Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review: 'Goodbye Father: The Celibate Male Priesthood And The Future Of The Catholic Church', William L. Portier

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

On Writing A History Of The College Theology Society: Reviewing Fifty Years Of Theological Conversations, Sandra Yocum Mize

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

The historian remains in many an imagination nothing more and nothing less than the purveyor of facts about the past. The historian's task appears simple, straightforward—to report the facts accurately. According to the logic of this image, once one has “the facts” about a selected topic, then the history nearly writes itself. Fortunately for the historian, even the most focused historical study demands more than setting the events in their proper order. I write “fortunately” because if the historical task were as straightforward as just described then a single history written by no particular historian would suffice on any given …

On Locating Disaster, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Imagine a man, unknown to you, standing in your backyard calmly clasping and unclasping his hands three times each hour. If we ask "What is he doing?" we would not likely be satisfied with these words: "He's clasping his hands three times per hour." There is something unnerving about the whole scene, not only because we cannot comprehend the point of clasping one's hands three times per hour; we want to know, "What's he doing in my back yard?"

There is a similarly unnerving quality about the description of the Columbia disaster as posed by the case study. By it …

The Strange New World In The Church: A Review Essay Of 'With The Grain Of The Universe' By Stanley Hauerwas, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Hauerwas's refusal to translate the argument displayed in With the Grain of the Universe (his recent Gifford Lectures) into language that "anyone" can understand is itself part of the argument. Consequently, readers will not understand what Hauerwas is up to until they have attained fluency in the peculiar language that has epitomized three decades of Hauerwas's scholarship. Such fluency is not easily gained. Nevertheless, in this review essay, I situate Hauerwas's baffling language against the backdrop of his corpus to show at least this much: With the Grain of the Universe transforms natural theology into "witness." In the end, my …

Praying For Understanding: Reading Anselm Through Wittgenstein, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

If Wittgenstein is correct to assert that practice gives words their sense, then it is logically possible that an understanding of the ontological "argument" Anselm presents in Proslogion requires some level of practical participation in prayer. A close inspection of Anselm's historical context shows that the conceptual distance we stand from him may be too great to be overcome by mere spectatorship. Rather, participation in this case likely requires of the modern reader a reproduction of Anselm's conduct in prayer. If so, Anselm's case falsifies, and thus warrants our resistance of, the commonly presumed disconnect between knowledge and practice.

Fresh …