The Christian scholar today and Bonhoeffer’s legacy of the transformative gospel

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksandar S. Santrac

This article seeks to draw some useful guiding principles for Christian scholars from Bonhoeffer’s work, applied primarily in the US context. These take note of: (1) the power and relevance of his contextual expression of the gospel message; (2) the intellectual and academic responsibility of his scholarship; (3) the distinctive elements of his ethics; and (4) his expression of the transformative symbiosis of the divine will and human agency. Based on these principles, recognised in Bonhoeffer’s historical and theological legacy, the article will explore the current legacy of Bonhoeffer’s work and contextualise it in the current battle for Christian values in society.Contribution: Within the current US political polarisation between forms of Christian nationalism and the anti-racist movement in the US, this article is a special contribution to the debate of Bonhoeffer’s theological or political momentum.

2021 ◽  
pp. 136843022097829
Author(s):  
Rosemary L. Al-Kire ◽  
Michael H. Pasek ◽  
Jo-Ann Tsang ◽  
Joseph Leman ◽  
Wade C. Rowatt

Attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policies are divisive issues in American politics. These attitudes are influenced by factors such as political orientation and religiousness, with religious and conservative individuals demonstrating higher prejudice toward immigrants and refugees, and endorsing stricter immigration policies. Christian nationalism, an ideology marked by the belief that America is a Christian nation, may help explain how religious nationalist identity influences negative attitudes toward immigrants. The current research addresses this through four studies among participants in the US. Across studies, our results showed that Christian nationalism was a significant and consistent predictor of anti-immigrant stereotypes, prejudice, dehumanization, and support for anti-immigrant policies. These effects were robust to inclusion of other sources of anti-immigrant attitudes, including religious fundamentalism, nationalism, and political ideology. Further, perceived threats from immigrants mediated the relationship between Christian nationalism and dehumanization of immigrants, and attitudes toward immigration policies. These findings have implications for our understanding of the relations between religious nationalism and attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy in the US, as well as in other contexts.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 551-580
Author(s):  
Marcos Cordeiro Pires ◽  
Thaís Caroline Lacerda Mattos

Este artigo busca refletir sobre o contexto de uma eventual disputa hegemônica entre Estados Unidos e China. Entretanto, ao invés de traçar um cenário prospectivo, busca-se levantar elementos históricos da formação de ambas as sociedades com vistas a delinear as bases das atuais estratégias internacionais de cada país. Importante característica comum entre ambas é que tanto Estados Unidos e China se veem como excepcionais, resultado de virtudes e de condições históricas específicas que moldaram de cada sociedade. Tal percepção de excepcionalidade está entre os princípios norteadores da inserção externa de Estados Unidos e China, além justificar e solidificar a construção das bases ideológicas que definem a concepção de hegemonia de cada país. Na perspectiva dos Estados Unidos, prevalece a noção de um “Destino Manifesto” – Manifest Destiny, uma visão missionária e religiosa sobre seu papel na ordem mundial. No caso da China, uma civilização milenar autocentrada e pacífica, construída sob o princípio imperial de “Tudo sob o Céu” – Tianxia ??, na qual o imperador chinês exercia o seu mandato celestial por meio da virtude e da benevolência sobre o povo Han e os povos vassalos de todo o mundo. Assim, o objetivo deste artigo é o de analisar a construção da excepcionalidade em ambas as sociedades e relacionar tais características com suas políticas atuais.     ABSTRACT: This article seeks to reflect on the context of a possible hegemonic dispute between the United States and China. However, instead of outlining a prospective scenario, it seeks to raise historical elements of the formation of both societies in order to outline the bases of the current international strategies of each country. An important characteristic that United States and China have in common is that both see themselves as exceptional, as result of their own virtues and the specific historical conditions they have shaped from each society. This perception of exceptionality is among the guiding principles of the US and China's external performance and justifies the ideological foundations that define each country's conception of hegemony. From United States perspective´s the notion of "Manifest Destiny” brings with it a missionary and religious vision about its role in the world. In China's case, a self-centered and peaceful ancient civilization, built under the imperial principle of "All Under Heaven" - Tianxia ??, in which the Chinese Emperor exercised his heavenly mandate through virtue and benevolence over the Han people and the vassal peoples of the whole world. Thus, the objective of this article is to analyze the perception of exceptionality in both societies and to relate such characteristics to their current policies. Keywords: United States. China. Hegemony. Exceptionality. Manifest Destiny. All Under Heaven.     Recebido em: Agosto/2018. Aprovado em: Novembro/2018.


2021 ◽  
pp. rapm-2021-103083
Author(s):  
Edward R Mariano ◽  
David M Dickerson ◽  
Joseph W Szokol ◽  
Michael Harned ◽  
Jeffrey T Mueller ◽  
...  

The US Health and Human Services Pain Management Best Practices Inter-Agency Task Force initiated a public–private partnership which led to the publication of its report in 2019. The report emphasized the need for individualized, multimodal, and multidisciplinary approaches to pain management that decrease the over-reliance on opioids, increase access to care, and promote widespread education on pain and substance use disorders. The Task Force specifically called on specialty organizations to work together to develop evidence-based guidelines. In response to this report’s recommendations, a consortium of 14 professional healthcare societies committed to a 2-year project to advance pain management for the surgical patient and improve opioid safety. The modified Delphi process included two rounds of electronic voting and culminated in a live virtual event in February 2021, during which seven common guiding principles were established for acute perioperative pain management. These principles should help to inform local action and future development of clinical practice recommendations.


Last Acts ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 31-53
Author(s):  
Maggie Vinter

This chapter traces how arts of dying migrate from devotional texts into homiletic dramas and finally to the commercial playhouse between 1570 and 1590, around the same time that anti-theatrical condemnations of the stage as inherently blasphemous come to cultural prominence. Theater constitutes an important site of religious instruction and theological investigation not despite, but rather because of, its blasphemous potential. William Wager’s Enough Is as Good as a Feast, Nathaniel Woodes’s The Conflict of Conscience, and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus all employ parodies of ars moriendi ideas to represent evil action. Parody arts of dying help dramatize a predestinarian cosmos where distinctions between the elect and the reprobate are fundamental, yet invisible to humans. The bad deaths in these plays function like negative theologies, manifesting and explicating divine will through attempted departures from it. In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe brings the reprobate parodist into focus alongside the divine parodied and makes the magician’s vicious death a site for analyzing human agency. As practices of dying are inverted into theatrical arts of dying badly, Elizabethan dramatists discover occasions to explore the nature of action and the forms of agency available in situations of extreme constraint or privation.


2005 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 338-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willis Jenkins

AbstractWhere some religious environmentalisms deploy traditional concepts according to the practical needs of cosmology, usul al-fiqh (jurisprudence) envisions an alternative practical strategy for Islamic environmental ethics. Jurisprudence governs religious adaptations according to guiding principles designed to conform practical reason to the ongoing discovery of divine will. This article shows how those principles can function as mechanisms for normative change, and reviews their diagnostic capacity for evaluating various uses of Islamic resources.


Author(s):  
Joseph Cheah

This chapter argues that race and ethnicity have been central factors in the development of US Buddhism. It begins with a construction of North American convert Buddhism, whose antecedent goes back to a process of Orientalism initiated by Brian Houghton Hodgson, Eugene Burnouf, and other founding figures of Western Buddhism. Then it examines the term “ethnic Buddhist” as a problematic and unstable category, an assimilationist underpinning in the theories employed by many investigators of US Buddhism that treats ethnicity as an extension of race, the employment of racial formation theory in the study of US Buddhism, the limitation of totalizing teleology and the use of Gramscian theory to transcend the limits of teleology, and the pivotal role that human agency has played in the adaptation of Buddhist practices and beliefs by Asian immigrant Buddhists to the US context.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Perry ◽  
Andrew L Whitehead ◽  
Joshua B. Grubbs

Though the persistence of voter suppression and disenfranchisement in the US is well-documented, we still know little about their contemporary ideological underpinnings beyond partisanship and racial resentment. Highlighting the Christian Right’s influence in driving anti-democratic sentiment in the post-Civil Rights era, we propose contemporary ideological support for restricting the vote generally, and specifically, to those who prove “worthy,” is undergirded by a pervasive ideology that cloaks authoritarian ethno-traditionalism with the ultimacy and polysemic utility of religious language―Christian nationalism. Nationally representative data collected weeks before the November 2020 elections reveal Christian nationalism is a leading predictor that Americans deny that voter suppression is a problem, believe that the US makes it “too easy to vote,” believe that voter fraud is rampant, and support measures to disenfranchise individuals who could not pass a basic civics test or who committed certain crimes. Interactions show Christian nationalism’s influence is particularly strong among men across most outcomes and, regarding voter suppression, whites compared to Blacks. We argue Christian nationalism seeks to institutionalize founding ideals in which civic participation is rooted in hierarchies, being restricted to a “worthy” few. Appeals to America’s religious heritage thus facilitate stratifying America’s citizenry and justifying restricting participation to preserve dominance.


Author(s):  
Daniel D. Miller

Abstract American Christian nationalism highlights the entanglements of identity and power as they relate to the category of “religion.” Like many populist movements, Christian nationalism emerges out of a power-devaluation crisis stemming from the diminishment of White Christians’ social and political hegemony, coalescing around the affirmation that the US is a properly “Christian” nation. However, an examination of Christian nationalism reveals that the meaning of “Christian” within Christian nationalism cannot be captured by traditional measures of individual religiosity that tacitly presuppose that religion is essentially private, belief-focused, and non-political in nature, but must recognize that it expresses a complex social identity involving multiple social domains (e.g., race, gender, political ideology) and, as such, contests of power. This analysis is significant for religious studies because it suggests that religion is better approached analytically as an active process of socially-shared identity formation than as a belief system or Gestalt of individual religious practices.


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