Sharing On Suffering Experiences As The Secularity Of Incarnation

The changing context of the Christian life brings Christian life at a crossroads, the first whether to remain in a comfort zone or the second whether to enter into the realm of profane daily life. The urge to get out of selfness and deal with the public world makes the Church deal with questions about its own identity. In this article, I want to explore the question of incarnation in Johan Baptist Metz's secularity. However, the concept of incarnation is applied solely to Jesus Christ as the Divine Word became flesh. Ricoeurian hermeneutics could help explain the term secularity on incarnation to immediate. And corporeal suffering of the others. The turn to Ricoeur as a methodological resource for theology provides a philosophical account of the methodology behind critical theology. The article concludes that the human being in their relationship its suffering experience is an experience of encounter.

Amway as Neoliberal Religious Tradition

Why do people desire their own continued oppression under neoliberalism? This essay seeks an answer to this confounding question through analysis of the Amway organization, an American multi-level-marketing (MLM) company that rose to a multi-billion dollar value in the 1980s and 90s. My argument is that Amway serves as a prime case study for the relation between neoliberalism and religious practices––people desire their continued oppression under neoliberalism in part because neoliberalism bears meaning at the level of culture and religion. What sets Amway apart from other MLMs, and makes Amway a prime case study for neoliberalism and religious practices, is its amalgamation of neoliberal ideology with ideas and trends from American evangelicalism, to the extent that it serves as a kind of neoliberal religious tradition. As this amalgamation demonstrates, people may defend neoliberalism with a similar fervor as defending cultural or religious traditions. The conclusion explores the possibility of a decolonial American evangelicalism, which would seek options for broadening the horizons of American evangelicalism beyond the relationship to neoliberalism and the possibility of a critical theology robust enough to thoughtfully critique neoliberalism. In pursuit of this thesis, the essay utilizes a theoretical framework guided by the contributions of scholars including Wendy Brown, Walter Benjamin, Olivier Roy, Walter Mignolo, and Carl Raschke in order to analyze Amway through the lens of contemporary political theories of neoliberalism.

Islam dan Pembebasan: Elemen-elemen Teologis dalam Menciptakan Transformasi Sosial

Di tengah sengkarut ekonomi global yang menyebabkan kesenjangan yang tajam, masyarakat dan elit-elit politik di dunia seolah telah kehilangan daya kritis untuk melawan penindasan dan penghisapan berkedok pembangunan. Di situlah Islam, sebagai agama yang transformatif, seharusnya mampu hadir sebagai penawar. Secara normatif, Islam bukanlah agama yang menafikan tanggung jawab sosial. Malahan dalam firman-Nya, Allah Swt menyatakan seorang muslim sebagai pendusta agama apabila sementara ia beribadah, ia mengacuhkan kondisi prihatin fakir dan yatim di sekitarnya (107: 3). Doktrin utama Islam, doktrin tauhid juga mengisyaratkan kesatuan manusia (The unity of man) sebagai hamba yang tunduk patuh kepada kesatuan Tuhan (The unity of God) dan karenanya menolak upaya penuhanan lainnya. Tulisan ini mengajukan sebuah konsepsi mengenai Islam selaku teologi kritis yang memiliki pesan utama agar penganutnya melakukan perubahan sosial. Konsepsi itu memperlihatkan Islam yang membebaskan melalui lima elemen teologis, yaitu: doktrin, kisah, subjek, kesadaran, dan pendidikan yang membebaskan. Amid the turmoil of the global economy which led to sharp disparities, the people and political elites in the world seemed to have lost the critical power to oppose the oppression and exploitation under the guise of development. That is where Islam, as a transformative religion, should be able to come as an antidote. Normatively, Islam is not a religion that denies social responsibility. In fact, in his word, God declared a Muslim a religious liar if while he worshiped he ignored the conditions of concern for the needy and orphans around him (107: 3). The main doctrine of Islam, the doctrine of monotheism also implies human unity (The unity of man) as a servant who obeys to the unity of God (The Unity of God) and therefore rejects other full efforts. This paper proposes a conception of Islam as a critical theology which has the main message that followers adhere to social change. This conception shows a liberating Islam through five theological elements namely doctrine, story, subject, consciousness, and liberating education.Kata Kunci: Teologi Pembebasan, Pendidikan Kritis, Transformasi Sosial, Islam

The aesthetics of the religious and the sacralization of “positivist” science – “idealism” (Adam Asnyk) and decadent religious poetry of early modernism (Stanisław Korab-Brzozowski)

Religious images and motives in nineteenth-century poetry (particularly in the period of dominant Positivism) became gradually aestheticized and lost much their original symbolic impact. This was partly due to the consequences of Kantian philosophy that introduce a dichotomy between phenomena and noumena. Positivism was merely interested in the relation between objects belonging to the phenomenal world. Critical theology (D.F. Strauss, Ernest Renan) started to analyze religious symbols and New Testament stories from the point of view of history and (compared) myth, applying positivist methodology to the “humanities”. Poets wishing to recapture the religious potential (the “Holy”) of traditional symbols and ritual had to recontextualize them. The “sacred” does not reside in the symbols themselves, but it is transferred to the relation established by the individual between his position in the world and a symbol or ritual. The religious moment results from experiencing this “unrepeatable” relation (its unrepeatability being the condition of contact with transcendence, relating the symbol as phenomenon with the noumenal sphere that is present as a trace – the individually experienced symbol points to its absence). In Polish late romantic poetry (e.g. Adam Asnyk) the individualization of the experience of transcendence is impeded by the patriotic connotations of religious symbols and rituals that presuppose the experience of belonging to a (“national”) community (a “relic” of Polish romantic messianism, c.f. the aftermath of the January Uprising). The modernist poet Stanisław Korab Brzozowski succeeded in developing a poetic method of recontextualizing traditional religious symbols that allowed to show the incompatibility between the phenomenal and the noumenal sphere as an inner experience of a subject (e.g. a wooden cross stretching its arms to an empty heaven) as a direct reaction to Renan´s relativization of the Christian “Heilsgeschichte”, unmediated by Polish romantic messianism).

Comparative Theology, Comparative Wisdom, and Covenantal Logic

Rashkover explores the encounter between Frank Clooney’s approach to comparative theology and Barth’s confessional theology with an eye to their implications for Jewish-Christian relations. Building on her work in Freedom and Law: A Jewish-Christian Apologetics, she offers appreciation for Barth’s confessional approach, which in theory permits the possibility of revelatory encounter beyond the Christian community because of God’s freedom coupled with the lawful limit of that freedom. However, she argues, Barth’s critical theology needs a “covenantal repair,” a theological supplement that pays closer attention to the positive role of sanctification through the community’s living apprehension of the Word in time. This “repair” is needed not only for Christians, but for Christian-Jewish comparative exchange, so that both communities can describe how a claim about God’s revelation makes sense in divine-human conversation. She finds resources for this repair in the work of Robert Jenson, with its analysis of the “covenantal character of the Word.” She concludes that this covenantal logic of scripture “renders both Judaism and Christianity viable participants in the adventure of Clooney’s comparative learning.”

The Political Is the Total

This chapter illuminates how theology came to view itself and the unresolved political questions generated by modernity that liberation theologians challenged. The theo-political negotiation that began in sixteenth-century Europe, the reverberations of the Enlightenment and Romantic heart religion, remained as a residue within post-war theology. Both Catholics and Protestant liberationists voiced the attitude of the radical wing of the Reformation, an influential minority appealed to by many subsequent dissenters. The chapter surveys a set of key theo-political negotiations resulting in the Great Separation between religion and politics contributing to the mid-century irrelevancy of theology. The thought of Martin Luther, Thomas Müntzer, and Friedrick Schleiermacher are examined as offering key ideas. In response, liberationists argued for a critical theology against an inherited privatized religion and the assumed autonomy of theology that denied its political character. Refusing to bypass politics, they instigated a call for a critical world-shaping theology.

The Vitalism of Religion

This chapter explores how liberationists responded to the modern critique of religion as ideology by building a critical theology asserting the world-shaping role of religious faith. Rousseau, Feuerbach, and Marx set the course for subsequent social theorists to consider the possibilities and limits of religion as a revolutionary force. Diverse thinkers had brought a charge against religion as detrimental to social progress, and yet by the mid-twentieth century the criticism seemed less essential to modernity. Other social thinkers drew on religious ideas useful for multiple, and often radical, political and social projects. The ambivalent secular/religious opposition of modernity served as an opportunity for liberationists to assume a critical stance toward religion as ideology while retaining a positive utopian function for faith. Furthermore, recognizing the many ways individuals were inescapably embedded in society rendered the struggle for freedom as confronting a total system of domination, of which religion was only a part.