scholarly journals Public Moral Discourse

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 255
Author(s):  
Robin Lovin
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Practical Interest ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
Moral Discourse ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Moral Concepts ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
The Church

Public moral discourse encompasses open discussions in which moral concepts of good and right are brought to bear on questions of public policy and on broader issues of basic rights and the goals and rules that guide social institutions. These public questions also raise practical, apologetic, and political concerns that are central to Christian ethics and moral theology. Public discourse frames legal and political understandings of religious freedom, and Christian ethics has a practical interest in ensuring that these choices do not limit Christian worship and formation or unduly restrict the institutional life of the church. Public discourse also engages apologetic theology in a moral task because the questions raised in public discourse involve conceptions of human good, human nature, and human community that have been discussed in Christian theology across the centuries. Christians have a distinctive understanding of persons in society that they hope to make effective, or at least to make understood, in a wider public discussion. Finally, public moral discourse gives rise to a moral responsibility for Christian participation in politics to create a public consensus on the creation of shared human goods.

Public Theology: Its Pastoral, Apologetic, Scientific, Political, and Prophetic Tasks

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-177
Author(s):  
Ted Peters
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Public Theology ◽  
Constructive Work ◽  
The Church

Abstract This blueprint for a constructive public theology assumes that Christian theology already includes public discourse. Following David Tracy’s delineation of three publics—church, academy, culture—further constructive work leads to a public theology conceived in the church, reflected on critically in the academy, and meshed with the wider culture. Public reflection on classic Christian doctrines in a post-secular pluralistic context takes the form of pastoral illumination, apologetic reason, a theology of nature, political theology, and prophetic critique.

scholarly journals The Goods of Human Sexuality: Ethics and Moral Theology

2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-30
Author(s):  
Ellen Wondra
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Behavior ◽  
Sexual Orientation ◽  
Human Sexuality ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
Sexual Ethics ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
The Church

AbstractChristian ethics has always taken a complex view of the goods and purposes of human sexuality and its role in human relationships. Sexual desire and behavior have to be seen always within the overarching moral imperatives of love of God and love of neighbor. Such love entails self-giving and other-regard, and in longer-term relationships also some measure of commitment, fidelity, reciprocity or mutuality, truthfulness and generativity. Yet not all relationships with these characteristics do (or should) include sexual behavior. Nor do all sexual relationships include all these characteristics or virtues all the time. So we do better to base our moral evaluations of relationships on the exercise of these virtues than on more obvious criteria of sexual orientation or even status in the eyes of the church. At the same time, it is also possible for faithful and reasonable people to disagree faithfully and reasonably on sexual ethics, as on other things.

Baptism in the Church

1949 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 391-403
Author(s):  
T. W. Manson
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
Code Of Conduct ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
The Past ◽  
Corporate Worship ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
Theological Study ◽  
Doctrine Of The Church ◽  
The Church

The new and sustained interest in the doctrine of the Church, which is one of the outstanding characteristics of theological study in our day, has lately taken a turn which seems to hold the promise of fresh and fruitful developments. There has been any amount of discussion in the past about the Church's faith as worked out in controversy and expressed in creeds and confessions; about the Church's organisation and the functions and status of her ministers; about the Church's code of conduct or ethical ideals. In these discussions it has not always been remembered that the Church is a worshipping community. True, there was a branch of study called liturgiology; but few students were attracted to it. To most people it seemed to be at best a harmless kind of antiquarianism remote from the main business of theology and the real life of the Church. Its exponents tended to be looked upon—often, it must be confessed, not without justification—as diligent pickers-up of unconsidered trifles. All that is changing. It is realised that the corporate worship of the Christian community in all its aspects is an essential and distinctive part of its life; and that it is one of the main tasks of Christian theology to know and interpret Christian worship.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark S. Massa
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
Scientific Revolutions ◽  
Structure Of Scientific Revolutions ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Theological Argument ◽  
The Church

This chapter presents a more detailed examination of Thomas Kuhn’s structure than that provided in the Introduction. The chapter explains how and why Kuhn’s book permanently rejected the idea of scientific “progress.” The author notes that although most Catholics experienced the widespread critique of Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical as a sudden (if welcome) rejection of the kind of theological argument that the Church had utilized in its moral teaching for several centuries, the cracks in the foundations of that older approach to natural law had appeared considerably before 1968. The emergence of a historicist approach to moral theology in the decades before the promulgation of the encyclical contextualized the rocky reception accorded it within a much larger historical framework. Further, even the guild of moral theologians had come to a much more nuanced understanding of what could be (and what could not be) “unchangeable” in Christian ethics.

The Politics of the Nonviolent God: Reflections on René Girard and Karl Barth

1998 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Hunsinger
Keyword(s):  
Christian Ethics ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cross Of Christ ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Church ◽  
Secondary Consequence ◽  
As If

Doctrines of the atonement in Christian theology, as Marlin E. Miller has pointed out, ‘usually limit their concern to reconciliation with God and, at most, consider reconciliation with others a secondary consequence of reconciliation with God’. Too often, in other words, the vertical aspect of reconciliation is allowed to overshadow its horizontal aspect. The vertical aspect of the atonement as it pertains directly to God is often treated in isolation as if its ethical implications were of no great importance. The reverse defect, however, would also appear to be widespread. Christian ethics as we know it today often seems to proceed as if the atoning work of Christ were of little or no relevance to its deliberations on human affairs. The social or horizontal aspect of reconciliation thereby eclipses its vertical aspect. Yet if the cross of Christ is indeed the very center of the center of the Christian gospel, as the church has historically believed, then how can it fail to determine the substance of Christian ethics as well as that of Christian theology? Moreover, how can the centrality of the cross fail to orient them both in any attempt to specify their inner unity, order and differentiation?

Christ Existing as Community

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Mawson
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
Dietrich Bonhoeffer ◽  
Human Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theological Study ◽  
Sanctorum Communio ◽  
The Church

How can theologians recognize the church as a historical and human community, while still holding that it has been established by Christ and is a work of the Spirit? How can a theological account of the church draw insights and concepts from the social sciences, without Christian commitments and claims about the church being undermined or displaced? In 1927, the 21-year-old Dietrich Bonhoeffer defended his licentiate dissertation, Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church. This remains his most neglected and misunderstood work. Christ Existing as Community thus retrieves and analyses Bonhoeffer’s engagement with social theory and attempt at ecclesiology. Against standard readings and criticisms of this work, Mawson demonstrates that it contains a rich and nuanced approach to the church, one which displays many of Bonhoeffer’s key influences—especially Luther, Hegel, Troeltsch, and Barth—while being distinctive in its own right. In particular, Mawson argues that Sanctorum Communio’s theology is built around a complex dialectic of creation, sin, and reconciliation. On this basis, he contends that Bonhoeffer’s dissertation has ongoing significance for work in theology and Christian ethics.

European-American Elderly. A Guide for Practice. Christopher L. Hayes, Richard A. Kalish, David Guttmann (Eds.). New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1986. 272 pages, $30.95 U.S.

1987 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-77
Author(s):  
Milada Disman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
Intervention Strategies ◽  
Publishing Company ◽  
European American ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Church

SUMMARY ABSTRACTThe book discusses the socio-cultural background of the Euro-American elderly; focuses on social institutions such as family, the ethnic neighbourhood and the church; addresses programs and services; identifies program models and describes some intervention strategies. The issues discussed appear to apply to the ethnic elderly from a range of ethnic groups in addition to the ones analyzed. Besides practitioners, this book should prove of interest to researchers, policy makers and gerontology students.

scholarly journals Anglican moral theology today

2021 ◽  
pp. 000332862110206
Author(s):  
Peter Sedgwick
Keyword(s):  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Social Ethics ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Common Life ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
Deep Appreciation ◽  
Moral Enquiry ◽  
The Church

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.

scholarly journals ’n Prakties-teologiese ondersoek na die kerklike jaar in die prediking van die Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk

2005 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Bothma
Keyword(s):  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
Practical Theological ◽  
The Church ◽  
Valuable Role

A practical-theological investigation into the role of the church year in the liturgy and preaching of the Dutch Reformed ChurchThe aim of this article is to discuss the valuable role the church year can play in liturgy and preaching and the service and activities of the church. The article demonstrates that the rediscovery of the church year is one of the most remarkable aspects of the twentiethcentury reform and renewal of Christian worship. Within a context of poverty and continuing change, the church year – if valued positively and if accentuated in the preaching – could lead to the celebration of God.

An Attempt at a Theological Analysis of Missionary Motivation

1963 ◽  
Vol os-14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
H. Richard Niebuhr
Keyword(s):  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
Churches Of Christ ◽  
National Council ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Kind Permission ◽  
Research Committee ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
International Missionary Council ◽  
The Church

This article represents a paper prepared under the direction of the Research Committee of the Division of Foreign Missions of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. and presented in April, 1951, as part of the American preparatory study on The Missionary Obligation of the Church”, the theme of the Enlarged Meeting of the International Missionary Council in Willingen. Germany, in 1952 So far as we know, it has never been published. It is presented now because of its intrinsic value and because it is as timely as it was a decade ago, if not more so. Un his death in 1962, Dr. Niebuh was for many years Professor of Theology and Christian Ethics in the Yale University Divinary School. The article is published with the kind permission of Mrs. H. Richard Niebuhr.

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