Masao Abe and Comparative Theology

Author(s):  
Leo D. Lefebure

A leading form of comparative theology entails commitment to one religious tradition but ventures out to encounter another tradition, with the goal of generating fresh insights into familiar beliefs and practices reliant upon both the tradition of origin and the newly encountered faith tradition. This chapter, based on a graduate course at Georgetown University, examines how Zen Buddhist thinker Masao Abe engages in a dialogue with Western philosophy and Christian theology. Abe interpreted the meaning of the kenosis (emptying) of God in Jesus Christ in Christian theology in light of Mahayana Buddhist perspectives on Sunyata (emptying) and the logic of negation. The chapter includes responses to Abe from various Christian theologians, including Georgetown graduate students.

Author(s):  
Muna Tatari

Muna Tatari presents her personal and autobiographical encounter with comparative theology. We learn that at the beginning of her work in comparative theology, she came to realize that not only did she need to learn much about Christian theology, its doctrines and methods; she had too a quantitative and a qualitative lack of knowledge of her own Muslim religious tradition. Tatari elaborates two theological categories, justice and mercy, in order to demonstrate how comparative insights are fruitful in developing kalām as the way of study and reflection that illuminates these categories. To elucidate her method, Tatari discusses five major insights arising in her dissertation that were inspired by comparative theology; she shows how she used tools and insights from Christian theology and late-modern philosophy to reconstruct Islamic thought on a specific topic.


MELINTAS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-94
Author(s):  
Joko Umbara

An experience of the cross of Jesus Christ in Christian theology brings the sense of paradox. Christ’s death on the cross reflects the fate of humanity within the context of Christian faith. The cross is also seen as a mystery that tells the tragic story of humans who accept their punishment. However, the cross of Jesus Christ also reveals meanings that challenge Christians to find answers in their contemplation of the cross. The cross becomes a stage for human tragic drama, which might also reveal the beauty of death and life. It is the phatos of humanity, for every human being will die, but it is also seen as the tree of life hoped for by every faithful. On the cross is visible God’s self-giving through the love shown by the crucified Christ. God speaks God’s love not only through words, that is, in the teachings of Jesus Christ, but also through Christ’s loving gesture on the cross. The cross of Christ is the culmination of God’s glory and through it, God’s glory is shown in the beauty of divine love.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 499-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Packard ◽  
Todd W. Ferguson

Institutionally organized religious life in the United State is undergoing a dramatic transformation. While individual beliefs and practices remain relatively stable, institutional affiliation and participation has declined dramatically. In this article, we explore the religious “Dones”—those who have disaffiliated with their religious congregations but, unlike the Nones, continue to associate with a religious tradition. Drawing on a unique dataset of 100 in-depth interviews with self-identified Christians, we explain the “push” and “pull” factors that lead a person to intentionally leave their congregations. We find that a bureaucratic structure and a narrow focus on certain moral proscriptions can drive people away, while the prospect of forming more meaningful relationships and the opportunities to actively participate in social justice issues draw people out. From these factors, we show that an “iron cage of congregations” exists that is ill-suited to respond to a world where religious life is increasingly permeable as people enact their spirituality outside traditional religious organizations. We conclude by questioning whether the spiritual lives of the Dones are ultimately sustainable without institutional support.


Author(s):  
Hiller A. Spires ◽  
Meixun Zheng ◽  
Manning Pruden

The purpose of this chapter is to present graduate students’ views of their Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) development. These graduate students are also teachers. Data was collected using a mixed method approach founded on the TPACK Framework and social network analysis. Koehler and Mishra (2006) claim that effective teaching with technology requires TPACK, or an ability to integrate content, pedagogy and technology flexibly during the act of teaching. As part of a graduate course on new literacies and media, participants were required to design and implement lessons that incorporated a range of technologies, produce written reflections about their experiences, and engage in online interactions with participants in the class. Qualitative results from participants’ written reflections revealed four themes relative to TPACK. Additionally, a social network analysis demonstrated a positive relationship between participants’ views on their TPACK development and their interaction patterns within the online learning environment. This study shows that the TPACK framework can be a useful tool, giving educators a productive way to think about technology integration as they navigate the rapid changes prompted by emerging technologies.


Author(s):  
Thomas P. Flint

The concept of omniscience has received great attention in the history of Western philosophy, principally because of its connections with the Western religious tradition, which views God as perfect in all respects, including as a knower. Omniscience has often been understood as knowledge of all true propositions, and though several objections to any simple propositional account of omniscience have been offered, many philosophers continue to endorse such an analysis. Advocates of divine omniscience have discussed many problems connected with both the extent of omniscience and the relation between this property and other alleged divine attributes. Three such issues are: Can an omniscient being properly be viewed as immutable? Would an omniscient being have knowledge of the future, and is such knowledge consistent with our future actions’ being genuinely free? And should omniscience be thought of as including middle knowledge? That is, would an omniscient being know (but have no control over) what other free beings would in fact freely do if placed in various different situations?


Publications ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Morell ◽  
Susana Pastor Cesteros

Genre pedagogy plays an important role in helping graduate students to enter the discourse community of their fields. Although familiarity with research genres benefits graduate students, few studies have explored the influences of instruction on learners’ subsequent generic practices. In this study, we describe the genre-based approach used in a bilingual (English and Spanish) Applied Linguistics graduate course, which aimed to enhance students’ research genre awareness to allow them to be better able to confront their own work as investigators. The description of the course is followed by a study to determine if and how a research article discourse analysis task influenced the students’ academic writing in their own papers. Our research question was the following: To what extent can course instruction influence students’ academic writing? The study entails a survey to elicit students’ perspectives on the influence of the course and its tasks on their academic writing, as well as teachers’ comments on the students’ written work. Although learning to do research at the graduate level requires a broad range of competencies that go beyond genre awareness, the findings from the survey confirmed the positive effects of genre knowledge gains in accomplishing further research goals.


Author(s):  
Beth Kania-Gosche

While online courses may be more convenient and fulfilling for adult learners, they pose an additional challenge because much of the communication between student and instructor is in writing. This is in addition to more formal, traditional written assignments like research papers. The challenge multiplies with graduate students, who may be years or even decades distant from their undergraduate writing courses, while the expectations for their writing are higher. Many graduate programs culminate with a final project, thesis, or dissertation, which often involves extensive research and writing. Many similarities exist between the literature on teaching writing and teaching adult learners; however, teaching writing within the contest of an online graduate course is an area of research that still needs to be expanded.


2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-164
Author(s):  
Grant Macaskill

The Bible is normative for all Christian theology and ethics, including responsible theological reflection on the biotechnological future. This article considers the representation of creaturehood and what might be labelled ‘deification’ within the biblical material, framing these concepts in terms of participation in providence and redemption. This participatory emphasis allows us to move past the simplistic dismissal of biotechnological progress as ‘playing God’, by highlighting ways in which the development of technology and caregiving are proper creaturely activities, but ones that must be morally aligned to the goodness of God. Framing our approximation of divine character in terms of ‘deification’ highlights its relational and soteriologically defined shape, preventing us from conceiving its attainment in any way that is loosed from the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The discussion allows us to affirm the pursuit of biotechnological research, but to recognize that it is unable by itself to accomplish certain ends, and that it must be pursued in alignment with the standards of goodness by which God loves his world.


1966 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-240
Author(s):  
John Lachs

Philosophers have long debated the question of the existence of God. This is one of many philosophical issues in which the motivation for inquiry has come more perhaps from the side of human feeling than from disinterested scientific curiosity. Powerful emotions appear to prompt thinkers to devote effort to the attempt to prove or disprove the existence of God. The urgency of this task has made some of these philosophers pay less than adequate heed to the concepts they employ. It appears to have escaped the attention of many of them that the word “God” does not have a single meaning either in religious language generally or in philosophical theology. It is obvious that one of the important ways in which religious traditions differ is in their conceptions of the Deity. But a considerable number of different God-concepts may be distinguished in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition itself, and not even in Christian theology proper is the word “God” free of ambiguity.


1991 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Engelbrecht

Liberation theology can only be understood as a pseudo-theology inspired by the spirit of Marx. It is not a bona fide or leg itimate theology, but the polar opposite thereof. Its destructive aims mirror those of Marxism, which can only be understood if the demonic spirit of Marx is seen as its real origin. The Kairos Document and the Road to Damascus replaced the biblical God with the anti-god of Marx, the deified proletariat and the deified revolution. The article calls for a reconversion to God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ of Scriptures. Orthodox theology is truly ‘thisworldly’ theology, since it offers real hope and salvation. The Marxist gospel can only offer a utopia, a ‘no-place’. It is self-alienating, world-aUenating and God-alienating.


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