This book advances that history by exploring stories, images and discourses across a worldwide range of geographical, cultural and confessional contexts. Its twelve authors not only enrich our ...understanding of the significance of the contextual method, but also produce a new range of original ways of doing theology in contemporary situations. The authors discuss some prioritised thematic perspectives with an emphasis on liberating paths, and expand the ongoing discussion on the methodology of theology into new areas. Themes such as interreligious plurality, global capitalism, ecumenical liberation theology, eco-anxiety and the anthropocene, postcolonialism, gender, neo-pentecostalism, world theology, and reconciliation are examined in situated depth. Additionally, voices from Indigenous lands, Latin America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Europe and North America enter into a dialogue on what it means to contextualise theology in an increasingly globalised and ever-changing world. Such a comprehensive discussion of new ways of thinking about and doing contextual theology will be of great use to scholars in Theology, Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, Political Science, Gender Studies, Environmental Humanities, and Global Studies.
The Thomistic Response to the Nouvelle Théologie: Concerning
the Truth of Dogma and the Nature of Theology retrieves the
most important and largely forgotten exchanges in the
mid-20th-century debate ...surrounding ressourcement thinkers. It
makes available new translations of works by the leading Thomists
in the exchange: Dominican Fathers Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange,
Michel Labourdette, Marie-Joseph Nicolas, and Raymond Bruckberger.
In addition to a lengthy historical and theological introduction,
the volume contains sixteen articles, thirteen of which have never
appeared in English. All the major critical responses of the
Dominican Thomists to the nouvelle théologie are here presented
chronologically according to the primary debates carried on,
respectively, in the journals Revue Thomiste and
Angelicum . A lengthy introduction describes the unfolding
of the entire debate, article by article, and explains and
references the ressourcement interventions. Unfortunately, the
history of this important debate is largely surrounded by polemics,
half-truths, caricatures, and journalistic soundbites. In the
articles gathered in this volume, along with the accompanying
introduction, the Toulouse and Roman Dominicans speak in their own
voice. The central theses that define the two sides of the debate
are sympathetically set forth. However, the texts gathered here
show the immense lengths to which the Thomists went to initiate an
authentic and fraternal theological dialogue with the nouveaux
théologiens. Frs. Labourdette and Nicolas repeatedly argued for the
importance of ressourcement work: they applauded its historical
efforts, and they were generally sympathetic and complementary
(although always pointed and persistent in gently expressing their
concerns). Even Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange-whose infamous intervention
is remembered as being a theological "atomic bomb"-is revealed as
being no more guilty of escalation than the Dominicans'
interlocutors in their own responses to him and Fr. Labourdette.
This volume will greatly aid in the task of theological and
historical reconstruction and will, undoubtedly, assist in a
certain rapprochement between the two sides, as the essential
texts, concerns, and theological arguments are made available in
their entirety to professional and lay anglophone readers.
The two-fold task of A Symphony of Distances is to provide
an overview of Hans Urs von Balthasar's use of distance imagery
with regard to personal distinctions in the Holy Trinity and to
offer a ...critical analysis of him as a modern Catholic theologian. A
metaphor of "distance" integrates all of Balthasar's theological
thought as a primary cipher for the many symbols through which he
reads the Christian theological tradition in a trinitarian and
eschatological mode. The book follows a chronological, four-stage
development of Balthasar's trinitarianism through the lens of this
distance metaphor as it occurs across representative texts. The
critical analysis employs the conceit of a symphony of four musical
movements that correspond to four varieties of theological
distance. These distances show certain correspondences of God's
creation and redemption of the world-marked by the first two
"distances"-with the relations of the divine persons to each other
in the economy of salvation and in the eternal Trinity
itself-marked by the third and fourth distances. "Listening" to the
four movements of Balthasar's theological distances enables his
readers to "hear" the themes of all four movements in the ascending
order of richness, complexity, and inclusivity over the long
development of his thought. This fundamentally positive approach of
A Symphony of Distances allows for a thorough critique of
the internal consistency of Balthasar's applied method, of the
controversial use of gendered trinitarian notions in his
speculations on divine pathos, and of his adequacy to the tasks of
modern theology. The final judgment is that Balthasar's theology of
distance can be accepted, with reservations, as a positive element
of his contribution to contemporary trinitarian theology. The book
can thus serve as a critical reference for readers who find
Balthasar's notion of trinitarian distance, and indeed his
trinitarianism as a whole, to be compelling, confusing, or
frustrating.
When I attended my first Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Annual Meeting in November of 1987 after having begun seminary teaching earlier that fall, there was no Book of Psalms program unit. Here ...are his words from his volume's "Implications for Further Work": Reading individual psalms via their Sitz im Leben, though useful, speculates on one historical slice of the Psalms and fails to grasp its role in the larger programmatic message as we have shown. ...I would date the end of the dominance of form criticism not to Wilson's 1985 work, but rather to the 1968 SBL presidential address by James Muilenburg, "Form Criticism and Beyond," in which he suggested that form criticism, while it could remain useful, "has outrun its course. Spieckermann wants interpreters to attend to the "individuality of every single psalm," and this is precisely what Muilenburg and Alonso Schökel were advocating.9 As Muilenburg put it, "What I am interested in, above all, is understanding the nature of Hebrew literary composition, in exhibiting the structural patterns that are employed for the fashioning of a literary unit, whether in poetry or prose, and in discerning the many and various devices by which the predications are formulated and ordered into a unified whole.
A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology presents for the first time in English key passages from the Summa Halensis, one of the first major installments in the summa genre for which scholasticism ...became famous. This systematic work of philosophy and theology was collaboratively written mostly between 1236 and 1245 by the founding members of the Franciscan school, such as Alexander of Hales and John of La Rochelle, who worked at the recently founded University of Paris.Modern scholarship has often dismissed this early Franciscan intellectual tradition as unoriginal, merely systematizing the Augustinian tradition in light of the rediscovery of Aristotle, paving the way for truly revolutionary figures like John Duns Scotus. But as the selections in this reader show, it was this earlier generation that initiated this break with precedent. The compilers of the Summa Halensis first articulated many positions that eventually become closely associated with the Franciscan tradition on issues like the nature of God, the proof for God’s existence, free will, the transcendentals, and Christology. This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the ways in which medieval thinkers employed philosophical concepts in a theological context as well as the evolution of Franciscan thought and its legacy to modernity.A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.
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