bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Visual Story and the Religious Interpretation of Film
Authors: May John R. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractThere are three basic theoretical approaches to the study of literature and religion that can profitably be appropriated by the religious critic of cinema—heteronomy, theonomy, and autonomy; but the greatest of these is autonomy, which explores those dimensions of the formal structure of film that represent the visual analogue of religious or sectarian questions. Inasmuch as all of our culturally typical films are stories, the autonomy of film is preserved if the religious critic approaches film as visual story. The extremes of story, myth and parable, yield substructures that correspond to differing responses to the fundamental religious questions about our relationship to the universe, to others, and to ourselves. Moreover, certain cinematic elements are more suitable than others for the visual representation in story of our basic religious concerns.
Preying Birds: An Examination of Thomas Merton's Zen
Authors: Fittipaldi Silvio E. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractAn examination of major themes in Merton's writings on Zen; the ground out of which he met with Zen (theology as experienced in contemplation); his presentation of Zen enlightenment in terms of its effect on awareness; his movement from articulating Zen enlightenment as an experience of “being” to a presentation of it as a realization of “void”; and a positive analysis of his understanding of Zen from the writings of D. T. Suzuki and S. Hisamatsu.
Encountering the Crucified God: the Soteriology of Sebastian Moore
Authors: Loewe William P. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractThese reflections on Sebastian Moore's soteriology fall under four headings. By way of introduction and in order to establish a context, I commemorate an anniversary (I). There follows an effort to state in summary fashion what I understand Moore to be saying and what I understand him to be doing in what he says (II). A third section contains a suggestion concerning the ecumenical significance of Moore's work (III). The paper concludes with a number of critical observations and proposals for further work (IV).
The Relation between Faith and Morality: Sources For Christian Ethics
Authors: Walter James J. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractThe question of the sources for Christian Ethics has been a perennial problem. In the first part of this study a heuristic continuum is set up in order to examine briefly six ways of relating faith and morality at the level of sources for Christian ethics which some theologians have actually adopted (e.g., Karl Barth and James Gustafson). In the second part, the author's own constructive proposal is offered along with a critical analysis of the previous positions. It is argued that a critical-dialogical relation between faith and morality offers the best possibilities both for preserving the relative autonomy of each and for utilizing the resources of faith and morality in the discipline of Christian ethics.
Abortion and Argument by Analogy
Authors: Cahill Lisa Sowle 
Published: August 2016

AbstractThe purpose of this essay is to examine the consistency and coherence of some arguments about abortion. Theological, philosophical, and public policy discussions of abortion are linked by the necessity of understanding the legitimate claims of the fetus on the woman who bears it, as well as on the larger human community. The tools of moral philosophy widely are employed, whether directly or indirectly, to evaluate abortion as one solution to problematic pregnancies. In particular, theologians examining the problem of abortion from the standpoint of normative ethics find it necessary to take into account some of the seminal work in recent moral philosophy. However, the logic of the moral arguments adduced is not always given fully critical attention in either “pro-choice” or “pro-life” positions, whether they be essentially religious, philosophical, or political in character.One logical implement used broadly is the analogical argument. Burdensome pregnancy can be compared to other situations in which the duty of one individual to protect the rights of another either is sustained or is modified. Differences in evaluations of the morality of abortion can be clarified and perhaps reduced by probing the ways in which the morally significant features of fetal dependency, and of maternal and societal obligation, are partly revealed yet partly hidden by the analogical mode of moral argument.
The Moral Act
Authors: Rigali Norbert J. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractFrom the manuals of the classicist period, moral theology inherited an understanding of the moral act that is rooted in the classical conception of the human being as a rational animal. However, the new personalist and relational anthropology characterizing contemporary theology requires a corresponding revised idea of the nature of the moral act. This revision, it appears, cannot be definitively achieved unless a holistic material understanding of the moral life first replaces the merely formal and empty concept of it in the manualist tradition. Fortunately, this replacement seems to be occurring. The areas of sexual morality and social consciousness are those that suffer the greatest distortion in ethics based on classicist anthropology and, similarly, admit the greatest revision when transferred into the context of contemporary theological anthropology.
Initial Aims as Seeds of Contemplation: A Whiteheadian Interpretation of Merton
Authors: Doud Robert E. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractMomentary divine instigations or seeds of love, liberty, and self-realization are showered down upon us inviting us to contemplation, conversion, and commitment. Contemplation knows God as the source of these instigations, and also knows them as a flow of opportunities by which we may respond to God in love. Merton calls these instigations “missions,” or “seeds of contemplation.” They are identical to Whitehead's “initial aims.” Whitehead's distinction of the “initial aim” and the “subjective aim” is important: each moment of emergent human existence is constituted by the tension of these two aims. The “initial aim” is taken in by the newly forming subject and redirected somewhat; that is, the new actual entity modifies the freedom it receives with the freedom of its own subjective decision. The new project designed by the actual entity out of the “initial aim” is called the “subjective aim.” The initial aim is the spark of givenness from God by which the new entity originates, and the subjective aim is the appropriation and redirection of this energy on the part of the new actual entity. The reality of contemplation involves attention to the initial aims, while conversion is concerned with the process by which the initial aim becomes the subjective aim.
Precious Mettle: Alchemic Aspiration as a Metaphor for Learning
Authors: Quillo Ronald 
Published: August 2016

AbstractRecent criticism of higher education challenges professors to facilitate learning which involves critical thinking, self-awareness, social consciousness, creativity, and interdisciplinary perspective. The ancient art of alchemy, which antedated post-Newtonian scientific categorizations, was directed toward much more than the transmutation of base metals into precious ones. As a process involving philosophical and religious views brought to bear on self-improvement as well as the improvement of all creation, alchemy may function as an appropriate metaphor for learning which is transformative of both learners and their environments. A psychological interpretation of alchemical pursuits facilitates an understanding of transformation in this way. Higher education is thus directed toward and affirmed in its mission of fostering in students a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to knowledge and skills which may be utilized both personally and socially.
“I Saw a Kingfisher”: Grace and Ruin in Golding's The Spire
Authors: Yeager D. M. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractWilliam Golding, in The Spire, invites us to ask how we may know the will of God, and suggests that what we take to be the will of God is often simply the projection onto history of the disguised image of our private and self-absorbed desires. Though contemporary critics tend to interpret the novel as a sympathetic exploration of moral ambiguity rather than as a compelling condemnation of Jocelin's mortifying and death-dealing sin, the novel turns on the contrast between the drive toward dominion and the capacity for assent. The final salvific discovery, given form in Jocelin's mind by the experience of the apple tree and the kingfisher, is the overthrow of the will, its panicked drowning, in terrified apprehension of implacable glory and squandered gifts.
Mother Earth as Metaphor: A Healing Pattern of Grieving and Giving Birth
Authors: Lane Belden C. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractMother Earth is often revered as a goddess in world mythology, but seldom recognized as also an important metaphor in the biblical theology of Old and New Testaments. The image of the earth as grieving mother is a recurrent theme, used in Scripture to symbolize the movement from tragedy and loss to the beginnings of hope. It is an image rich in implications for a theological approach to ecological questions, a search for human and sexual wholeness in a technological age, and a study of the relationship of biblical thought to the universal process of mythogenesis. More than this, however, it touches most deeply the human quest for the lost mother and the role of Christ's passion in the renewal of spiritual connectedness to the natural world.
Telling it Slant: American Catholic Public Theology and Prophetic Discourse
Authors: Lindsey William D. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractCertain proposals to construe American Catholic public theology as civil discourse assume that public theological discussion needs to be disciplined to prevent “interest groups” from imposing their agendas on all participants. These proposals urge that all parties be required to employ the language of natural law, which is to be taught to all by theological experts.Though American Catholic public theology traditionally seeks to avoid sectarianism by employing the philosophical language of natural law, and though civil discourse would presumably reinforce this anti-sectarian tendency, it has a significant shortcoming. Requiring public religious discourse to prescind from all specific interests would rule out prophetic contributions to public theology. Prophets always speak perspectivally and reflect the interests of their historical situations. The interests of religious speakers need scrutiny, but this scrutiny should not exclude from hand prophetic discourse arising out of experiences of oppression.The essay provides a foundation for this thesis by examining what is at work in prophetic speech. It locates prophetic discourse at the intersection of the prophet's need to proclaim and the community's need to control. The argument of the essay moves to the conclusion that American Catholic theologians need to give more attention than previously to the rhetorical dimensions of public theological discourse.
Seeking a Minor Sun: Saints after the Death of God
Authors: Sanders Theresa 
Published: August 2016

AbstractTheology lives in the days of the frost. Postmodern philosophers question the very possbility of God-language. In response, Edith Wyschogrod's Saints and Postmodernism attempts to develop an ethics grounded in lives of saints. Her definition of “saint” as one devoted to the alleviation of pain is problematic; moreover, her definition does not in fact grow out of hagiography. Rather, it reduces saints' lives to didactic tales. Still, Wyschogrod points toward a more adequate description of the saint as one who sees the being of others as constituted by a lack. An emphasis on otherness is developed in the theologies of Mark Taylor and Charles Winquist. Using their insights and Wyschogrod's, I propose that Christianity turn to the “minor sun” of saints' lives to rethink theology in light of the postmodern critique.
The Coherence of Catholic Social Thought: Toward a Theology of Involvement
Authors: Bayer Richard C. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractAlthough recent attempts to state the coherence or integrating idea within Catholic Social Thought have contributed much to our understanding of the tradition, the attempts have been based on improper methodological presuppositions. For this reason the authors offering these theories have been unable to justify their selection and emphasis on certain documents; they have not fully considered the challenge to their theories by development in the integrating idea taken as most essential; and they have not been methodologically clear about the role which their own vision plays in the historical retrieval. Recognition of such problems in historical analysis, and the path toward dealing with them today in an historically conscious way, is found in the work of Ernst Troeltsch.
Historicism, Truth Claims, and the Teaching of Ethics
Authors: Reynolds Terrence 
Published: August 2016

AbstractThis article analyzes the impact of postmodernism on the meaning, truth, and justification of claims in contemporary theology and ethics. It argues that historicist premises do not lead inexorably from a naïve objectivism in ethics to ethical relativism, as Sheila Greeve Davaney and Richard Rorty suggest. Instead, as the work of Carol Christ and Jeffrey Stout has argued, theologians and ethicists are justified in making indirect, web-of-belief related claims to ontological truth. Christ's theological realism and Stout's modest pragmatism both appear able to support meaningful discussions of truth, while avoiding the related dangers of relativism, skepticism, and nihilism. Paying careful attention to these methodological issues in a course on Religious Ethics and Moral Issues has proved very effective in overcoming student acquiescence to a relativist perspective, and in enabling them to propose and defend their own moral views with greater confidence.
How Could We Break the Lord's Bread in a Foreign Land? The Eucharist in “Diet America”
Authors: McCormick Patrick T. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractUnderstanding and celebrating the Eucharist does not take place in a vacuum, but depends at least in part on our ability to grasp and be moved by the fundamental symbols of food, body, and table. And yet in contemporary America we increasingly find ourselves in a culture characterized by distorted experiences and notions of all three of these. How, then, does our growing obsession with dieting, nutrition, and efficiency, as well as the increasing disparity of our national and global tables, challenge or undermine our experience of breaking, sharing, and eating the Body and Blood of Christ? And how does the Eucharist speak to and challenge some of the distortions of “Diet America” regarding the humanizing characteristics of food, the importance of embodiment, and the demands of table fellowship?
Emmanuel Levinas and the Problem of Meaningless Suffering: the Holocaust as a Test Case
Authors: Baird Marie L. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractJohann Baptist Metz has exhorted Christian theologians to discard “system concepts” in favor of “subject concepts” in their theologizing. This revisioning of Christian theology recovers the primacy of the uniqueness and irreplaceability of the individual from totalizing doctrinal formulations and systems that function, for Metz, without reference to the subject. In short, a revisionist Christian theology in light of the Holocaust recovers the preeminence of the inviolability of individual human life.How can such a revisioning be accomplished in the realm of Christian spirituality? This article will utilize the thought of Emmanuel Levinas to assert the primacy of ethics as “first philosophy” replacing ontology, and by implication the ontological foundations undergirding Christian spirituality, with the ethical relation. Such a relation is the basis for a new Christian spirituality that posits the primacy of merciful and compasionate action in the face of conditions of life in extremity.
Mentoring Moral Courage: Resources in Liberation Ethics, Community Service, and the Social Commitment of the Academy
Authors: Hobgood Mary E. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractThe essay argues that resources in Scripture, tradition, and social theory are important but insufficient to the task of teaching social ethics. Liberation ethics promotes not only diverse epistemologies to evaluate the structures that mediate social relations, but also moral courage to execute social responsibility. Given this agenda, teaching social ethics also requires community-based learning experiences, democratic classrooms, and the social commitment of the academy. Drawing on student writing and the example of the author's own academic institution, the essay argues that multiple resources and sites are needed to educate students in ethical theory and moral courage.
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Theologians and the Mandatum
Authors: Moser M. Theresa 
Published: August 2016

AbstractThe title of my reflections is “Between a Rock and A Hard Place,” which I think aptly describes the situation of Catholic theologians in the United States since the bishops' meeting of November 1999. The imagery refers to the rock of Peter, the hard place to the problems the mandatum raises for ourselves and our Catholic colleges and universities. My question is: What can the social sciences tell us about our present dilemma? First, I will look at the history of the problem as we have experienced it in the U.S. Next, the bishops' document is now in the hands of the Roman Curia, so I will look at the role of that institution. And finally, I will review quickly events to date in the light of evidence from the social sciences and suggest a possible strategy to deal with the situation in our U.S. context.
Religion, Symbol, and the Twenty-Year-Old Demythologizer
Authors: Sawicki Marianne 
Published: August 2016

AbstractWithout an appreciation of symbol, one cannot hope to grasp concepts such as revelation and incarnation which are foundational for theology and for other varieties of religious thought. Unfortunately, the undergraduate years find our students at an age when they are natural demythologizers: impatient and exasperated with symbols. Are we wasting our breath in trying to teach them disciplines which are constitutionally disabled from understanding? This article suggests that human cognition must develop through the successive stages of literal, conventional, critical, and conjunctive understanding. It recommends strategies for helping students move from conventional to critical thinking so as to prepare the way for conjunctive thought beyond age thirty.
Algonquian Shamans and Puritan Saints
Authors: Porterfield Amanda 
Published: August 2016

AbstractThis paper compares the shamanism of seventeenth-century Indians in southern New England with the religion of the New England Puritans. The paper identifies shamanic elements within Puritan religion, focusing particular attention on the visionary experiences and social control the Puritans gained through praying, preaching, reading, and writing. Although the literacy and moralism essential to Puritan religion were absent in seventeenth-century Algonquian shamanism, the powers of Puritan literacy and moralism can be understood in shamanic terms.
Writing Your Own Scripture?
Authors: Kramer Kenneth P. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractIs it possible to write contemporary scripture? This discussion highlights the pedagogical value not only of teaching with primary resource materials, but also of having students creatively rewrite sacred texts. First, I discuss the purpose of a religious studies journal, and then provide some practical guidelines for journal-keeping along with suggestions for grading them. Secondly, I focus upon one type of creative journal exercise—rewriting sacred texts. In response to Ira Progoff s statements that we can create the Bibles of the world anew by recording images drawn up from our depth consciousness, I encourage students to write scripture-styled passages which deepen their appreciation for and understanding of sacred texts. To conclude, I provide six sample creative journal exercises, one from each of the sacred texts read in my Eastern Religions classes, along with several student responses.
The Social Rationality of Theological Discourse
Authors: Martin Terence J. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractDrawing lessons from literary dialogues on religious issues, this essay offers a rhetorical and hermeneutical analysis of the workings and achievements of theological discourse. The rationality proper to theological discourse is found to be a function of interlocutors' communicative actions and reactions, describing the social processes by which speakers sustain common space and time for persuasion and understanding. Standards of rationality are idiosyncratic not simply to individual cultural-linguistic frameworks, but to public, dialogical situations which speakers must create and sustain in their communicative interaction.
Teaching Christology in Light of Feminist Issues
Authors: Kopas Jane 
Published: August 2016

While awareness of feminist issues has not left its mark on all professors of theology, much less on all who teach christology, those whose awareness has been changed by facing these issues often find themselves asking how they can bring them to bear on courses with already substantial content. The point of raising feminist issues, however, is not a matter of adding content but of uncovering questions that have not been asked and of transforming the way we look at key areas of the discipline. This is turn leads to the discovery of new resources and new insights.My own approach in teaching “Christ in Tradition and Culture” to undergraduates has been to uncover feminist issues and concerns that are in the mainstream of christology. I have done this by looking at scriptural, theological, and soteriological/spiritual perspectives that are central to the development of a contemporary christology. The purpose of this article is to share the ways I deal with feminist issues within the perspectives noted and to indicate some of the more important bibliographic resources that address them. Before examining issues that surface in the various perspectives, it may be helpful to underscore some aspects of feminist theology that should be kept in mind.
Reason and Emotion: Modern and Classical Views on Religious Knowing
Authors: Morrissey Michael P. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractThe interdependence of mind and heart forms the basic dynamism in human consciousness. In modernity, however, this vital duality has often been obscured by the infamous dualism between reason and emotion, whereby reason is reduced to an abstract rationalism and emotion is identified with irrational passions—a view that has ancient roots. Given this confused state of affairs, the recovery of an authentic emotional life is not only essential for the preservation of human integrity but also for the possibility of authentic religious knowledge. This essay considers the work of John Macmurray, a rather neglected contemporary philosopher whose reflections on this matter remain worthy of study. Relating his personalist thought to Plato's preeminent myth of the erotic soul will serve to construct on solid footing a philosophy of consciousness that pays due respect to the Pascalian “reasons of the heart.” A wholistic understanding of human personality emerges, one based on an “emotional rationality” that is the condition for authentic human love and the incarnate medium for divine revelation.