Theology-missiology on the Move: Loving and One Another, Back to Basics

Exchange ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 364-381
Author(s):  
Dorottya Nagy

The present article, with a special attention to migration dynamics, envisions a theology-missiology relevant to both academic and non-academic settings by means of a quest to place theology at the heart of the definition of missiology. The article argues that a theology-missiology defined through ‘love God’ and ‘love your fellow human being’ reboots the agenda for theology’s engagement with migration studies. The article seeks to demonstrate that the ‘hermeneutic of love’ in the Great Commandment leads us to accentuate a theology of ‘creation out of love’ (creatio ex amore), and this hermeneutic further questions the framework of common theological approaches to migration studies, urgently asking for more awareness when building a theological vocabulary of contemporary manifestations of human mobility. The discussion on ‘migrant churches’ points to some problems of the migration terminology used currently. The article ends by spelling out interdisciplinarity in terms of intradisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, pluridisciplinarity, and infradisciplinarity.

Author(s):  
Sascha Salatowsky

In order to attain a deeper understanding of Aristotelian philosophy in the Renaissance, it is necessary to consider the theological implications of given facts. This article discusses a basic problem centring on the reception of Aristotle’s Ethics. The Nicomachean Ethics was widely regarded as the basis for a virtuous ethical life, yet how could a pagan philosophy, with its concepts of happiness, virtue, justice, etc., be the basis of a Christian society? The aim of the present article is to show how Lutheran scholars solved this problem in confrontation with Catholic and Calvinist scholars of the time. The first part deals with the two basic components of Aristotle’s Ethics, namely the doctrines of happiness (Eudaimonologia) and virtue (Aretologia), and attempts to show that Aristotle’s Ethics should not be understood as a system of rules, but rather as a handbook for the cultivation of practical habits in the free human being who strives to live a good life. The second part examines two key ideological confrontations in relation to Aristotle’s philosophy: between Lutherans and Calvinists in respect of definition of theology and philosophical and theological virtues on the one hand, and between Lutherans and ›the Enthusiasts‹ in respect of the concept of virtues on the other.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Gennaro Avallone ◽  
Yoan Molinero Gerbeau

The migrant category is linked to the origin of the State as the predominant political unit in the world. This is because, as Abdelmalek Sayad (2008, 2010a) pointed out, without a State, there would be no migrants, as they exist as a political category, referring to the nationals of a State who cross the borders to settle (temporarily or permanently). This functional and historical connection has had a decisive impact at the epistemological level on the discipline of migration studies, where hegemonic paradigms have used analysis categories that not only reproduced the tate framework, but have replicated principles such as coloniality, aimed at legitimizing their control over this population. The objective of this article is to propose an analytical framework on migrations that, following Sayad’s (2010a) and Fanon’s (2009) postulates, breaks with state hegemony in the definition of human mobility to point out the possibility of constructing analyses, which in contrast to the predominant State-centric approaches,start from a migrantcentric epistemology.


2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorottya Nagy

The present paper addresses the question of methodology in theology-missiology’s engagement with migration studies in academic settings. Migration Studies’ rapidly growing literature rarely discusses methodology. While acknowledging that research is always defined by methodology with ontology, epistemology and their assumptions as core-components, the present article perceives migration as a field of inquiry and seeks to create dialogue and conversation on methodology at the level of intra-disciplinarity, multi-disciplinarity and pluri-disciplinarity (Tötösy de Zepetnek and Vasvári 2009). It assumes that methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2002, and Wimmer 2007) penetrates much of migration studies and therefore needs interdisciplinary attention and should be replaced by relevant and innovative approaches to migration. Intra-disciplinarily, the article problematizes two theological conceptualizations of migration: migration aslocus theologicusand migration as context. It argues that revisiting meanings attributed to “locus” and “context” will lead to a more relevant contextual theological praxis related to migration. Multi-disciplinarily, it focuses on ethnicity and introduces the models of boundary-making and structuration as means of combating methodological nationalism. As regards pluri-disciplinarity the article issues a call for teamwork fostering methodological awareness.


Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 72-83
Author(s):  
Tushar Kadian

Actually, basic needs postulates securing of the elementary conditions of existence to every human being. Despite of the practical and theoretical importance of the subject the greatest irony is non- availability of any universal preliminary definition of the concept of basic needs. Moreover, this becomes the reason for unpredictability of various political programmes aiming at providing basic needs to the people. The shift is necessary for development of this or any other conception. No labour reforms could be made in history till labours were treated as objects. Its only after they were started being treating as subjects, labour unions were allowed to represent themselves in strategy formulations that labour reforms could become a reality. The present research paper highlights the basic needs of Human Rights in life.


2013 ◽  
pp. 174-183
Author(s):  
Piotr Sadkowski

Throughout the centuries French and Francophone writers were relatively rarely inspired by the figure of Moses and the story of Exodus. However, since the second half of 20th c. the interest of the writers in this Old Testament story has been on the rise: by rewriting it they examine the question of identity dilemmas of contemporary men. One of the examples of this trend is Moïse Fiction, the 2001 novel by the French writer of Jewish origin, Gilles Rozier, analysed in the present article. The hypertextual techniques, which result in the proximisation of the figure of Moses to the reality of the contemporary reader, constitute literary profanation, but at the same time help place Rozier’s text in the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of talmudism understood as an exchange of views, commentaries, versions and additions related to the Torah. It is how the novel, a new “midrash”, avoids the simple antinomy of the concepts of the sacred and the profane. Rozier’s Moses, conscious of his complex identity, is simultaneously a Jew and an Egyptian, and faces, like many contemporary Jewish writers, language dilemmas, which constitute one of the major motifs analysed in the present article. Another key question is the ethics of the prophetism of the novelistic Moses, who seems to speak for contemporary people, doomed to in the world perceived as chaos unsupervised by an absolute being. Rozier’s agnostic Moses is a prophet not of God (who does not appear in the novel), but of humanism understood as the confrontation of a human being with the absurdity of his or her own finiteness, which produces compassion for the other, with whom the fate of a mortal is shared.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Spencer ◽  
Katharine Charsley

AbstractEmpirical and theoretical insights from the rich body of research on ‘integration’ in migration studies have led to increasing recognition of its complexity. Among European scholars, however, there remains no consensus on how integration should be defined nor what the processes entail. Integration has, moreover, been the subject of powerful academic critiques, some decrying any further use of the concept. In this paper we argue that it is both necessary and possible to address each of the five core critiques on which recent criticism has focused: normativity; negative objectification of migrants as ‘other’; outdated imaginary of society; methodological nationalism; and a narrow focus on migrants in the factors shaping integration processes. We provide a definition of integration, and a revised heuristic model of integration processes and the ‘effectors’ that have been shown to shape them, as a contribution to a constructive debate on the ways in which these challenges for empirical research can be overcome.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Hengstschläger ◽  
Margit Rosner

AbstractIt is known that in countries, in which basic research on human embryos is in fact prohibited by law, working with imported human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) can still be permitted. As long as hESCs are not capable of development into a complete human being, it might be the case that they do not fulfill all criteria of the local definition of an embryo. Recent research demonstrates that hESCs can be developed into entities, called embryoids, which increasingly could come closer to actual human embryos in future. By discussing the Austrian situation, we want to highlight that current embryoid research could affect the prevailing opinion on the legal status of work with hESCs and therefore calls for reassessment of the regulations in all countries with comparable definitions of the embryo.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Hollender

AbstractBased on Ivan Marcus’s concept of “open book” and considerations on medieval Ashkenazic concepts of authorship, the present article inquires into the circumstances surrounding the production of SeferArugat ha-Bosem, a collection of piyyut commentaries written or compiled by the thirteenth-century scholar Abraham b. Azriel. Unlike all other piyyut commentators, Abraham ben Azriel inscribed his name into his commentary and claims to supersede previous commentaries, asserting authorship and authority. Based on the two different versions preserved in MS Vatican 301 and MS Merzbacher 95 (Frankfurt fol. 16), already in 1939 Ephraim E. Urbach suggested that Abraham b. Azriel might have written more than one edition of his piyyut commentaries. The present reevaluation considers recent scholarship on concepts of authorship and “open genre” as well as new research into piyyut commentary. To facilitate a comparison with Marcus’s definition of “open book,” this article also explores the arrangement and rearrangement of small blocks of texts within a work.


Numen ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-254
Author(s):  
Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati

AbstractThe present article focuses on the function of mythic journeys with regard to the problem of death and the transience of human life in two selected Mesopotamian literary sources: the Gilgamesh-Epic IX–XI and the Descent of Ishtar to the Underworld. The selected texts are analysed and compared from the perspective of a functionalist definition of religious symbol systems, with particular attention to the transformation involved in travelling through different cosmic regions. The structure of the journey, the characterisation of the different regions visited by the protagonist, and the changes provoked by the mythic travel evince similarities and differences in the strategies employed to produce a religious orientation dealing with the ineluctable limits of life.


Author(s):  
Therese Scarpelli Cory

This chapter explores the fundamental vision of the human being at the core of Aquinas’ anthropology. Aquinas has typically been construed as defending a fundamentally ‘Aristotelian’ vision of the human being. I show that this label has generated a skewed reading of Aquinas. Accordingly, this chapter does not lay claim to identify what it would take for an anthropology to be authentically ‘Thomistic’. Instead, it makes a proposal concerning what I argue is the ‘guiding vision’ of Aquinas’ anthropology: namely the ‘distinctive unity of the human’. Aquinas prioritizes this notion of distinctive unity in the different areas of his anthropology. I explore how this distinctive unity is expressed (a) in Aquinas’ account of the human soul as the ‘horizon’ of the bodily and spiritual worlds, and (b) in his definition of the human being as ‘rational animal’.


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