scholarly journals Anglican moral theology today

2021 ◽  
pp. 000332862110206
Author(s):  
Peter Sedgwick

Anglican moral theology is a genealogy, in MacIntyre’s use of this concept. It is a tradition that is handed on from one generation to another, practically and theoretically. Moral theology is part of the tradition of moral virtue, practiced by Christians, in local communities, families, and of course the church. What is distinctive in Anglicanism was that after 1580 there emerged an Anglican tradition of moral enquiry, which recognized the Protestant emphasis on scripture and a quite different role for the clergy, alongside a deep appreciation of the old, pre-Reformation tradition of moral theology. Today, the Anglican exemplary tradition also incorporates debates on sexuality, gender, and questions of identity. In social ethics, postcolonial voices show both the idolatry of political life and how our common life can be a locus of divine grace. Anglican moral theology is both very vibrant and deeply pluralist today.

Author(s):  
Thomas Palmer

This book examines the impact in mid- to later seventeenth-century England of the major contemporary religious controversy in France, which revolved around the formal condemnation of a heresy popularly called Jansenism. The associated debates involved fundamental questions about the doctrine of grace and moral theology, about the life of the Church and the conduct of individual Christians. The book offers an analysis of the main themes of the controversy and an account of instances of English interest, arguing that English Protestant theologians who were in the process of working out their own views on basic theological questions recognized the relevance of the continental debates. The arguments evolved by the French writers also constitute a point of comparison for the developing views of English theologians. Where the Jansenists reasserted an Augustinian emphasis on the gratuity of salvation against Catholic theologians who overvalued the powers of human nature, the English writers examined here, arguing against Protestant theologians who denied nature any moral potency, emphasized man’s contribution to his own salvation. Both arguments have been seen to contain a corrosive individualism, the former through its preoccupation with the luminous experience of grace, the latter through its tendency to elide grace and moral virtue. These assessments are challenged here. Nevertheless, these theologians did encourage greater individualism. Focusing on the affective experience of conversion, they developed forms of moral rigorism which represented, in both cases, an attempt to provide a reliable basis for Christian faith and practice in the fragmented intellectual context of post-Reformation Europe.


Author(s):  
Ruqaya Saeed Khalkhal

The darkness that Europe lived in the shadow of the Church obscured the light that was radiating in other parts, and even put forward the idea of democracy by birth, especially that it emerged from the tent of Greek civilization did not mature in later centuries, especially after the clergy and ideological orientation for Protestants and Catholics at the crossroads Political life, but when the Renaissance emerged and the intellectual movement began to interact both at the level of science and politics, the Europeans in democracy found refuge to get rid of the tyranny of the church, and the fruits of the application of democracy began to appear on the surface of most Western societies, which were at the forefront to be doubtful forms of governece.        Democracy, both in theory and in practice, did not always reflect Western political realities, and even since the Greek proposition, it has not lived up to the idealism that was expected to ensure continuity. Even if there is a perception of the success of the democratic process in Western societies, but it was repulsed unable to apply in Islamic societies, because of the social contradiction added to the nature of the ruling regimes, and it is neither scientific nor realistic to convey perceptions or applications that do not conflict only with our civilized reality The political realization created by certain historical circumstances, and then disguises the different reality that produced them for the purpose of resonance in the ideal application.


Author(s):  
Mark S. Massa

This chapter presents an examination of the thoughts and writings of Lisa Sowle Cahill, a moral theologian at Boston College. Taking issue with both Germain Grisez and Jean Porter, Cahill seeks to construct a new paradigm of natural law that addresses feminist and poststructural scholars. Cahill believed that any paradigm of intercultural or interreligious ethics that purported to be describing moral duties in the real world must begin by exploring how ethical questions are intimately tied to the concrete experiences in specific (often religiously diverse) communities. Her paradigm addressed the concerns of feminist and postimperialist scholars in moving beyond the “false universalism” offered by paradigms like that of neo-scholasticism, while offering a “realist” understanding of social ethics that remained true to the realist impulses in Catholic moral theology.


Author(s):  
Richard A. Muller

Grace and Freedom addresses the issue of divine grace in relation to the freedom of the will in Reformed or “Calvinist” theology in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century with a focus on the work of the English Reformed theologian William Perkins, and his role as an apologist of the Church of England, defending its theology against Roman Catholic polemic, and specifically against the charge that Reformed theology denies human free choice. Perkins and his contemporaries affirmed that salvation occurs by grace alone and that God is the ultimate cause of all things, but they also insisted on the freedom of the human will and specifically the freedom of choice in a way that does not conform to modern notions of libertarian freedom or compatibilism. In developing this position, Perkins drew on the thought of various Reformers such as Peter Martyr Vermigli and Zacharias Ursinus, on the nuanced positions of medieval scholastics, and on several contemporary Roman Catholic representatives of the so-called second scholasticism. His work was a major contribution to early modern Reformed thought both in England and on the continent. His influence in England extended both to the Reformed heritage of the Church of England and to English Puritanism. On the Continent, his work contributed to the main lines of Reformed orthodoxy and to the piety of the Dutch Second Reformation.


Author(s):  
Michael P. DeJonge

Chapter 3’s discussion of kingdoms and orders in the context of political life leads naturally into the topic of this chapter: the church, the state, and their relationship. The present chapter locates the state (or, better, political authority in general) in relationship to Chapter 3’s categories by presenting it as one of the orders by which God’s structures the world. It is an important actor in the temporal kingdom, where God has ordained it to preserve the world through law. The church in its essence is an agent of the spiritual kingdom, bearing God’s redemptive word to the world. The themes of preservation and redemption, the kingdoms, and the orders find many of their concrete expressions in themes of the church, the state, and their relationship.


Journalism ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 146488492095858
Author(s):  
Leena Ripatti-Torniainen

This article provides an alternative contribution to journalism studies on a foundational concept by analysing texts of Jane Addams, a public intellectual contemporary with the seminal scholars Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. The author uses methods of intellectual history to construct the concept of the public from Addams’s books: Democracy and Social Ethics and The Newer Ideals of Peace, showing that all three authors, Lippmann, Dewey and Addams, discuss the same topic of individuals’ changed engagement with public political life. Addams departs from Lippmann and Dewey in setting out from the standpoints of exclusion and cosmopolitanism. Her argument regarding the public, as constructed by the author, consists of two premises. First, public engagement is a method of democratic inclusion as well as social and political inquiry for Addams. She sees the extension of relationality across social divisions as a necessary method to understand society and materialise democracy. Second, Addams emphasises cooperative and reflexive involvement especially in the characteristic developments of a time. She considers industrialisation and cosmopolitanism as characteristic developments of her own era. Addams suggests an in-principle cosmopolitan concept of the public that includes marginalised persons and groups. Compared to Lippmann’s and Dewey’s accounts of the public, Jane Addams’s argument is more radical and far more sensitive to the social inequality and plurality of a drastically morphing society.


Vox Patrum ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 62 ◽  
pp. 583-592
Author(s):  
Michał Wyrostkiewicz

Testimonies of life and faith of the Fathers of the Church, and their teaching (letter, scriptures) impact on moral theology as a theological science. First, as “loci theologici” of contemporary theology. Omitting them would result in danger to go beyond a theology in the spirit of one, catholic and apostolic Church. Then, because the actions and writings of the Fathers of the Church are examples of ex­ploration and argumentation for today’s theologians, also moralists. Information on the life and teachings (scriptures) are conclusive, actual and current presenta­tion morality and the confirmation of new moral-theological views and theses. For this, however, it is necessary to use the material developed by the researchers of the Fathers of the Church (specialists in patrology). They, due to its historical and philological methods and competencies, adapt antique texts and information to the needs of contemporary theologians, also moralists.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (29) ◽  
pp. 408-433
Author(s):  
Alphonsus Tjatur Raharso Tjatur Raharso

The concern to the situation and condition to all other members of the Church and the collaboration for the welfare of the entire Church is the expression of communio (communion) which is the character of Christ Church. The arise of Church in the mission land and its development which like the mustard seed is the fruit of the concern and collaboration of the missionaries showed by the community and Church which have been founded along the history. Considering Church resources are always limited, every form of across continents concern and collaboration should be done effectively. In the process of the evangelization in the mission land, these concern and collaboration encounter various forms of initiatives; starting from the simple, spontaneous, sporadic and individual to the consistent, coordinated organizations. These concern and collaboration often find frictions, conflicts of interest, impartialities, and injustice; especially concerning the implementation of the power of jurisdiction in the mission land and the submission to the superiority of the mission leaders. The negative excesses are seen and observed objectively and corrected to attain the more effective concerns and collaboration for the sake of the development of the mission work. The apostolic see is the central organ has explored and successfully founded an effective and sustainable missionary collaboration system, from the commissio to the mandate system. Nowadays, the missionary concern and collaboration across particular churches have not been centralized, but assigned to each local communities and particular Churches, to develop mutual collaboration according to the mutual need and projects through the written agreement to mutual minister


Author(s):  
Felipe Gaytán Alcalá

Latin America was considered for many years the main bastion of Catholicism in the world by the number of parishioners and the influence of the church in the social and political life of the región, but in recent times there has been a decrease in the catholicity index. This paper explores three variables that have modified the identity of Catholicism in Latin American countries. The first one refers to the conversion processes that have expanded the presence of Christian denominations, by analyzing the reasons that revolve around the sense of belonging that these communities offer and that prop up their expansion and growth. The second variable accounts for those Catholics who still belong to the Catholic Church but who in their practices and beliefs have incorporated other magical or esoteric scheme in the form of religious syncretisms, modifying their sense of being Catholics in the world. The third factor has a political reference and has to do with the concept of laicism, a concept that sets its objective, not only in the separation of the State from the Church, but for historical reasons in catholicity restraint in the public space which has led to the confinement of the Catholic to the private, leaving other religious groups to occupy that space.


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