Spirit and the Obligation of Social Flesh PDF Download

Author: Sharon V. Betcher
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823253929
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Drawing on philosophical reflection, spiritual and religious values, and somatic practice, Spirit and the Obligation of Social Flesh offers guidance for moving amidst the affective dynamics that animate the streets of the global cities now amassing around our planet. Here theology turns decidedly secular. In urban medieval Europe, seculars were uncloistered persons who carried their spiritual passion and sense of an obligated life into daily circumambulations of the city. Seculars lived in the city, on behalf of the city, but—contrary to the new profit economy of the time—with a different locus of value: spirit. Betcher argues that for seculars today the possibility of a devoted life, the practice of felicity in history, still remains. Spirit now names a necessary “prosthesis,” a locus for regenerating the elemental commons of our interdependent flesh and thus for cultivating spacious and fearless empathy, forbearance, and generosity. Her theological poetics, though based in Christianity, are frequently in conversation with other religions resident in our postcolonial cities.

Author: James M. Ault, Jr.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375702385
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
In an attempt to understand the growing popularity and influence of Christian fundamentalism, sociologist and documentary filmmaker James Ault spent three years inside the world of a Massachusetts fundamentalist church.Spirit and Flesh takes us into worship services, home Bible studies, youth events, men’s prayer breakfasts, and bitter conflicts leading to a church split. We come to know the members of the congregation and see how the church acts as an extended family that provides support and security along with occasional tensions. Intimate and rigorously fair-minded, Spirit and Flesh will help non-religious readers better understand their fellow citizens, and will allow devout readers to see themselves through the eyes of a sympathetic outsider.

Author: William S. Campbell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567669432
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
William S. Campbell provides a comprehensive commentary on Paul's most challenging letter. In conversation with reception history and previous scholarship, he emphasizes the contextuality of Romans as a letter to Rome, using social identity theory combined with historical, literary and theological perspectives to arrive at a coherent reading of the entire letter. Because Paul has never visited Rome and is not the founder of the Christ-movement there, Campbell argues that his guidance and teaching are formulated more cautiously than in his other letters. Yet the long list of people who had previous links with him and his mission to the 'gentiles' demonstrates that Paul is well-informed about the situation in Rome and addresses issues that have arisen. With Christ the Messianic Time is beginning, but there was some lack of clarity in Rome about the implications of this for Jews and gentiles. Rather than ethne in Christ replacing Israel, as some in Rome possibly concluded, Campbell stresses that Paul affirms the irrevocable calling of Israel, and that simultaneously the identity of ethne in Christ is also called alongside the people Israel; thus, the integrity of the identity of both is affirmed as indispensable for God's purpose now revealed in Christ. Campbell fully demonstrates how Paul in Romans achieves this by the social and theological intertwining of the message of the gospel.

Author: Channing L. Crisler
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725263432
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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An Intertextual Commentary on Romans is an exhaustive treatment of the hundreds of Old Testament citations, allusions, and echoes embedded in Paul’s most famous epistle. As many scholars have acknowledged, to understand Paul’s engagement with Israel’s Scriptures is to understand Romans. Despite this acknowledgement, there is a dearth of reference works in which the primary focus is how the Old Testament impacts Paul’s argument from Romans 1:1 to 16:27. This four-volume commentary aims to provide just such a reference. The interplay between Romans and its vast sea of Old Testament pre-texts produces unstated points of resonance that illuminate Paul’s rhetorical argument from the letter’s opening to its closing doxology. Volume 2 examines the scriptural pre-texts in Romans 5:1—8:39. While this portion of Romans contains only one full citation, it is teeming with scriptural allusions and echoes that are critical to understanding Paul’s argumentation. Crisler leaves no intertextual stone unturned as he probes the subtext of one of the richest sections in the entire Pauline corpus. From Paul’s key transition in Romans 5:1 to his poetic flourish in 8:31–39, and everywhere in between, Crisler explores the interplay between the apostle’s endless engagement with Israel’s Scriptures and his message to the Christians in Rome. This volume contributes to the commentary’s overarching aim which is to provide scholars, interpreters, and students with verse by verse analysis of how Israel’s Scriptures impact almost every clause of Paul’s most famous letter.

Author: Stephanie N. Arel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319425927
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book addresses the eclipse of shame in Christian theology by showing how shame emerges in Christian texts and practice in ways that can be neither assimilated into a discourses of guilt nor dissociated from embodiment. Stephanie N. Arel argues that the traditional focus on guilt obscures shame by perpetuating the image of the lonely sinner in guilt. Drawing on recent studies in affect and attachment theories to frame the theological analysis, the text examines the theological anthropological writings of Augustine and Reinhold Niebuhr, the interpretation of empathy by Edith Stein, and moments of touch in Christian praxis. Bringing the affective dynamics of shame to the forefront enables theologians and religious leaders to identify where shame emerges in language and human behavior. The text expands work in trauma theory, providing a multi-layered theological lens for engaging shame and accompanying suffering.

Author: Al Barrett
Publisher: SCM Press
ISBN: 0334059909
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
How can we develop and embody an ecclesiology, in contexts of urban marginality, that is radically receptive to the gifts and challenges of the agency of our non-Christian neighbours? Drawing on resources from political theologies, and in particular conversation with Graham Ward and Romand Coles, this book challenges our lazy understanding of receptivity, digging deep to uncover a rich theological seam which has the potential to radically alter how theologians think about what we draw from urban places. It offers a game changing liberative theology rooted not in the global south but from a position of self-critical privilege.

Author: Rebecca F. Spurrier
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823285545
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
How do communities consent to difference? How do they recognize and create the space and time necessary for the differences and disabilities of those who constitute them? Christian congregations often make assumptions about the shared abilities, practices, and experiences that are necessary for communal worship. The author of this provocative new book takes a hard look at these assumptions through a detailed ethnographic study of an unusual religious community where more than half the congregants live with diagnoses of mental illness, many coming to the church from personal care homes or independent living facilities. Here, people’s participation in worship disrupts and extends the formal orders of worship. Whenever one worships God at Sacred Family Church, there is someone who is doing it differently. Here, the author argues, the central elements and the participation in the symbols of Christian worship raise questions rather than supply clear markers of unity, prompting the question, What do you need in order to have a church that assumes difference at its heart? Based on three years of ethnographic research, The Disabled Church describes how the Sacred Family community, comprising people with very different mental abilities, backgrounds, and resources, sustains and embodies a common religious identity. It explores how an ethic of difference is both helped and hindered by a church’s embodied theology. Paying careful attention to how these congregants improvise forms of access to a common liturgy, this book offers a groundbreaking theology of worship that engages both the fragility and beauty revealed by difference within the church. As liturgy requires consent to difference rather than coercion, an aesthetic approach to differences within Christian liturgy provides a frame for congregations and Christian liturgists to pay attention to the differences and disabilities of worshippers. This book creates a distinctive conversation between critical disability studies, liturgical aesthetics, and ethnographic theology, offering an original perspective on the relationship between beauty and disability within Christian communities. Here is a transformational theological aesthetics of Christian liturgy that prioritizes human difference and argues for the importance of the Disabled Church.

Author: P. W. P. Fagerstjerna
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Author: Trevor George Hunsberger Bechtel
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498297846
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
One day, Matthew Eaton was walking through an impromptu animal shelter display at his local pet store when suddenly an eight-month-old kitten dug his claws into Eaton’s flesh. Eaton recognized that the “eyes of this cat and the curve of his claw” compelled a response analogous to those found in the writings of Buber, Levinas, and Derrida. And not just Eaton but a whole community of theologians have found themselves in an encounter with particular places and animals that demands rich theological reflection. Eaton enlisted fellow editors Harvie and Bechtel to collect the essays in this volume, in which theologians listen to horses, rats, snakes, cats, dogs, and the earth itself, who become new theological voices demanding a response. In this volume, the voice of the more-than-human world is heard as making theology possible. These essays suggest that what we say theologically represents not simply ideas of our own making subsequently superimposed onto the natural world through our own discovery, but rather flow from an expressive Earth. With additional contributions from: Kimberly Carfore Lisa E. Dahill Celia Deane-Drummond Heather Eaton Nathan Kowalsky Abigail Lofte Jame Schaefer Cristina D. Vanin Mark Wallace Grace Y. Kao Chris Carter John Berkman Laura Hobgood

Author: Walter Earl Fluker
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479897183
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Honorable Mention, Theology and Religious Studies PROSE Award A powerful insight into the historical and cultural roles of the Black church If we are in a post-racial era, then what is the future of the Black Church? If the US will at some time in the future be free from discrimination and prejudices that are based on race how will that affect the church’s very identity? In The Ground Has Shifted, Walter Earl Fluker passionately and thoroughly discusses the historical and current role of the Black church and argues that the older race-based language and metaphors of religious discourse have outlived their utility. He offers instead a larger, global vision for the Black church that focuses on young Black men and other disenfranchised groups who have been left behind in a world of globalized capital. Lyrically written with an emphasis on the dynamic and fluid movement of life itself, Fluker argues that the church must find new ways to use race as an emancipatory instrument if it is to remain central in Black life, and he points the way for a new generation of church leaders, scholars and activists to reclaim the Black church’s historical identity and to turn to the task of infusing character, civility, and a sense of community among its congregants.