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How Marion Helps Us To Understand Kierkegaard’S Fear And Trembling, Mark Tazelaar

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

In the past decade, many interpretations of Fear and Trembling highlight the significance of the “eschatological”—the marvel of Abraham’s expectation that he will get Isaac back. For these interpretations, the central issue is the contrast between the knight of faith and the knight of resignation. Merold Westphal, however, contends that these interpretations lead us away from the main contrast between the hero of faith and the tragic hero. Kierkegaard scholarship is at an impasse. I argue that Marion’s phenomenology of sacrifice, together with the important idea of veritas redarguens that he appropriates from Augustine, offer insights that can resolve the …

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

Theology and 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 …

Ecclesial Practices, Colin M. Mcguigan, Brad Kallenberg

Theology and 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 …

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

Theology and 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 …

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

Theology and 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 …

Justice Without Solidarity? Collective Identity And The Fate Of The "Ethical" In Habermas' Recent Political Theory, Andrew J. Pierce

Presidential Seminar on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition

No abstract provided.

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

Theology and 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 …

Consideration Of The Church's Identity And Mission, Predicated On The Church Be-Ing 'Ligamen' (Bond), C. A. Chase

School of Theology and Seminary Graduate Papers/Theses

In 1965, the Roman Catholic Church, in Gaudium et spes, declared to the world: this community realizes that it is truly linked with mankind and its history by the deepest of bonds (GS 1). Shifting her identity from being one in opposition to the modern world, she announced the possibility of becoming the very bond (ligamen) binding diverse human communities and nations of the world, whilst existing as a function, a light, an energy (GS 42). Framed against the classical understanding of ecclesia as a perfect society, and the fact that this was no longer realistic in …

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

Theology and 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.

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

Theology and 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 …

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

Theology and 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 …

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

Theology and 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

Theology and 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

Theology and 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 …

Humility, Civility, And Vitality: Papal Leadership At The Turn Of The Seventh Century, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

In 416, Bishop Innocent I of Rome sent a colleague in Gubbio what was to become one of the most important set of liturgical instructions in early Christendom. Innocent composed his remarks on, inter alia, penitential discipline and prescribed gestures during the administration of the Sacraments to deter other bishops and their priests from improvising. He claimed that bishops of Rome, as successors of St. Peter, had the responsibility to authenticate ritual observances and achieve uniformity in Italy and elsewhere. Churches could not be left to alter or surrender valued practices because presiding priests or bishops thought them superfluous or …

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

Theology and 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

Theology and 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. …

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

Theology and 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 …

Character, D. Michael Cox, Brad Kallenberg

Theology and 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. …

John Paul Ii And Christian Personalism Vs. Peter Singer And Utilitarianism: Two Radically Opposed Conceptions Of The Nature And Meaning Of Suffering, Peter J. Colosi

Faculty and Staff - Articles & Papers

Although Christian ethics and contemporary utilitarianism both employ terms such as love and compassion, they are in fact polar opposite ethical views. This fact is not at all easy to discern. One key to perceiving the radical opposition between them lies in clarifying their respective concepts of suffering. In the Christian view, suffering is always understood as the suffering of individual persons, while in utilitarianism suffering is primarily understood as a quantifiable entity detached from the individuals who experience it. The paper attempts a primarily philosophical elucidation of this difference, including some theological points, by taking as its point of …

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

Theology and 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 …

Ciis Today, Fall 2008 Issue, Ciis

CIIS Today

This volume is the Fall 2008 issue of CIIS Today, the Magazine of the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Modernism And Postmodernism, Brad Kallenberg, Ethan Smith

Theology and 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 …

Personhood, The Soul And Non-Conscious Human Beings: Some Critical Reflections On Recent Forms Of Argumentation Within The Pro-Life Movement, Peter J. Colosi

Faculty and Staff - Articles & Papers

This paper has grown out of concerns that I have about the way in which some pro-life arguments have been developing recently, and it is written in a spirit of frank dialogue with those whom I consider allies. I present three basic problems within some prominent contemporary pro-life argumentation, all three of which are rooted in a general tendency towards relying on empirical science in an increasingly exclusive way as the foundation of those arguments. The three problems that I touch on are: a neglect of the role of God in human procreation, a neglect of the dignity of women, …

The Descriptive Problem Of Evil, Brad Kallenberg

Theology and 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 …

The Uniqueness Of Persons In The Life And Thought Of Karol Wojtyła/Pope John Paul Ii, With Emphasis On His Indebtedness To Max Scheler, Peter J. Colosi

Faculty and Staff - Articles & Papers

The uniqueness of persons is explored philosophically in the writings of Max Scheler and Pope John Paul II.

Some Things Are Worth Dying For, Brad Kallenberg

Theology and 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

Theology and 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

Theology and 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

Theology and 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 …