Theology and the Transformation of Society

1968 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-36
Author(s):  
Richard Shaull
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Future ◽  
Transcendent Reality ◽  
Ontological Categories ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The Way

“At a time when neo-orthodox theology was dominant, [Reinhold] Niebuhr was able to use effectively, with far-reaching social consequences, the metaphysical-ontological categories of transcendence. Today it is important to recognize not only that these concepts have little meaning for another generation, but also that the biblical symbols point us in a different direction. The transcendent reality described in the biblical myths and images is not so much the God who stands above all human attainments, judging them and raising man to a higher order, but the God who goes ahead of us, opening the way for greater fulfillment on the road to the future. He is one whose actions in the totality of man's hisotyr lead to new events that open new possibilities. Thus the basic Christian symbols suggest that human life is free because it is lived, in history, in the context of ‘gracious’ sovereignty.”

scholarly journals Hope found, hope lost – eschatological aspects in the interpretations of Israelites’ wilderness wanderings. Two sides of one story: Origen’s 27. Homily on the Book of Numbers and Jerome’s Letter 78

Vox Patrum ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 727-742
Author(s):  
Marcin Wysocki
Keyword(s):  
Spiritual Growth ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Road ◽  
Rich Picture ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
The Future ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Allegorical Interpretation ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
The Way

The writings of Origen and Jerome, which are the source of the article, al­though in a different literary form – a homily and a letter – and written for a diffe­rent purpose and at different times, both are exegesis of the chapter 33 of the Book of Numbers in which the stops of the Israelites in the desert on the road to the Promised Land are described. Both texts are the classic examples of allegorical interpretation of the Scripture. Both authors interpret the 42 “stages” of Israel’s wilderness wanderings above all as God’s roadmap for the spiritual growth of individual believers, but there are present as well eschatological elements in their interpretations. In the presented paper there are shown these eschatological ideas of both authors included in their interpretations of the wandering of the Chosen People on their way to the Promised Land, sources of their interpretations, simi­larities and differences, and the dependence of Jerome on Origen in the interpre­tation of the stages, with the focuse on the idea of realized eschatology, present in Alexandrinian’s work. Origen has presented in his interpretation a very rich picture of the future hope, but Jerome almost nothing mentioned in his letter about hopes of the way towards God after death.

THE HOLY MAN'S HUT AS A SYMBOL OF STABILITY IN JAPANESE BUDDHIST PILGRIMAGE

Numen ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-416
Author(s):  
Mark MacWilliams
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Pure Land ◽  
The Road ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The Way

AbstractIn this paper, I examine the way holy men's huts are portrayed in eighteenth century Buddhist tales from the Saikoku and Bandô Japanese Buddhist pilgrimage routes. These stories suggest that holy men's huts are ultimately located in places beyond the ordinary human life of suffering, marked as it is by impermanence and instability. That the hermit's hut transcends the transient world is indicated in two important ways in these tales. First, the holy men's statues of the Buddhist celestial bodhisattva Kannon, which they carry or carve while on the road, display a preternatural mobility or immobility which force the ascetics to stop their peregrination. Second, the places they build their huts to enshrine the statues are revealed as spiritual places (reijô), Pure Land paradises where the living Kannon has a permanent abode. These holy men's huts were the prototypes of the Saikoku and Bandô temples that continue to attract multitudes of Japanese pilgrims who travel there even today seeking freedom from the sorrows of transmigration.

scholarly journals Świat jako tranzyt. Poetyka przestrzeni w poezji Gizelli Lachman

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-25
Author(s):  
Jolanta Brzykcy
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Model ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Spatial Relations ◽  
The Road ◽  
The World ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Selection Of

The article is an analysis of the poetry of Gisella Lachman (1895–1969), poet of the “first wave” of Russian emigration, from the perspective of the poetics of space. The poet expressed her emigration experience (multiple changes of residence: Russia, Germany, Switzerland, USA) in her poems in spatial relations. They appear on different levels of the works’ morphology: in the construction of the lyrical “I”, in the organisation of the presented world, in the repertoire of motifs and the selection of poetic lexis and genre forms. Space plays a literal role in Lachman’s poetry; it is a representation of extra-literary reality, seen subjectively. It is also subject to metaphorisation, becoming a tool for expressing philosophical content. The poet creates not only a spatial model of the world, but also a spatial model of human life, which she perceives as a transit on the road to eternity.

Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

2021 ◽  
pp. 43-52
Author(s):  
Kathleen Riley
Keyword(s):  
The Road ◽  
The Past ◽  
Western Front ◽  
The Future ◽  
No Man's Land ◽  
The Way

This chapter looks at Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which focuses on a generational subset for whom the past barely exists in memory and the future is inconceivable—a predicament in which war itself becomes a kind of Ithaca, the only home to which the adolescent soldier has any intimate or tangible connection. Narrator Paul Bäumer and his schoolfellows inhabit a No Man’s Land of their own: they are young but have lost hope; they feel old but have no yesteryear; they are refugees whose yearning is without shape or object. Whatever images of home they had when they enlisted, whatever plans for the future, were too nebulous, too lacking in resilience to compete with war’s intensity, its ubiquity and noise. The chapter shows that, despite its apparent pessimism, All Quiet was envisaged as a first step towards finding the ‘way back’ and pointing out ‘the road onward’, and that writing the book was itself a form of nostos.

Warning Flags on the Road to the Future

1990 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 8-8
Author(s):  
Burton W. Kreitlow
Keyword(s):  
The Road ◽  
The Future ◽  
On The Road

Grasshopper theology: Heading to the Promised Land instead of climate disaster

2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (3) ◽  
pp. 412-416
Author(s):  
Brooks Berndt
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Self Assessment ◽  
The Road ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Face ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Uncertain Future ◽  
Climate Crisis

Today’s climate crisis provokes dystopian and utopian narratives of the future faced by humanity. To navigate the theological terrain between the present and an uncertain future, this article explores passages pertaining to the journey of Moses and the Israelites to the Promised Land. The guiding point of orientation for this exploration comes from a verse that captures the seeming powerlessness of the Israelites in the face of the giants inhabiting the Promised Land. Numbers 13:33 reads, “To ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.” Of crucial importance in coming to terms with such honest self-assessment is the period of discernment and growth that comes from being in the wilderness with the presence of a God who loves and empowers grasshoppers in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Because the future of the Body of Christ is inseparable from how the climate crisis is confronted, the journey through the wilderness becomes not merely a story for self-coping but rather a story about churches finding a way forward, even as some dystopian narratives place churches on the road to irrelevance and ultimately extinction. This article explores how the story of exodus provides a sacred ground for imagining a different, even if difficult, future.

No Stone Unturned: Popular Versus Professional Evaluations of Willa Cather

Prospects ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 167-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Stineback
Keyword(s):  
Willa Cather ◽  
White Hair ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Road ◽  
Divine Wisdom ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Prayer Meetings ◽  
The Way ◽  
Song Of The Lark

In The Song of the Lark (Willa Cather's third novel, published in 1915), Thea Kronberg goes to one of her father's regular prayer meetings in Moonstone, Colorado, and hears an old woman who “never missed a Wednesday night [and] came all the way up from the depot settlement.” Cather describes the woman this way:She always wore a black crocheted “fascinator” over her thin white hair, and she made long, tremulous prayers, full of railroad terminology. She had six sons in the service of different railroads, and she always prayed “for the boys on the road, who know not at what moment they may be cut off. When, in Thy divine wisdom, their hour is upon them, may they, O our Heavenly Father, see only white lights along the road to Eternity.” She used to speak, too, of “the engines that race with death”; and though she looked so old and little when she was on her knees, and her voice was so shaky, her prayers had a thrill of speed and danger in them; they made one think of the deep black cañons, the slender trestles, the pounding trains. Thea liked to look at her sunken eyes that seemed full of wisdom, at her black thread gloves, much too long in the fingers and so meekly folded one over the other. Her face was brown, and worn away as rocks are worn by water. There are many ways of describing that colour of age, but in reality it is not like parchment, or like any of the things it is said to be like. That brownness and that texture of skin are found only in the faces of old human creatures, who have worked hard and who have always been poor.

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