Public Theology as Religious Practice: Anglican Mission and Interreligious Encounter

2020 ◽  
Vol 102 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-282
Author(s):  
William L. Sachs
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Public Theology

The concept of a public theology must balance emphasis on Christianity's theological grounding with recognition of religious pluralism. Where Christians are in the minority, interreligious encounter frames public presence. This article argues that the basis of both faithful religious identity and substantive encounter with non-Christian traditions lies in forms of religious practice. The point is illustrated with reference to the Anglican encounter with Islam. In Egypt during the first half of the twentieth century, the careers of Temple Gairdner and Constance Padwick opened an emphasis upon prayer as a basis for appreciative encounter. Informed by this example, Kenneth Cragg developed a basis for Christian-Muslim relations. He articulated a Christian public theology that is both faithful and constructive in pluralist settings. Following Gairdner and Padwick, Cragg featured matters of practice as the basis for understanding.

African American Religious Identities in the Twentieth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Mainline Denominations ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Moorish Science ◽  
Southern Migrants

This chapter analyzes African American religious identity and practice in the twentieth century. Shaped by the Great Migration and the rise of mass culture, modern African American religious practice was both inventive and entrepreneurial. Although mainline denominations continued to dominate, Pentecostal and Holiness churches gained popularity through the rise of storefront churches, a refuge for southern migrants in the urban North. In addition, new religious movements such as the Moorish Science Temple of America, the Nation of Islam, and Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement offered followers the opportunity to create entirely new religious and ethnic identities for themselves. The rise of radio and television transformed African American evangelism and eventually produced the era of the megachurch exemplified by the careers of Reverend Ike and T. D. Jakes. Modern African American religions competed in a spiritual marketplace that cultivated imaginative faith practices and met the material needs of their followers.

How American Newspaper Comic Strips Portray God, Angels, and Humans

2020 ◽  
pp. 398-413
Author(s):  
Leonard Greenspoon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Texts

The comic strip as a mainstay of print and more recently online media is an American invention that began its development in the last decades of the 1800s. For many decades in the mid-twentieth century, comic strips were among the most widely disseminated forms of popular culture. With their succession of panels, pictures, and pithy perspectives, comics have come to cover an array of topics, including religion. This chapter looks at how the Bible (Old and New Testament) figures in comic strips, focusing specifically on three areas: the depiction of the divine, renderings of specific biblical texts, and how comic strips can function as sites in which religious identity and controversies play out. Relevant examples are drawn from several dozen strips. Special attention is also paid to a few, like Peanuts and BC, in which biblical imagery, ideology, and idiom are characteristically portrayed in distinctive ways.

Power and the Reproduction of History: Twentieth-Century Histories of Abortion in the Ancient Mediterranean World

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Tara Baldrick-Morrone
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Mediterranean World

Abstract This essay explores issues of identity and power in twentieth-century scholarship on abortion in the ancient Mediterranean world. I consider how two scholars, John T. Noonan, Jr. and Beverly Wildung Harrison, approach the same ancient Christian sources from different theoretical frameworks: narrative historiography and feminist liberation ethics, respectively. While Noonan’s historical narrative on ancient Christian opposition to abortion demonstrates the “moral supremacy” of Christianity, Harrison’s historical counternarrative reads the ancient sources as borne out of the “sex-negativism” of a minority of ancient Christians. In this analysis I focus on the ways in which the production of history manufactures power by means of authority and legitimacy, particularly for each scholar’s own religious identity and views on the morality of abortion in America. In conclusion, I consider the interests of the respective authors in the production of these histories.

Religious Identity: Reflections on Revelation and Rationality

2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-459
Author(s):  
Majid Amini
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Public Theology ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Ethnic Origins

AbstractThere is a widespread assumption that ethnic origins substantially contribute, if not constitute, the identity of individuals. In particular, among the ethnic elements, it is claimed that religion takes precedence and people could be individuated in terms of their religious affiliations. Indeed, public theology as an attempt to expand on the public consequences of religious doctrines and beliefs is predicated on the legitimacy of the idea of religious identity. However, the purpose of this article is to show that strictly speaking identity cannot be constituted by religion. More precisely, it is argued that a phenomenological characterization of individual identity fails to do justice to the philosophical requirements of identity. The argument is obviously philosophical by nature and is developed through an analysis of the concept of revelation. The phenomenon of revelation plays a pivotal role in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, yet by its very nature owes its authenticity to something prior to itself; namely, reason. This entails the priority of reason over revelation and as such undermines claims that purport to define identity in terms of revelation/religion. This detachment of identity from religion would clearly have far reaching socio-political implications for issues such as religious diversity, pluralism and multiculturalism in particular and public theology in general.

Catholicism in Twentieth-Century Ireland: From “an Atmosphere Steeped in the Faith” to à la Carte Catholicism

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 484-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Legislative Process ◽  
Attendance Rate ◽  
Short Period ◽  
Catholic Culture ◽  
Irish People ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Irish Case ◽  
The 1960S

The aim of this article is to give a historical overview of Catholic culture in the Republic of Ireland in the twentieth century and to examine how it has changed. Ireland has in a short period changed from a largely rural agricultural economy to a modern urbanised one. Religious practice has declined steadily in that time and Catholicism no longer exercises the same influence on people's lives, or on the political/legislative process. The climate of the 1960s and the events that unfolded from that time made traditional Catholicism unsustainable. However in the 2011 census, eighty-four percent of Irish people still call themselves Catholic and recent surveys estimate the weekly Mass attendance rate at about forty-three percent. This and other contra-indications suggest that one should be cautious about adopting secularisation theories too readily in the Irish case. It would appear that many Irish still identify with their Catholic cultural heritage.

Kristendom i grænseland

2018 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 2-20
Author(s):  
Niels Kastfelt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Northern Nigeria

This article discusses general historiographical perspectives emerging from a religious encounter between Danish missionaries and the Bachama people in northern Nigeria in the twentieth century. The general points relate to the role of Christian missionaries in the making of modern Christianity. It is argued that missionaries should be seen as the spearheads of modern Christianity through their experience of religious pluralism and relativism in religious encounters outside Europe. The paper uses the concept of the border to characterise a particular “borderland Christianity” emerging from missionary situations. By way of conclusion it is argued that the borderland experience of missionaries was made part of Western Christianity and constitutes a potentially important but neglected part of the historical development of Christianity in the modern world.

Religious Education Between the Traditions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eboo Patel ◽  
Noah Silverman
Keyword(s):  
Religious Education ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Relationship Building ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Rapid Rise ◽  
Modern Context ◽  
Building Activities ◽  
Interfaith Education

This chapter addresses how the continuity of individual and communal religious identity can be preserved in a modern context characterized by a rapid rise in religious diversity and a concomitant decline in traditional religious association. The chapter discusses various postures that religious communities can take in such a context. The authors advocate an intentional and engaged religious pluralism, achieved through “interfaith education.” This concept is defined and parsed into three activities in which religious communities should engage: developing a theology of interfaith cooperation, nurturing appreciative knowledge of shared values, and engaging in relationship-building activities. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of how North American seminaries have been on the vanguard of adopting interfaith—sometimes referred to as multifaith or inter-religious—education.

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