Other Religion Commons^™

A Balancing Act: Reading 'Amoris Laetitia', Peter Steinfels, Paige E. Hochschild, William L. Portier, Sandra A. Yocum, Dennis O'Brien

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Five religious scholars provide commentary on Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), Pope Francis's 2016 apostolic exhortation on love in the family.

Paralysis And Sexuality In Medical Literature And The 'Acts Of Peter', Meghan Henning

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

This paper focuses on the story of Peter’s daughter that is found in the Berlin Coptic papyrus BG 8502.4 and is associated with the apocryphal Acts of Peter. Research on the story of Peter’s daughter has primarily focused on its interpretation of the theme of chastity, or whether the story was originally included in the Acts of Peter. In the course of these investigations, scholars have taken for granted the curious assumption of the text that paralysis renders Peter’s daughter unfit for marriage, and thus safe from Ptolemy’s unwanted advances.

This paper explores the underlying understandings of paralysis and sexuality …

Vatican Ii And Intellectual Conversion: Engaging The Struggle Within, Dennis M. (Dennis Michael) Doyle

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In 1980 I took a course with Joseph Komonchak entitled “The History and Theology of Vatican II” at the Catholic University of America. True to the title, Komonchak was doing history and theology together at the same time on a class-by-class basis. He would bring in documents from the Council and from the times leading up to it, often in Latin, and he would talk about how his goals as a theologian required him to work in a historical manner. To understand Vatican II, or the Church itself for that matter, required not just understanding theological concepts but also grasping …

A Member Of No Community? Theology After Wittgenstein, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

The study of Wittgenstein has spawned a new sort of Christian theology. A growing list of theologians have discovered in Wittgenstein a therapy for conceptual confusion and tips for how to go on, not only in religious faith and practice, but also in the practice of theology as an academic discipline. This is not to say that such thinkers have succeeded in turning Wittgenstein into an instrument of apologetics or that Wittgenstein has “delivered” them from the grip of their own religious particularity. No; they have learned from Wittgenstein the skill of silence. Their theology, like Wittgenstein’s philosophy, comes to …

Practicing To Aim At Truth: Theological Engagements In Honor Of Nancey Murphy, Ryan Newson, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Well-meaning evangelicals unfamiliar with Nancey Murphy’s philosophical theology frequently worry that her work in philosophy of mind has the effect of depriving us of our souls. When such an objection is voiced after a speaking engagement, Murphy’s “reassurance” is predictable: “Don’t worry! There is nothing to be lost; we never had souls to begin with!”

Underneath her wry reply is a deep concern that philosophical confusion about “having a soul” is seriously undermining Christian discipleship. For example, it has become second nature for many Christians to hold that the soul is more important than the body; regardless of the state …

Ecclesial Practices, Colin M. Mcguigan, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In this chapter, we first provide an overview of the place of practice in some of the most prominent recent epistemologists of religion; second, we give an account of an ordinary practice (engineering) to flesh out a general conception of the importance of practice in training cognizers for skilled perception; third, and last, we connect the results of this inquiry with renewed theological and philosophical interest in the ‘spiritual senses’ tradition. The upshot of these reflections is the conclusion that an adequate account of social practices already anticipates the possibility that ecclesial practice might contribute to an epistemic transformation capable …

Extraordinary Love In The Lives Of Lay People, Dennis M. Doyle

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

The College Theology Society (CTS), initially called the Society of Catholic College Teachers of Sacred Doctrine, was founded mainly by religious and clergy in the early 1950s to support those who taught college-level theology to Catholics in non-seminary settings. Sometimes CTS, in comparison with another group, is said to be relatively more lay-oriented. What this actually means, I think, is that for the CTS, the college classroom, populated mainly by lay people, was the primary locus for carrying out the task of teaching theology.

The main goal was to promote the religious formation of Catholic lay people. Given some of …

Americanized Catholicism? A Response To Thomas Schärtl, Dennis M. Doyle

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

I stand in fundamental agreement with what Thomas Schärtl has said in his article describing recent trends in US Catholicism. I am a lifelong Catholic and a lifelong Democrat. I felt personally distressed and discouraged by the support given to Mitt Romney and the Republicans by some leading US Catholic bishops. Most of this support may have technically passed the legal test of being nonpartisan, but undeniably it functioned in a partisan manner, as did the attacks launched on President Obama in the midst of a campaign to defend religious liberty. Schärtl’s analysis of these trends as reflecting marketing strategies …

Hauerwas On Hauerwas: Review Of 'Approaching The End: Eschatological Reflections On Church, Politics, And Life', William L. Portier

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Stanley Hauerwas has achieved singular preeminence among theologians in the United States as a public intellectual. Writing on subjects from Christian ethics to law, pacifism, bioethics, and political philosophy, he has provided bountiful fodder for academics while managing to leave footprints in the general culture-he is surely one of very few theologians ever to appear on Oprah. Any new book bearing Hauerwas' name is noteworthy, and the latest one doesn't disappoint.

Eternal Punishment As Paideia: The Ekphrasis Of Hell In The Apocalypse Of Peter And The Apocalypse Of Paul, Meghan Henning

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Much of the history of scholarship on “hell” has been devoted to tracing genetic relationships between older texts and more recent ones, typically based upon generic elements or the specific features of hell’s landscape. This paper suggests a new direction for classics and New Testament study, focusing instead on the rhetorical function of hell in antiquity. This paper argues that the ancient conventions of descriptive rhetoric were at work in the depictions of Hell that we find in the Jewish and early Christian apocalypses. It begins with a definition of these rhetorical devices by examining the Progymnasmata as well as …

Educating Early Christians Through The Rhetoric Of Hell: 'Weeping And Gnashing Of Teeth' As 'Paideia' In Matthew And The Early Church, Meghan Henning

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Meghan Henning explores the rhetorical function of the early Christian concept of hell, drawing connections to Greek and Roman systems of education, and examining texts from the Hebrew Bible, Greek and Latin literature, the New Testament, early Christian apocalypses and patristic authors.

This work is a revised version of the author's Ph.D. dissertation, which was successfully defended at Emory University in 2013. It is included in the series Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament II.

She writes, "Now that this work is finished, I am delighted to have the opportunity to thank those who have generously traveled with me on this …

Here Come The Nones! Pluralism And Evangelization After Denominationalism And Americanism, William L. Portier

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

This essay begins with a four-part overview of American Catholic history focused on the building and dissolution of an immigrant Catholic subculture. The final period, “Catholics and the Dynamics of Pluralism (1968-present)” leads naturally into a discussion of the demography of Catholics in the United States. Particular attention is given to the trend to disaffiliation among millennials and how best to interpret it. Pastoral and theological reflections on the demography of disaffiliation emphasize the need for the church in the United States to take on an evangelical form more suited to a pluralism that is post-denominational and post-Americanist, and how …

Assembly Required: Christ's Presence In The Pews, William L. Portier

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

When I attempt to articulate what I "get out of" going to church, I find myself increasingly emphasizing the real presence of Christ in the assembly. It has been almost 50 years since Vatican II, so it is well to recall what the council's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy said in 1963 about that presence. It taught that in order to accomplish the work of salvation for which the Father sent him, Christ is always present in the church, especially in the church's liturgical celebrations.

Jewish, Christian – Or What? Questions Of Self-Designation In The 'Ascension Of Isaiah', Meghan Henning, Tobias Nicklas

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

The Question of the “Parting of the Ways” between Jews and Christians has become a matter of debate again: is it really appropriate to speak about two more or less coherent groups going two different ways from a certain point in history – perhaps after Paul’s mission, after the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE), or after the Bar-Kokhba War (132-135 CE)? Does the image of a tree with one root and two different trunks going into two different directions really fit what the extant sources tell us about the complexities of the past? Or shouldn’t we distinguish between …

A Modus Vivendi? Sex, Marriage & The Church, William L. Portier, Nancy Dallavalle, Christopher C. Roberts, Tina Beattie, R. R. Reno, Patricia Hampl, Luke Timothy Johnson, Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Paul Baumann

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

During the 1960s, nearly 80 percent of adult Americans were married. A recent analysis of U.S. census data reported that only 52 percent of adult Americans were married in 2009. That is the lowest percentage reported in the 100 years the Census Bureau has collected such information. The reasons for this dramatic cultural shift are well known: high rates of divorce; changing attitudes toward premarital sex; social acceptability of cohabitation; the weakening of the stigma surrounding out-of-wedlock births and single parenting; the postponement of marriage and children for academic or professional reasons.

Among those with only a high-school education or …

Rethinking Fideism Through The Lens Of Wittgenstein’S Engineering Outlook, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In an otherwise superbly edited compilation of student notes from Wittgenstein’s 1939 Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cora Diamond makes a false step that reveals to us our own tendencies to misread Wittgenstein. The student notes she collated attributed the following remark to a student named Watson: “The point is that these [data] tables do not by themselves determine that one builds the bridge in this way: only the tables together with certain scientific theory determine that.” But Diamond thinks this a mistake, presuming instead to change the manuscript and put these words into the mouth of Wittgenstein. …

Character, D. Michael Cox, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Character denotes the particular set of qualities, both natural and acquired, that serves to identify a person or community. These qualities are relatively stable and will be manifest as a consistency of act~ on that can be termed "integrity." Accordingly, in the context of Christian ethics, character names an established disposition (or set of dispositions) with respect to the particular conception of the . human good exemplified by Christ. Such character ts developed over time and, as such, can be formed either toward or away from virtues, understood as those intellectual and affective habits that enable the pursuit of excellence. …

Foreword To 'Sermons From Mind And Heart: Struggling To Preach Theologically', Brad Kallenberg, William Vance Trollinger

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

One does not flip through a car manual and mistake it for poetry. Nor does one pick up the Sunday comics and mistake them for a Physicians' Desk Reference. That is because native speakers seldom make mistakes of genre when reading ordinary English texts. Yet pick up a collection of sermons, and one may feel at a loss: What is going on here? What am I to make of these sentences? What sort of genre is this? What am I, as a reader, to expect (or not to expect) from a sermon, especially from a printed sermon? Should I expect …

Teaching Engineering Ethics By Conceptual Design: The Somatic Marker Hypothesis, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In 1998, a lead researcher at a Midwestern university submitted as his own a document that had 64 instances of strings of 10 or more words that were identical to a consultant's masters thesis and replicated a data chart, all of whose 16 entries were identical to three and four significant figures. He was fired because his actions were wrong. Curiously, he was completely unable to see that his actions were wrong. This phenomenon is discussed in light of recent advances in neuroscience and used to argue for a change in the standard way engineering ethics is taught. I argue …

Modernism And Postmodernism, Brad Kallenberg, Ethan Smith

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

The Global Dictionary of Theology is inspired by the shift of the center of Christianity from the West to the Global South. But it also reflects the increase in two-way traffic between these two sectors as well as the global awareness that has permeated popular culture to an unprecedented degree.

The editorial perspective of the Global Dictionary of Theology is an ecumenical evangelicalism that is receptive to discovering new facets of truth through listening and conversation on a global scale. Thus a distinctive feature of the Global Dictionary of Theology is its conversational approach. Contributors have been called on to …

The Descriptive Problem Of Evil, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Language is like the cane in the hand of the blind person. The better one becomes at getting around with the cane, the more he or she is apt to forget the cane but through the cane perceive the objects scraped and tapped by the other end. A defective cane may distort the world perceived by the blind person. So too, defective use of language threatens to muddy our understanding of the things we talk about. When discussing something as difficult as natural evils, a frequently undetected defect in our language use is “overly attenuated description.” In this piece, I …

What Mega-Churches Can Learn From Catholics, Aaron James, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Mega-churches are not very popular among academics, even Christian ones. At a recent conference of theologians and ethicists, my colleague and I found ourselves on the defensive. According to the bulk of the seminar participants, the failure of mega-churches to form faithful disciples was a foregone conclusion.

This perspective was very troubling to us. Since we could vouch for the genuine and sincere faith of our academic peers, we could not simply dismiss their complaints as spiritually vacuous. At the same time, we could not deny that God's Spirit was genuinely present in our mega-church congregation. Formerly-unchurched persons are coming …

Some Things Are Worth Dying For, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In April of 1992, Kristen French, a 15 year-old girl was kidnapped and held as a sex slave in suburban Ontario. For two days she was raped and threatened with death. Surprisingly, on the third day she grew defiant, refusing to perform a particular sexual act even after she was shown pre-recorded videotape of her predecessor, Leslie, being strangled by her captors with an electrical cord. (Leslie's corpse was sawn into 10 pieces before disposal.) A record of Kristen's suffering was preserved on video tape too. Of interest is Kristen's dying claim: "Some things are worth dying for."

Kristen's story …

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 …

Virtues And Practices In The Christian Tradition: Christian Ethics After Macintyre, Nancey C. Murphy, Brad Kallenberg, Mark Thiessen Nation

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Using Alasdair MacIntyre's work as a methodological guide for doing ethics in the Christian tradition, the contributors to this work offer essays on three subjects: description of MacIntyre's approach; reflections on moral issues; and selected essays on family, abortion, feminism and more.

Professional Or Practitioner? What’S Missing From The Codes?, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Imagine a code of ethics that advocated shady business practices and that the organization proposing the code came under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. Imagine further, that the investigation came to trial and the stance taken by the organization was found to be illegal by the highest court of the land. Such a scenario, if true, would raise a host of questions about codes of professional ethics, not the least of which would be “What value, if any, do codes of ethics have for the teaching of ethics?”

Sadly, the above scenario is factual. However, I’m not referring …

Live To Tell, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In recent years, countless Christians have found evangelism a difficult and even baffling scriptural mandate. Those we encounter, particularly young people, are often entirely unfamiliar with the basics of the Gospel. Traditional means of communicating the faith, from cold-calling to mass-mailings, simply no longer speak the language of the culture.

Brad Kallenberg recognizes that evangelism, even in our own backyard, has become a cross-cultural task. Like missionaries serving in foreign countries, we must become "students of the host culture." Much more than a "sinner's prayer," conversion requires a change of social identity.

Indeed, becoming a follower of Christ involves gaining …