In the interface of Christian ethics, autoethnography and Indigenous knowledge, I propose a Christian moral imagination of cohabitation based on interdependence and enablement. I use non-archival community knowledge and oral memory to excavate moral...
During the twentieth century, Catholic theology moved to reject the misuse of imaginaries of the afterlife. By insisting on a de-cosmologization of the “last things”, theologians endorsed a Christocentric eschatology. However, a physical...
This paper attempts to deal with an essential dimension of the process of discernment as Francis develops it, namely, the narrative. The paper treats the imaginative discernment exemplified in his use of storytelling, metaphors, and symbols to open a...
Most studies of the religio-racial constellation begin with the medieval taxonomy of Christians, ‘Jews’, ‘pagans’ and ‘heretics’. Some scholars examine how this medieval taxonomy functioned as a system of dehumaniz...
Catholic education has a long tradition of engagement with the liberal arts and especially the humanities. The place of the humanities today in the curriculum is under threat for several reasons, one being the predominance of the technocratic mentali...
In this text, the author analyzes the convergence between Christian culture and relevant films of Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense filmography. Rather than focusing on Hitchcock’s status as a Catholic director, he makes an empirical analysis t...
This essay introduces and examines aspects of the theological aesthetics of contemporary Canadian artist, Michael D. O’Brien (1948–). It also considers how his philosophy of the arts informs understandings of the Catholic imagination. In so doing, it...
Choosing to have a body embalmed, the choice of interment locations and type, including the selection of a particular casket, are all deeply intertwined with various understandings of the afterlife, and views of the body after death. Consumer choices...
Faith in the Anthropocene requires a re-imagined account of Christian hope. Research on the emergence of eco-anxiety disorder shows that climate crisis and ecological destruction have psychological and emotional effects on persons and communities, pr...
The capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, the extirpation of various heresies in the twelfth and thirteen centuries, the gradual expansion of Christian rule in the Iberian peninsula, and the mass conversion of Jews to Christianity there duri...
While many authors continue to use terms like Christian Imagination or Sacramental Imagination, few seek to define what the term imagination means. In this paper, the author presents his findings based on a close reading of S.T. Coleridge, C.S. Lewis...
In 2012, the Christian evangelical organization Focus on the Family published Escape to the Hiding Place, the ninth book in Adventures in Odyssey’s Imagination Station book series. This short children’s book is a creative reimagining of C...
This paper leverages the Christian tradition of negative theology (Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Areopagite, Eriugena, Eckhart, Cusanus) in order to think past the impasses of identitarian politics and culture. It essentially bears on Christianity...
Christian theology is not an isolated system of knowledge. The theological phenomena of revelation and inspiration are related to human knowledge of self, community and the world, yet it would be insufficient to think that their conceptual content co...
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints possesses a subversive and fecund interpretation of the Christian creation narrative. This interpretation, denying creation ex nihilo, bespeaks a particular attention to and care for the living earth. H...
Rethinking the powers of the imagination, Søren Kierkegaard both anticipates and challenges contemporary approaches to a descriptive philosophy of religion. In contrast to the reigning approaches to religion in his day, Kierkegaard reconceives...
Many people assume that there has been ceaseless conflict between science and Christianity. I argue that the real conflict has been between scientism and religion. Scientism is the view that only the sciences generate knowledge or rational belief. Sc...
Wittgenstein had significant religious impulses, from his early Notebooks to his late entries in Culture and Value. Christian religious texts seemed to him to articulate significant human experiences that were worthy of respect. Yet he found himself...
The very latest scholarship on the Swiss Reformation has urged us to resituate the conceptual origins and first articulations of a Reformed Covenant theology in the Zurich of Zwingli, Jud, Pellikan, and Bullinger, rather than in the Geneva of Calvin...
Colonialism in Africa rewarded individuals who offered no resistance to its ideology and demonized those who did. An effect this continues to have on the African moral imagination is the tendency to idealize compliance over resistance, especially to...
The figure of Antichrist, linked in recent US apocalyptic thought to President Barack Obama, forms a central component of Christian end-times scenarios, both medieval and modern. Envisioned as a false-messiah, deceptive miracle-worker, and prophet of...
Preaching is one of the most creative things a pastor does. This essay explores how a theology of creativity, the imagination, and the arts can encourage preachers to embrace proclamation as creative work. The invitation to preachers to engage their...
Contemporary forms of Pentecostalism, such as that of the Faith Movement, are often represented as inherently global, constituting a religion ‘made to travel’ and to missionize across the world. I argue that while much attention has been paid to pros...
In medieval India, the desire for “the unity of Brahman and Self” was present in the Vedānta tradition of Hinduism. Adi Śaṅkara, the master of Vedānta philosophy, proposed the six-fold sādhana: mind control, sens...
The present study examines the ways in which the Filipino Christian value of pakikipagkapwa (fellowship) can be seen and experienced in modern society. Using empirical phenomenology, this paper aims to (re)imagine the ways of cultivating ways of dial...
This paper will begin by exploring the underlying scriptural and theological foundations for a Christian response to the ecological crisis with particular focus on the writings of cultural historian, Father Thomas Berry, CP. It will then describe the...
This article examines historically competing categories of magic and religion and their gendered traces in the history of religious studies. On one hand, we have a genealogy that traces the term, “magic”, back to an early modern European Christianity...
The Doctrine of Christian Discovery is a series of fifteenth-century papal bulls that served as the theological and legal justification for the colonization of the world and the enslavement of the Original Free Nations, starting first on the African...
Christianity appealed to writers of African descent from the moment they set foot on New World soil. That attraction, perhaps as a result of the professed mission of slaveholders to “Christianize the heathen African,” held sway in African...
This paper aims to understand better the religious beliefs and cultural practices of Cordilleran Christian youth in the Philippines. By zooming in on the notions of God and practices of select Cordilleran Christian youth, this study endeavors to make...
Anyone specialising in Islamic theology at a Western university is aware of the fact that their teaching and research will either be recognised by the institution as falling under the category of “Islamic Studies” or “Divinity&rdquo...
In many ways, the cascading effects of the age of the Anthropocene have accelerated life as we know it towards a certain kind of reckoning, which has only been exacerbated amidst the global inequities present within the COVID-19 pandemic. Trauma stud...
The future of colonial pasts still haunts Christian imagination and theology. This is especially true in the field of eschatology, which is dedicated to Christian ways of conceiving the future. This article examines the manifold entanglements that co...
Jewish apocalyptic literature emerged as a form of resistance literature during the intertestamental period. A product of marginalized communities, such literature is highly political, articulating the worldview of the politically oppressed and those...
This paper examines the diasporist French Jewish political group, Le Cercle Gaston Crémieux, founded in 1967 “to promote a diasporic Jewish existence without subjugation to the synagogue or to Zionism”. In contrast to either an ass...
This paper takes its cue from studies in Chinese religious transnationalism to offer an interpretation of how a group of Chinese evangelical leaders constructed their visions and versions of transnational Christianity across China and Southeast Asia...
The cultural renaissance in 20th-century India has fostered an aesthetic integration of contemplative mysticism with popular religious practices, influencing various artistic and theological movements. This paper examines Christian artist Joy Elamkun...
This article explores the following question: Given the Roman Catholic Church’s present-day teaching on catholicity, how can St. John Henry Newman’s historically conscious, imaginative view of catholicity assist Catholic Christians today in understan...
Liturgical practice and its theological interpretation are not only very important to the Chinese inculturation of Catholicism in particular and Christianity in general but also of great significance in the establishment of an indigenized Christian f...
An activity that is widespread but rarely closely examined in studies of pilgrimage is the enumeration of pilgrims (and related visitors) to shrines and their environs. Such “biopolitics of hosting” can play a significant role in mobilisi...
The Liber Exemplorum, a collection of preachers’ tales, was compiled c.1275 by an English Franciscan working in Ireland, and is the earliest Franciscan example of its type. Out of 213 exempla which survive in this manuscript, some 26 of these are fou...
Religious educational literature in the United States often presumes the congregation as the primary context for the work of faith formation. Given the reduction of institutional affiliation and participation in Christian congregations, this assumpti...
This paper argues that the unconscious dimensions of the moral life—for example, moral vision, moral imagination, and distorted consciousness—are some of the most urgent provinces of moral theology today. Historically, moral theology was concerned wi...
In Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, Margaret Atwood examines different forms of debt and their various interrelations. Her work invites, but does not provide, an account or philosophy of debt or its deep implication in Christian beliefs s...
Critical realism as a lens of thought is not new to theological inquiry, but recently a growing number of theologians have been using its conceptual frameworks to guide their thought on how social structures function theologically, and how ethics mig...
Monastic vows have been a source of religious controversy at least since the Reformation. Today, new monastic movements recover many elements of the tradition (e.g., community life and prayer, material solidarity and poverty), but vows—understo...
The main challenge of theology is the adequate manner of the transmission of what is sacred and belongs to the transcendent order by means of appropriate categories of immanent religious language. In history, there was a debate between the univocal a...
This article explores the paratexts of the epistles attributed to Baruch, the scribe of Jeremiah, in Syriac, Peshitta Old Testament manuscripts. In early manuscripts, the epistles ascribed to the figure Baruch are, most commonly, either included in t...
How do we understand the relationship between preaching and culture? This question is as old as Christianity, even though “culture” in its anthropological sense is a relatively recent development. As every preacher knows, both preacher an...
The ‘Age of Austerity’ has ruptured the social fabric of contemporary Britain. Arising from our three-year Life on the Breadline project, this article represents the first fieldwork-led analysis of the multidimensional nature of austerity...
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