Fidelity with Plausibility

Fidelity with Plausibility
Author: Wesley J. Wildman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 472
Release: 1998-01-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1438424043

The task of interpreting the religious significance of Jesus Christ takes shape in this book with the tension determined by two goals: fidelity to the classical Christological tradition, which draws our attention to Jesus in the first place, and plausibility with respect to all forms of contemporary knowledge. To ignore the classical tradition is to assume uncritically that contemporary plausibility structures are beyond question, while to forsake plausibility is to embrace the irrationalism of the theological ghetto-dweller. This book argues that maintaining this tension in our time can be achieved only with a modest interpretation of Jesus Christ, one that repudiates the hermeneutical absolutism associated with affirming that Jesus Christ is uniquely, exhaustively, unsurpassably significant for revelation and salvation.

Rhetorical Public Speaking

Rhetorical Public Speaking
Author: Nathan Crick
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2017-06-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1351868306

Rhetorical Public Speaking: Civic Engagement in the Digital Age, Third Edition offers students an innovative approach to public speaking by employing the rhetorical canon as a means of constructing artful speech in a multi-mediated environment. It provides a foundation to guide students in understanding, constructing, and delivering messages that address matters of public concern. This edition features contemporary as well as historical examples to highlight key concepts and show how rhetoric works in practice. Each chapter includes speech excerpts, summaries, and exercises for review and retention. Students of public speaking are encouraged to employ their new skills as engaged citizens of society.

Religion within the Limits of History Alone

Religion within the Limits of History Alone
Author: Demian Wheeler
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1438479352

Among the greatest challenges facing religious thinkers today is that created by historicism, the notion that human beings and their myriad understandings of reality are utterly historical, conditioned by contingent circumstances and tied to particular contexts. In this book, Demian Wheeler confronts the historicist challenge by delineating and defending a particular trajectory of historicist thought known as pragmatic historicism. Rooted in the German Enlightenment and fully developed within the early Chicago school of theology, pragmatic historicism is a predominantly American tradition that was philosophically nurtured by classical pragmatism and its intellectual siblings, naturalism and radical empiricism. Religion within the Limits of History Alone not only undertakes a detailed genealogy of this pragmatic historicist lineage but also sets forth a constructive program for contemporary theology by charting a path for its future development. Wheeler shows that pragmatic historicism is an underdeveloped resource for contemporary theology since it offers a model for normative religious thought that is theologically compelling yet wholly nonsupernaturalistic, deeply pluralistic, unflinchingly liberal, and radically historicist.

Christ Actually

Christ Actually
Author: James Carroll
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2014
Genre: Church and the world
ISBN: 0670786039

Critically acclaimed and bestselling author James Carroll has explored every aspect of Christianity, faith, and Jesus Christ except this central one: What can we believe about -- and how can we believe in -- Jesus in the twenty-first century in light of the Holocaust and other atrocities of the twentieth century and the drift from religion that followed?

Ernst Troeltsch and Comparative Theology

Ernst Troeltsch and Comparative Theology
Author: Echol Lee Nix
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2010
Genre: Christianity
ISBN: 9781433108372

Ernst Troeltsch and Comparative Theology examines the methodological attempts of Ernst Troeltsch and Robert Neville for discerning Christian normativity. The investigation of Troeltsch focuses on his treatment of the absoluteness of Christianity and highlights the crisis brought upon absolute religious claims by the study of the history of religions. By rejecting both the supernatural-exclusive apologetic of orthodox Protestantism and the evolutionary apologetic of liberal Protestantism, Troeltsch insists that theology's method should be the history of religions' method (die religionsgeschichtliche Methode). Like Troeltsch, Neville agrees with historical inquiries, but, contrary to Troeltsch, Neville advances an axiological hypothesis to thinking, which is founded in valuation. Neville explains the role of valuation at the imaginative level of thinking and relates it to his theory of normative truth in religious symbols. This study shows that Neville begins with Troeltsch's methodological presuppositions but achieves more normative theology than Troeltsch, especially on ways in which God is engaged in symbolically shaped thinking and practice. Both thinkers offer creative insights for theology that make possible a critical comparison of truth claims regarding the validity of Christianity in and for a historically conscious age.

Human Rights: Moral or Political?

Human Rights: Moral or Political?
Author: Adam Etinson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 519
Release: 2018-03-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191022225

Over the past decade or so, philosophical speculation about human rights has tended to fall into two streams. On the one hand, there are "Orthodox" theorists, who think of human rights as natural rights: moral rights that we have simply in virtue of being human. On the other hand, there are "Political" theorists, who think of human rights as rights that play a distinctive role, or set of roles, in modern international politics: setting universal standards of political legitimacy, serving as norms of international concern, and/or imposing limits on the exercise of national sovereignty. This edited volume explores this disagreement, its underlying sources, and related issues in the philosophy of human rights. Using the Orthodox-Political debate as a springboard for broader reflection, the volume covers a diverse range of questions about: the relevance of the history of human rights to their philosophical comprehension; how to properly understand the relationship between human rights morality and law; how to balance the normative character of human rights - their description of an ideal world - with the requirement that they be feasible in the here and now; the role of human rights in a world shaped by politics and power; and how to reconcile the individualistic and communitarian aspects of human rights. All chapters are accompanied by useful and probing commentaries, which help to create dialogues throughout the entire volume.