bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Mundane Work of the Spirit
Authors: Mclelland Joseph
Published: February 2011

“One could almost suggest a strategy of the Spirit, who reconciles two enemies not by disclosing an underlying harmony, but by creating a new man, a man between, a third thing, upsetting the old tension and introducing a surprising way ahead for both. We are the Holy Spirit's experiment in new humanity, a poor thing offered to the world because we happen to have laughed in response to God's good news.”
Be My Guest
Authors: Hiltner Seward
Published: February 2011

“It upsets completely all the traditions of hospitality that come to us from land, sea, desert, and even saloon, not to say church. … For the first time, there is hospitality with no risk of contamination. … And the best of it is they can never, officially, be anything but grateful. … Good things may also be done that were not possible before. Especially when you love them but cannot stand them.”
Concepts, Symbols, and Sentences
Authors: Scharlemann Robert P.
Published: February 2011

“Ontology is the explanation of what it means to say ‘x is’ and theology is the explanation of what it means to say ‘God does x.’ If, however, the sentence form conveys a content in addition to that of the terms which constitute it, then the combination of the universal subject and the universal object into ‘God is’ describes a domain that is neither simply theology nor simply ontology. It might be called theontology.”
Conscience and the Draft
Authors: Minear Lawrence
Published: February 2011

“Time will tell, but we do sincerely believe that we are going to have to review all of our deferred students and single men to meet future calls.”

“What are you going to do with the young men whom you select who not believe in the war? Are you going to make them fight? Yes; you propose to make them fight in this war, whether they think it just or not”
How Adequate is the New Hermeneutic?
Authors: Achtemeier Paul J.
Published: February 2011

“To the extent that the ‘new’ hermeneutic has brought to the forefront of theological discussion the problem of hermeneutics, one must, I would argue, support it, since the validity of any theological or exegetical statement is in direct proportion to the validity of the hermeneutical method upon which it is based. But we must ask whether or not this ‘new’ hermeneutic is in fact adequate to the task it has set for itself, and to which it calls theological thinking.”
Taking the Death-of-God Seriously
Authors: Shideler Emerson W.
Published: February 2011

“It must be insisted that this absence or death of God is no mere cynicism or loss of faith to be reproved as moral irresponsibility, or dismissed as a failure correctly to read the evidence. This is a mood of our time to which Christian theology must speak intelligibly. … It may not represent everybody, but it does represent a large segment, of young people in particular, to whom the traditional language and institutional forms of Christianity seem very empty. However, this theology is more than a diagnosis. It is also a prescription, and a prescription which offers the disease as the cure.”
Youth, Establishments, and Protest
Authors: Gandy Samuel L.
Published: February 2011

“Students on the whole did not seek to go beyond the conventional and accepted channels of campus organization until they discovered that organization could not bring itself into position of involvement with the issue of revolution, revolt, or protest. It was then that the younger generation, its ranks already swollen by the non-organization antagonists, began to seek more indigenous ways by which to effect social change.

“It is to be noted that the religious leader (chaplain) differs from his faculty colleague in that when a crisis involving justice and equality is upon him or within the college environs, he must act. Failure to act is immoral. The religious leader or chaplain must seek to proclaim justice and equality even at the risk of rejection and persecution.”
Atheism in Our Time
Authors: McCracken Robert J.
Published: February 2011

“When I meet people who are contemptuous of the ‘God is dead’ theologians, and who are cocksure about their own belief in God, and who talk about him as if he were a man on the street and allow themselves unlimited license of dogmatic affirmation about the most profound questions of existence, I wonder whether they are alive to what is going on.”
Religious Pluralism and World Community
Authors: Jurji Edward J.
Published: February 2011

“Invariably the great religions constitute merger between classical and popular strains. A symbol of such symbiosis was once advanced by John Clark Archer of Yale. It took the form of the letter X on its side, as the Romans wrote it to signify 1000. Thus one stroke stood for mythical folklore and sundry visible elements of mass religion as they appear in rite and cult. The other stroke represented classical, conceptual, and scriptural norms of faith and order.

“These two strokes of the symbol may be conceived in terms of two historical streams flowing down from antiquity. Intersecting at a given point in time, they form a traffic circle, so to say, affording both transit and interchange for future direction.
The Irenic Potential of Religions
Authors: Smith Huston
Published: February 2011

“Do religions that stress love as the prime condition of peace lend themselves more to supporting immediate peace, while prophetic religions (stressing justice as prerequisite for enduring peace) stand more willing to sacrifice immediate peace for the sake of a future peace they hope will be more lasting? These are interesting and important questions, but they are subsidiary. The point that is not subsidiary is that all the high religions have embedded within them a peace potential. … Are there principles that can guide us toward maximizing the peace potential in our several faiths?”
Lev Shestov: A Russian Jewish Existentialist
Authors: Martin Bernard
Published: February 2011

“What Shestov was fundamentally concerned with throughout his lifetime was to criticize the timidity and lack of imagination of traditional philosophy, with its view that metaphysical truth flows solely from obedience and passive submission to the structures of being given in experience, and to insist instead that ultimate reality transcends the categories of rationalist metaphysics and scientific method and that the truth about it is to be discovered through the untram-meled soaring of the spirit and through daring flights of the imagination. It may be said that so to insist is to abandon philosophy for poetry and art, but Shestov himself always maintained that philosophy is indeed, or rather should be, more art than science.”
Religious Pluralism and Social Welfare
Authors: Harrison Paul M.
Published: February 2011

“In this situation social workers are faced with a permanent dilemma. In their field activities, the workers must not assume a judgmental and moral stance in their therapeutic relation to the client public, but at the same time they must encourage a spirit of moral judgment within a society whose structures and values sustain and excuse exploitation and injustice. It is at this point in the development of a new social theory of values, and in the education and evangelizing work that is so necessary, that it remains profitable, even imperative, for social work to maintain its alliance with religion.”
Architectural Anachronism
Authors: Huxtable Ada Louise
Published: February 2011

“The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, on Morningside Heights [New York], was conceived in 1891 as the world's largest and latest of the great medieval line … it doen't really matter how the Cathedral is finished now. … You can only finish a super-anachronism like St. John the Divine with more of the same. … ‘How do you keep God on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village?’ The question, posed by the Tenth Church of Christ, Scientist, at 171 Macdougal Street, is to be answered by remodeling the old building. … The new front promises to be not much better than bleak … we can only hope that God gets the message. In terms of art and history, once more, the church has not.”
Religion in Canada: A Study in Polarities
Authors: McLelland Joseph C.
Published: February 2011

“The Christian Pavilion at Expo '67, the International Exhibition at Montreal, is a bold annunciation of what's happening. Truly ecumenical— the fruit of eight cooperating churches including the Roman Catholic—the controversial building attempts to meet the challenge and need of our electronic age by opting for contemporary symbols of faith rather than historical and traditional ones. Critics aplenty, mostly within the churches, are charging that it is a surrender to the theories of Marshall McLuhan, Canada's prophet of technological environment. The lack of familiar and identifiable Christian symbols, and the use of modern photographs showing the variety of human life and problems, offend popular piety and theological conservatism.”
The Clown in Contemporary Art
Authors: Miller Samuel H.
Published: February 2011

“Has the horror and the terror of the last years, of Dachau and Hiroshima, and the sickening shame of it all, left us without recourse to the ritual of laughter, by which we might be cleansed? Has life been so flattened out by the industrial juggernaut of senseless speed and cluttered claptrap that men can utter only one note, like a mechanical toy, and the complex music of humor, that rare blend of the solemn and the foolish, of the tender and the cruel, cannot be voiced? … Would one be treading on too holy ground, would one be speaking offensively, if he were to suggest that the reason there is so little space for a Doppelger, a clown, may be the same reason for there being so little space for a Christ? He, too, was incognito, disguised in the flesh, of no reputation.”
Two Currents in the Sociology of Religion
Authors: Harrison Paul M.
Published: February 2011

“It is widely assumed … that scholars of religion, especially historians and sociologists, should by some magic immunity stand aloof from the heady disputes that are splitting ministers into churchmen and non-churchmen and dividing the theologians into theists and dead-theists … But neither sociology nor history has yet developed a device that enables scholars to be at once deeply interested in their subject and perfectly disinterested with respect to the issues involved in it.”
A Theology of Rebellion
Authors: Smith Rolland F.
Published: February 2011

“A revolution is a successful rebellion; the victory has been won and the new system has been established. A rebellion is a continual revolution; the new system is ever in process of being established and the victory or victories are always still ahead. … Revolution becomes an absolute negation of the past; it absolutizes its present or future forms and so becomes demonic and nihilistic. … There is an historical connection between rebellious thought and Judeo-Christian thought.”
Shape and Style of the Church Tomorrow
Authors: Rose Stephen C.
Published: February 2011

“Biblical faith does not rest on the success or failure of the world on human terms, which is to say, Christians are called at once to affirm the the world with every fiber of their being, while being aware that there is another world which is perfect. I am even prepared to argue, if I must, that such a paradoxical posture is essential to a truly secular style of life. Anyone who knows the secular world will not be bemused by its romantic frontiers. Such frontiers may exist; then again they may not. Much churchly frustration today derives from the romantic notion that the grass is greener on the other side. … The church must neither reject nor idolize secular society … her fundamental task is to recover her own integrity.”
Cosmic Purpose and Self-Identity
Authors: Callahan Daniel
Published: February 2011

“Christianity has tried to sustain three theological convictions, each with a psychological correlate: (1) man's nature needs to be grounded in something transcending his nature; he cannot create an ultimately valid self-identity apart from such a ground; (2) man is genuinely free; a major element in his freedom is the ability to choose a self-identity which ignores the ground of his nature and freedom, though he does so at his own risk; (3) man needs and can have hope that the cosmos (of which he is a part) has a potential direction and goal; his ultimate self-identity requires the capacity to envision his own future as coherent with that of a meaningful universe.”
Biblical Theology in a Time of Confusion
Authors: Beker J. Christiaan
Published: February 2011

“The recent past has witnessed too much imperialism by the biblical theologian. This is primarily due to the claims of Barth and Bultmann who tended to equate biblical theology with the theological enterprise as such. The critical function of biblical theology should be much more modest, to see to what extent biblical insights can function in the various fields which constitute the theological enterprise. The function of biblical theology is correlation, not domination. The imperialism of biblical theology in the recent past has created a backlash which now threatens to isolate the Bible from today's theological quest. Bleak days lie ahead for biblical studies unless biblical theology is willing to come to terms with its own imperialism.”
The Regenerative Art of Adolph Gottlieb
Authors: Eversole Finley
Published: February 2011

“And yet I think man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.”—Dostoevsky

“The light, the light, the seeking, the searching, in chaos, in chaos.”—A Maori Text

“My favorite symbols were those which I didn't understand.”—Adolph Gottlieb
The Secular Search for Religious Experience
Authors: Cox Harvey G.
Published: February 2011

“Our culture is now struggling to escape both nihilism and cynicism. … To do so, however, we will require a new type of religious sensibility. That sensibility must contribute to the search for style and vision. It must allow us to combine critical awareness and religious immediacy, sophistication and ecstasy. … The new religious sensibility I refer to is the comic elan, the spirit of festivity and fantasy which one finds at the creative edges of the churches and in the religious underground.”
A Psycho-Theological Appraisal of the New Left
Authors: Lapsley James N.
Published: February 2011

“If a fundamental change is really taking place in the personality structure of persons coming of age, as some people think, then the implications are especially profound for those of us who seek to minister directly to persons. … Young people no longer experience guilt and shame the way we did and still do. They don't need alcohol or the gospel to release them from guilt. … They reject ‘up-tight’ middle class values as rigid, cerebral, and institutional role-bound. … Guilt stems from an apprehension of some code or law violated. … Shame stems from an apprehension of failure.”
God's Promises and Man's
Authors: Hiltner Seward
Published: February 2011

“For when God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself, saying, ‘Surely I will bless you and multiply you.’ And thus Abraham, having patiently endured, obtained the promise. Men indeed swear by a greater than themselves, and in all their disputes an oath is final for confirmation. So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he interposed with an oath, so that through two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible that God should prove false, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to seize the hope set before us. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.”
1976 or 1984: On Celebrating Revolution
Authors: Smylie James H.
Published: February 2011

In a sense, all citizens of the United States are sons and daughters of the American Revolution, and the sobering thing about cries for law and order in our day is that many citizens seem to forget that revolution is as American as cherry pie. Since many citizens will be drawn into the bicentennial celebrations, the American Revolution offers a valuable point of contact for a discussion of what is now going on throughout the country and the world. 1976 is far too important to be left to the professional historians or playwrights.
The Person of Jesus and the Kingdom of God
Authors: Gärtner Bertil E.
Published: February 2011

“In this essay we can only consider how the concept of the Kingdom of God was used before and after the resurrection. This comparison will shed light on the authority of Jesus, a crucial element in the origin of christology; and this comparison will help explain the shift from Jesus' proclamation of the Kingdom to the primitive church's kerygma and its development of christology. We will find that there is a definite difference between Jesus' preaching and the teaching of the early church, but we will also detect a continuity between them in terms of the person of Jesus.”
Myth and the Biblical Tradition
Authors: Anderson Bernhard W.
Published: February 2011

“The primary ‘images’ which shaped Israel's religious consciousness did not arise out of the reservoir of pagan myths or from the collective unconscious. … Rather, biblical imagination was inspired by certain ‘normative’ motifs which were actually given to Israel through her own unique, historical experience. … These motifs gathered unto themselves traditions once independent, were recapitulated in new historical situations, were supplemented by still other motifs born out of Israel's history, and attracted pagan images which, in the process of appropriation, were transformed to enhance the Israelite story with a cosmic and universal meaning.”
The Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Church in Action
Authors: King Coretta Scott
Published: February 2011

“Sometimes—yes sometimes—the good Lord … I say the good Lord … accepts his own perfection, and closes his eyes, and goes ahead, and takes his own good time, and he makes himself a man. Yes! And sometimes that man gets hold of the idea of what he's supposed to do in this world, and he gets an idea of what it is possible for him to do. And that man lets that idea guide him as he grows and struggles, and stumbles, and sorrows … until finally he comes into his own God-given shape, and achieves his own individual and lonely place in this world. It don't happen often. Oh, no! But when it does, then even the stones will cry out in witness to his vision, and the hills and towers will echo his words and deeds, and his example will live in the breasts of men forever. … So you look at him awhile, and be thankful—that the Lord let such a man touch our lives, even if it were only for a little while.”
Communication and Community
Authors: Minear Paul S.
Published: February 2011

“… conversation marks the voluntary opening of an invisible door that ends an inner isolation between persons. Their meeting and their conversation create for both a new situation out of which unpredictable developments may emerge. A genuine dialogue produces a new orientation for both participants. Two centers gravitate together, so that by standing at the same point each comes to see what the other sees. … In speech, a common past is both discovered and created…. Any genuine dialogue is worth studying, for in it life-stories are being told and re-told as a way of celebrating the death of an older world (before this particular meeting) and the birth of a new (in which these two are, as it were charter members).
Technological Utopia and the Theology of Hope
Authors: Vaux Kenneth
Published: February 2011

Man responsibly engages in technologic or cybernetic mastery of the environment as he acknowledges that his life is situated in the creative action of God, as he recognizes the fact that his ingenuity is rooted in his createdness Imago Dei, as he perceives that world order and change are dynamically given by the perpetual impulse of the divine Spirit …. His own creative activity is not pioneering in the sense that he works alone. He is co-worker as divine power penetrates his conceptualization, decision-making, and implementation.
Purpose in the university
Authors: Billington James H.
Published: February 2011

“St. Matthew … tells us about the type of community that Jesus developed out of Daniel's tradition. The scene had moved in less than two centuries from the Seleucid Empire of Daniel's time to the far more universal and pretentious Roman Empire of Caesar Augustus. Those who sought to remain faithful to the righteous God of a captive people argued over how to get involved in the Jerusalem of Jesus' time.

“There were the Zealots—the original revolutionary guerrilla warriors. The Pharisees preached sublime and self-demanding fidelity to the spirit as well as the letter of the law. And if the Pharisees were the party of law, the Sadducees were the party of order—urging creative cooperation with Rome to bring everyone back together and insure the survival of tradition.

Finally there were the Essenes: ascetic communes of withdrawal and private salvation.

“But Jesus chose none of these available options.”
Black Experience and the Bible
Authors: Bennett Robert A.
Published: February 2011

“The black experience in America is not the Jewish-Christian experience in ancient Palestine. But as the tale of sorrows of a people awaiting deliverance, the black narrative has a message consistent with the biblical witness though not to be found in that witness. It is a testimony of its own, distinct from Scripture even as it would proclaim its word to us in biblical images and in the categories of scriptural revelation … Though not of canonical status, the story of the black man in America is a self-validating account of faith which when heard and heeded, helps black and white respond more creatively to the divine word for our present situation.”
Kazantzakis: Prophet of Non-Hope
Authors: Calian Carnegie Samuel
Published: February 2011

“Kazantzakis was indeed a soul in search of himself. … In his search for God, he became a prophet of non-hope. For him, 'a world without God has no foundations, but a world without justice cannot be governed'…. His theology is both radically Christian and non-Christian. He has rightly stressed the need for freedom in our struggle to find meaning in life. He has taken a necessary look at the abuses of religiosity in the name of Christ and has shown a divine passion to keep life human.”
Art and the Art of Theology
Authors: Shideler Mary McDermott
Published: February 2011

“The most concrete manifestations of a theology, apart from words, occur in worship and ethics. How deeply any particular theologian should engage in such concrete affairs must, of course, be left to his individual decision. The artist can teach him, however, that the effort toward con-creteness—incarnation—will infuse his work with a vitality that cannot be obtained in any other way, and will test its validity more severely than any other form of examination.”
Searching for “IT”
Authors: Biallas Leonard J.
Published: February 2011

“By finding meaning through emotions and practical action…young people today are emphasizing the dimension of love. For them, salvation is attained by the creation of a loving situation. The attainment of community, with its concomitant release of power, self-discovery, and decision to love, is salvation. It is a contemporary way of trying to find God. John's First Epistle stresses that ‘God is love’ (I Jn. 4: 8), and today young adults are trying to turn the equation around to read ‘Love is God.’”
Is Revelation Coherent?
Authors: Griffin David
Published: February 2011

“It is certainly the case that much theological talk about revelation has been associated with an anti-rational approach to religious truth; in fact, much of the motivation in modern theology for making revelation a central concept has been to have a starting point immune from the onslaughts of rational criticism, criticism based on biblical studies, the history of religions, hostile world views, and epistemologies, and the demands of logic and morality. But the idea of revelation as such has no necessary connection with irrational approaches in the quest for truth.”
Other-Worldly Christianity: Some Positive Considerations
Authors: Williams Jay G.
Published: February 2011

“It is true that our political and social problems are monumental and need solution, but it may very well be that at their root is a deep spiritual crisis which makes any cleaning-up operations frustrating illusions. The truth is that we have lost touch with the depth of being and hence have become alienated from ourselves, from each other, and from our environment as a whole. The man who is divorced from his own unconscious can hardly be reconciled with his brother. Our society, like Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together by all the King's horses and men, no matter how well financed they be. In fact, they may only make matters worse.”
Abortion: Woman's Right and Legal Problem
Authors: Moody Howard
Published: February 2011

Howard Moody is pastor of Judson Memorial Church in New York City and a Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. In 1967, Moody brought together a small group of clergymen to help counsel women with “problem pregnancies.” Risking public censure and criminal prosecution, the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion referred thousands of women for safe abortions. In addition, Moody and others formed a coalition to support the passage of a bill to legalize abortion. The New York Legislature passed such a bill in April, 1970, which permits abortions by licensed physicians within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. On July 1, 1970, the New York Clergy Consultation Service, which had served as a model for other organizations in other states, was disbanded and reconstituted as Clergy and Lay Advocates for Hospital Abortion Performance. The new organization is designed to deal with local restrictions on abortions and the growth of high-priced “abortion brokers.” This article is reprinted from the March 8, 1971 issue of Christianity and Crisis, Copyright © 1971 by Christianity and Crisis, Inc. The article is used with permission and is reprinted not only as a commentary on a controversial issue but as a case-study of the problems involved when clergy and churches take on the role of social and cultural change-agents. It's definitely not easy, but apparently it can be done. Dr. Moody wishes to acknowledge the assistance of his associate, Arlene Carmen.
Styles of Theological Reflection for the Future
Authors: Baum Gregory
Published: February 2011

Gregory Baum, O.S.A., a member of the Editorial Council of Theology Today, teaches at St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto and is the editor of The Ecumenist. The following article is his response to and analysis of the Consultation on Styles of Theological Reflection for the Future, held at the University of Kansas, August 1–6, 1971. The Consultation was sponsored by United Ministries in Higher Education, the Kansas School of Religion at the University of Kansas, and the National Campus Ministry Association, Regions Three and Four.
Eclipse of Creation
Authors: Hendry George S.
Published: February 2011

“Not only is creation in eclipse in contemporary theology; it has ceased to play any significant part in popular piety. It is noteworthy that when occasion calls for a brief, summary statement of faith, creation is often passed over…. An obvious alternative [to abandoning the doctrine of creation] would be to follow the tendency in modern theology, to move the accent from the moment of origination and to refer the doctrine of creation to the continuing dependence of all things on God. … Presumably, [modern man] would be more responsive if creation were presented to him primarily in terms of creatureliness, and the moment of createdness were allowed to fade into the background.”
Infallibility Revisited
Authors: Carey John J.
Published: February 2011

“Anyone who works with the literature of the infallibility debate quickly detects that underlying much of the controversy are some radically different assumptions about theological method…. It is abundantly clear from Küng's earlier works that he takes biblical categories as normative, accepts and draws upon insights of critical biblical scholarship (both Protestant and Catholic), and deals with Roman Catholic thought primarily through historical analysis. While this means that Küng is probably the most intelligible and persuasive Roman Catholic theologian for a Protestant to read, it also goes against the grain of the scholasticism and transcendentalism that have prevailed in many centers of Roman Catholic thought.”
Axioms of Ecumenical History
Authors: Van Dusen Henry P.
Published: February 2011

“Up to the eve of the nineteenth century, hardly a single organized Christian fellowship existed, let alone organization across denominational lines; in contrast, at mid-point in the twentieth century, there are thousands of vigorously functioning agencies of trans-denominational collaboration. In these latter days, the practice of Christians with respect to the unity of Christ's church has begun to accord with their profession. How can we account for this newness, the novelty of the modern movement of Christian unity? What are the underlying causes, the explanation of this amazing, wholly unprecedented reversal of previous practice?”
The Trial of Jesus in an Age of Trials
Authors: O'Meara Thomas F.
Published: February 2011

“Political trials and political prisoners accuse their society of being frozen in what is wrong. The legal system must take its course, but in and through the judicial process itself, trials raise the agonizing and ultimately insoluble conflict between man and his laws. The courtroom offers a platform for critical and prophetic views and the deeper questions of whether law and court process are identical with what is good and true. The jurisprudential and the political are not enough; the movement struggles beyond to the 'theological.'”
God's Holy People
Authors: Marks John H.
Published: February 2011

“To be the people of God in biblical terms means to live with the symbols of Exodus, Promised Land, covenant, and salvation: to live by grace. The complexities, evils, and values of statehood are the facts of human existence, and every generation must struggle with their comprehension, amelioration, and transmission. To do so as God's people is to rejoice in the opportunity of defining and contributing to the well-being of all men. The duty of God's people does not differ from human duty, but grace should be a gift, known, accepted, and transmitted by any people chosen by God. Grace is defined for us by those biblical symbols which have survived national or social aspirations to indicate a context in which men can learn to love one another.”
A Theological Appraisal
Authors: Despland Michel
Published: February 2011

“The contrast between these two interpretations (Catholic and Jewish) provides us with a starting point for reflection on what it means to be the people of God…. The awareness of these two types of community consciousness and of these two ways of relating particularity and universality will lead us … to ethical reflection on the art of being a particular group in the world, this for the time being identified with the art of being the people of God in the world.”
The Hermeneutics of the Symbol
Authors: Alves Rubem A.
Published: February 2011

“A philosophy of revolution believes that through the dialectics of negation a new social order will be created. The revolutionary act is essentially negative. One hopes that from it a new social order will, of necessity, come into being.… But the symbol of the People of God does not derive its meaning from a vision of history as a process of successive resolutions of its contradictions through revolutions. It is therefore impossible to extract from the Bible any theology of revolution.”
Ecosystems and Systematics
Authors: Kerr Hugh T.
Published: February 2011

“The ecological emergency of our day has reopened the cosmological argument. … To imply that ecology is the matrix of a new systematics, as the Gothic image and the Elizabethan chain were in their time, may seem an extravagant conceit. But if ecological predictions of the immediate future are justified … we may have no choice about the contextual situation in which future deliberations in any area are to be pursued.”
New Data for a New Bonhoeffer
Authors: Brown Robert Mcafee
Published: February 2011

“We now have a picture of Bonhoeffer's own day-to-day life so helpfully filled in that it cannot help but give us a ‘new’ picture of him, and a ‘new’ way of approaching the theological breakthroughs of the last months. … The expanded edition of Letters and Papers from Prison is not so much an increasingly theological document, as it is an increasingly human document.”
Night Thoughts on the “Pieta”
Authors: Atcheson Richard
Published: February 2011

“These violent acts may sometimes appear to have been gratuitous, but they can also be read as messages to mankind, messages that share a common intent—to say that society is false, that man is lonely, that we are estranged from God. … When these things happen, intelligent people everywhere wonder why. What will a man not do in order to signal his fellow men without words?”
Theology and Artistic Experience
Authors: Dillistone F. W.
Published: February 2011

“If the theologian refuses to be confined within the classroom and the laboratory and insists that he must get out and do theology in the common room and the dining room and the playing field and the theater and on the road, then he must take very seriously the crucial and dramatic experiences [of Schönberg, Picasso, and Eliot]. … The revelation through the wrestlings of the musician, the painter, and the poet may indeed be part of the total revelation of the living God.”
The Hidden Agenda in Ben Hur
Authors: Smylie James H.
Published: February 2011

“It may be that Wallace wrote exactly the kind of apologetic that some Americans in the latter part of the nineteenth century needed, an apologetic which allowed them to have God and Mammon too. Wallace wrote a tale as an opiate for the rich and for all those other Americans who thought that they had a divine calling to make it, even to make it big, in the ‘Great Barbecue.’ They could participate in the struggle not only for existence but also a place in the emerging industrial state of the late nineteenth century—and be Christian too.”
Social Change and Christian Ethics
Authors: Fletcher Verne H.
Published: February 2011

“Does future-oriented, humanly-induced change as presently projected constitute a threat to forms and orders established by the Creator? Or, does such change confront us with challenging and promising tasks to which the Christian is in fact called by his faith?”
Classroom as Community
Authors: Kerr Hugh T.
Published: February 2011

“I have been trying to arrange my seminary classes in recent years in accordance with some of these student concerns. I take their quest for a more humane educational environment seriously, and since the initiative should come from the instructional side, I feel some obligation to respond positively. There is little likelihood, I think, of creating a complete campus community in this day and age, but the classroom seems an obvious format with which to experiment.”
Resurrection Appearances as Evidence
Authors: Allen Diogenes
Published: February 2011

God's love becomes incarnate for our sake, suffers for our sake, and promises us that we will be united eternally with him. If that view of God's love can be stated without resurrection appearances (but not without a resurrection), one can believe in it without believing in resurrection appearance stories. When appearances are regarded only as evidence for the gospel, one can believe in the resurrection without believing in the postresurrection appearance accounts, because the appearances do not add anything to the content of the gospel.
Philosophies and Fairytales
Authors: Shideler Mary McDermott
Published: February 2011

We shall not know the truth until we have learned how the various truths are related, each to every other, omitting none. It is a task that the intellect alone cannot perform, because the truths of heart and and spirit cannot be stated as philosophical propositions or mathematical formulae. We shall never be complete in our living, or our theology or science or history, until we have brought into the dance those realms of our selves that are accessible only by means of images, and until our intellects and imaginations and bodies and spirits are integrated.
An Overview of Catholic Theology
Authors: Carey John J.
Published: February 2011

Perhaps an analysis of trends in Roman Catholic theology serves best to remind us that increasingly the problems of ecclesiology, humanness, and meaning transcend ProtestantCatholic categories, and that in reflecting upon these matters we have much to learn from our Roman Catholic counterparts.
The Roots and Fruits of Black Theology
Authors: Washington Joseph R.
Published: February 2011

“In the midst of abiding inequality and poverty based on race, young black Christians are coming to an awareness of their task in formulating a black theology. There is a realism here which is not based on the false claims of nationalists. There is an attempt to attend the low burning fires of Christian universality, for the aim of black theology, like all Christian theology, is to bring more light and truth and action from the word.”
Christian Care of the Retarded
Authors: Hauerwas Stanley M.
Published: February 2011

“The retarded are the sign that all men have significance beyond what they can be for us–our friend, our playmate, our brother; each of us is precious and significant because his being is grounded in God's care. The retarded, the poor, the sick, are particularly intense forms of God's call to every man through the other. God calls us to regard each other as significant as we each exist in him, as we are each God's gift to the other.”
Medicine, Morals, and Religion
Authors: Fletcher Joseph
Published: February 2011

The search for “‘a moral calculus’ is the most crucial problem we have in medical ethics and medical care…. No longer can we turn to the teachings of Jesus or Moses for direct moral guidance. Things are not that simple any more. Medical ethics therefore has to become truly a social ethics, not a simple interpersonal morality. The world is so tied together now that even the words ‘neighbor’ and ‘stranger’ have become archaic. We even need a new ethical language.”
Old and New in The Worshipbook
Authors: Hageman Howard G.
Published: February 2011

“Any general impression is admittedly subjective, but let me make it after several weeks of fairly intensive reading of The Worshipbook. Successful as it may be at provoking us to a new awareness of our horizontal obligations as Christians, it fails notably to provoke us to a similar awareness of our transcendental relationships. The language, with a few lapses, is efficiently expressive, but it fails to be equally evocative.”
A British Look at The Worshipbook
Authors: Routley Erik
Published: February 2011

“Hymn-singing is more than just leaning back and shouting something you have known all your life. … Allied with that is the principle that the church should no longer be something a decent musician holds in contempt. Chorally, it isn't. … But congregational music is still largely a matter of singing ‘the old favorites.’ I'm afraid that being an ‘old favorite’ is not a theologically honorable condition.”
The Moods and Modes of Worship
Authors: Baer Richard A.
Published: February 2011

“Each of the three phenomena we are examining—glossolalia, Quaker silence, and liturgical worship—exhibits a kind of strangeness or peculiar style as over against more usual religious and secular activities. … From time immemorial, saints and mystics have witnessed to the fact that a certain letting go, a being open to, is a necessary requirement for deeper experiences of the presence and power of God.”
Our Faith of Tomorrow
Authors: Harvey Julien
Published: February 2011

“If there is anything from which Christian believers should not suffer, it is really this ‘future shock,’ for they live in a history directed and read from the perspective of its end and wait ‘for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.’ The acceleration of history is our natural milieu, for our God is not a God of the dead but of the living, not a God of nature but of history.”
Biblical Inerrancy: Are We Going Anywhere?
Authors: Coleman Richard J.
Published: February 2011

“The question of biblical inerrancy is remarkably the same now as it was nearly a century ago…. If history is to be our teacher, and biblical inerrancy our illustration, we have somehow not learned from the past.”
The Worth of Words
Authors: Owens Virginia
Published: February 2011

“The Babel story in Genesis 11:1-9 is so rich in associations that one could mine it a good while before exhausting its lode …. Did the tale-bearer intend the pun inherent in the peoples' desire to ‘make a name for themselves’? … At any rate, such was the early writer's explanation for the confusion of tongues he found about him. And the result of the breakdown of communication was, predictably, the dissolution of human society. A more concise, graphic explanation for the state of human affairs could scarcely be imagined. What more is there to say except to document the same phenomenon in our own age?”
Peter De Vries: The Vale of Laughter
Authors: Vries Calvin De
Published: February 2011

“What emerges from De Vries' comic vision is the sense that ambiguity is the form of all human action. And if we are ‘saved,’ it is from self-preoccupation and harshness. The way of ‘salvation’ is suffering, and its benefits are compassion and reconciliation.”
Moltmann's Theology of Contradiction
Authors: Irish Jerry A.
Published: February 2011

“As resurrection hope, liberates believers from death, placing their confidence in God's final victory over death, so the cross enlists their lives in a constant battle against death in all its forms … The believer cannot identify with the promise of resurrection without participation in the cross of the present … ‘Peace with God means conflict with the world.’ ”
Why do Pastors Preach on Social Issues?
Authors: Nelsen Hart M. , Blizzard Samuel W.
Published: February 2011

Editor's note: The following article was prepared in honor of Samuel W. Blizzard, who, after a long and distinguished teaching career, is taking early retirement because of ill health. Since 1957, he has been Professor of Christianity and Society at Princeton Theological Seminary, and since 1970, he has held the Maxwell M. Upson Professorship of Christianity and Society at Princeton. He has also taught at Pennsylvania State University and Union Theological Seminary in New York, as well as serving as the director of both the Russell Sage Foundation's Training for the Ministry Project from 1953 to 1960 and the National Council of Churches' Clergy Research Project from 1957 to 1958. He is the co-author with Emory J. Brown of The Church and the Community and has contributed essays and articles to more than forty books, scholarly journals, and popular periodicals. After receiving his undergraduate degree from Maryville College, he pursued graduate study at Biblical Seminary in New York, Princeton Theological Seminary, Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Hartford Seminary Foundation, and Cornell University, as well as post-graduate work at Mansfield College, Oxford University. Prior to entering academic life, he served Presbyterian parishes in Roselle, New Jersey, and Long Green and Ashland, Maryland.

One of his students, Hart M. Nelsen, prepared this article utilizing Blizzard's highly influential study of clergy roles. Nelsen, a graduate of Occidental College, the University of Northern Iowa, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Vanderbilt University, is Professor of Sociology and Chairperson of the Department of Sociology at The Catholic University of America, as well as a member of the Boys Town Center, a research institute at Catholic University. He is the author of many articles in major sociological journals, the editor (with Raytha L. Yokley and Anne K. Nelsen) of The Black Church in America (1971) and author (with Anne K. Nelsen) of the forthcoming volume, The Black Church in the Sixties.

The data for this article were collected under support from the National Institute of Mental Health (1 R01 MH 16573). His colleagues in the larger study are Raytha L. Yokley and Thomas W. Madron.

Copyright © 1975 by Hart M. Nelsen
My Story and “The Story”
Authors: Brown Robert Mcafee
Published: February 2011

“A story … must reach me on some level to which I can respond, but it must also ‘stretch’ me, pull me beyond where I now am … One of the most telling aspects of ‘The Story’ may be this very unexpectedness intruding upon the familiar. We know about kings, for example, but we do not know about kings who come as servants.”
The Bible and Women: Bane Or Blessing?
Authors: Sakenfeld Katharine D.
Published: February 2011

“The church in the past has tended to hear ‘God’ the most loudly in the various passages which endorse the status quo with all its divisions and classes … Thus religion brings up the rear in social change, and a misused Bible functions as a millstone … Perhaps there was a time when in God's history there was a place and a demand for subjection of women. But in our own historical circumstance, God's demand may be (and I believe is) quite different.”
A Model to Combat Racism
Authors: Chamberlain Gary L.
Published: February 2011

“In this discussion, I will begin with the apparent confirmation … between Christian belief and racist behavior and explore one possible strategy which the Christian churches can use to overcome the gap between belief and behavior. The model under study here combines laboratory training methods with the content of the Christian faith as a way of developing a community of people equipped with the tools and analysis necessary to deal with personal, institutional, and cultural racism.”
Catholicism as a Protestantism
Authors: Miles John A.
Published: February 2011

“Among the ways in which the American Catholic church has protestantized itself in recent years, the most important has been its transformation into an intentional community. For Catholics now, as earlier for Protestants, religion is a matter of opinion, not of birth; and one may change religion as easily and frequently as one changes one's mind. However—and this is the key point—intentional, Protestant religious communities have long had ways of recognizing and removing those who do not share the grounding intention of the community, whatever it may be. The Catholic Church, for the moment anyway, does not.”
A Next Step for Catholic Theology
Authors: Carmody John
Published: February 2011

“Catholicism will again have an exciting, frontier theology if it probes non-Christian religious experience … from the still point of its own mystical tradition. … The experiential highpoints in non-Christian religious traditions, if engaged, would pressure Catholic theology to review, renew, and perhaps reform its own symbols mediating between numinous experience and confessional doctrine.”
The holy hush of Sunday Morningc
Authors: Dillistone F. W.
Published: February 2011

“Does Sunday any longer carry religious associations, or is it basically a convenient device for giving society an opportunity for relaxation and recreation one day in seven? By a strange coincidence, four of the major poets of this century have each written a poem, using ‘Sunday Morning’ in the title (Wallace Stevens, Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell) … Many of the old emblems may be vanishing, but we still need some symbol to mark the sanctification of time.”