined our relationships with God, with our own selves, with one another, and even with the natural world itself which we are meant to “steward” for its good. In these pages the reader will discover why the gospel that requires faith is good news, but why we so tragically default to our divisive and self-destructive ways.
Current research shows what many in the Christian community already know: young people are leaving the church. This raises important questions: Why are young people leaving? How can the church respond? Some have responded to this issue out of a posture of fear and anxiety, trying to find new ways to strengthen doctrinal beliefs or practices of faith formation and discipleship. What if the best response isn't to strengthen our theology or tighten our hold on the lives of young people? What if the best response is a posture of love that lets young people go? Using the insights of philosopher Charles Taylor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Poetic Youth Ministry argues that the church must take seriously the formative power of social and cultural patterns that shape the social imaginaries of young people. Rather than seeing the problem as young people abandoning faith, the Christian community should see the issue as young people exchanging one form of faith for another. This allows the church to approach the issue from a posture of love, calling young people to embrace their identity in the new humanity revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
This popular text has been updated to ensure that it continues to provide a current and comprehensive overview of the main Christian theologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Each chapter is written by a leading theologian and gives a clear picture of a particular movement, topic or individual. New and updated treatments of topics covered in earlier editions, with over half the chapters new to this edition or revised by new authors. New section singling out six classic theologians of the twentieth century. Expanded treatment of the natural sciences, gender, Roman Catholic theology since Vatican II, and African, Asian and Evangelical theologies. Completely new chapters on spirituality, pastoral theology, philosophical theology, postcolonial biblical interpretation, Pentecostal theology, Islam and Christian theology, Buddhism and Christian theology, and theology and film. As in previous editions, the text opens with a full introduction to modern theology. Epilogue discussing the present situation and prospects of Christian theology in the twenty-first century.
This volume focuses on ‘fittingness’ as an ethical-aesthetical idea, and in particular examines how the concept is beneficial for environmental ethics. It brings together an innovative set of contributions to argue that fittingness is a significant but under-investigated facet of human ethical deliberation with both ethical and aesthetic dimensions. In widely diverse matters – from architecture to table manners – individuals and communities make decisions based on ‘fittingness’, also expressed in related terms, such as appropriateness, prudence, temperance, and mutuality. In the realm of environmental ethics, fittingness denotes a relation between conscious embodied persons and their habitats and is of relevance to judgements about how humans shape, and take up with, the non-human environment, and hence to ethical decisions about the development and use of the environment and non-human creatures. As such, fittingness can be of great benefit in reframing human relationships to the non-human, stimulating a way of living in the world that is fitting to the preservation of its fruitfulness, goodness, beauty, and truth.