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This study of the work of noted liberal theologian Gordon Kaufman tracks his career from his first published book, Relativism, Knowledge, and Faith (1960) through his 2006 book, Jesus and Creativity, in light of recent conversations about divine action and modern scientific knowledge. James interprets Kaufman's mature position as a sophisticated reconstruction of divine activity that makes use of recent scientific theory and its naturalistic assumptions in order to revitalize a theocentric frame of reference rooted in classical theological tradition. Though there are costs to be paid in the construction of a theology of "radical naturalism," particularly with respect to the relation between divine action and the human good, Kaufman's program offers a distinctive way forward. After developing a critical analysis of the limitations and possibilities of Kaufman's mature position, James suggests that a christological reconsideration of the meaning of human flourishing offers the prospect of an even more radically naturalistic and theocentric theology.
This book covers a broad spectrum of current perspectives in theology, including evangelical, liberal, liberationist, feminist, and postmodern approaches. A textbook for introductory theology classes in seminaries and colleges, this wide-ranging collection of essays also represents the best available resource for any reader seeking to explore and understand the diversity of current trends in theology and ethics.
Edward Scribner Ames (1870–1958) was raised in the American Midwest as his family moved westward after the Civil War. His father was a minister in the Disciples of Christ, which was later changed to the Christian Church. In between serving several small churches in the Iowa area, his father did various odd jobs. Young Ames joined the Church one Sunday when his father was preaching, and was baptized in the river that afternoon. Ames was able to attend Drake College in Des Moines, Iowa, and did a post-graduate year here. He then went to Yale University’s Divinity School, where he was placed in the senior class because of his previous studies. Following the BD, he spent two years toward a P...
This translation of a 1982 volume published in Bern (Paul Haupt Verlag) by a Swiss theologian with a longstanding interest in dialogue between Buddhism and Christianity features an examination of the Kyoto school of Japanese philosophers who attempted to engage with both Christianity and secular Wes
Sheila Greeve Davaney develops a bold new option in theology and religious reflection—pragmatic historicism—which emerges out of the historicist assumptions of human situatedness, particularity, and plurality that have come to characterize Western thought. The major theological attempts by postliberal and revisionist theology to incorporate these insights have failed to contend fully with the historicist challenge; Davaney's pragmatic historicism more clearly repudiates essentialism, universalism, and confessionalism. The theology that emerges is constructive and critical, resisting all forms of confessionalism without resorting to new forms of universalism. In its academic mode, it is i...
The book is a contribution to the fields of pragmatism, intercultural philosophy, and social and political ethics. The argument in the book runs along two lines: firstly, four pragmatist philosophers (William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and Roberto Mangabeira Unger) are discussed by putting them into their respective intercultural contexts. They are interpreted as philosophers that were/are either explicitly or implicitly linked to some of the key tenets in comparative and/or intercultural philosophy of the twentieth/twenty-first century. Secondly, the book looks to their particular works and discusses the role of the body and its important ethical potential. In their respective contex...
Reappraises the work of Shailer Mathews, a leading but long-neglected theologian of the social gospel movement whose work prefigures contemporary liberation theologies.
This Festschrift for historian Gerald L. Priest, who served the Lord Jesus and the church for over twenty years at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, contains six articles that touch on historical subjects dear to Dr. Priest's heart. The first three articles deal with aspects of the life and ministries of Jonathan Edwards and Andrew Fuller, both remarkable eighteenth-century theologians whose thought has had a profound impact down to the present day, along with eighteenth-century Baptist reflection on the subject of good works. The second set of three essays explore the nature of Fundamentalist historiography and the emergence of twentieth-century Fundamentalism through the lens of the thinking of two prominent liberals, William Newton Clarke and George Burman Foster. Together, all six essays are offered as a tribute to a fine Christian historian, teacher, and believer.
Among the greatest challenges facing religious thinkers today is that created by historicism, the notion that human beings and their myriad understandings of reality are utterly historical, conditioned by contingent circumstances and tied to particular contexts. In this book, Demian Wheeler confronts the historicist challenge by delineating and defending a particular trajectory of historicist thought known as pragmatic historicism. Rooted in the German Enlightenment and fully developed within the early Chicago school of theology, pragmatic historicism is a predominantly American tradition that was philosophically nurtured by classical pragmatism and its intellectual siblings, naturalism and ...
This book recognizes that the postmodern "new historicism" leads to a value-neutral relativism and leaves theology with an impossible choice. Dean argues that the postmodern challenge is incoherent and ineffective unless it is reinterpreted in terms of its classical American roots. Before offering a third option, Dean defends the neopragmatism of Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein, Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam, Cornel West, and Jeffrey Stout; the deconstructivism of Jacques Derrida and Mark Taylor; and the recent theology of Gordon Kaufman. The third option, opening up a new possibility for American theology, is the radical empiricism of William James and John Dewey and the precedent of the "Chicago School."