American Academy of Religion

About: American Academy of Religion is a nonprofit organization based out in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Meaning (existential) & Protestantism. The organization has 52 authors who have published 59 publications receiving 600 citations.

The Idea of Purity In Ancient Judaism

Abstract: HE most important recent analysis of the significance of purity in the study of religions is Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger.' Our interest is not in the criticism of Douglas' ideas, for none of the data we shall survey decisively affects her main theses. We seek rather to construct an agendum out of anthropological thought for the interpretation of the various expressions of the idea of purity in ancient Judaism. Douglas' fundamental perspective on purity provides the foundation for the interpretation of the data concerning purity and impurity produced by ancient Judaism. As we shall see, she shows what is at issue and allows us to interpret the full weight and significance of the Temple and its destruction in the structure of being created by Israelite faith. She states, "The more deeply we go ... the more obvious it becomes that we are studying symbolic systems .. ."2 This constitutes the main result of the inquiry before us. Ideas of purity and impurity were intimate to, and expressive of, the larger conceptions of reality of the communities that held them. Certainly without a notion of the meaning of purity, one cannot understand either the Dead Sea yahad ("commune") or the Pharisaic havurah ("fellowship"). Purity serves to differentiate one sect from another. Because of that fact, the ideas adduced to explain or interpret purity are going to carry implications for the larger system of which they are a part. And that fact is admirably explained within Douglas' larger theory:

In Defense of Reductionism

Abstract: interpreters were less tolerant of the participant's point of view or simply less interested in it, they were not the least reluctant to understand human beliefs and actions in their own terms rather than his Indeed, they were not averse to evaluating those beliefs and actions, frequently pronouncing them false or foolish What contemporary sociologist J D Y Peel says of his nineteenthcentury predecessors holds for other disciplines as well: "Early attempts to understand social phenomena were so tied to the peculiar interests of the social world of the sociologists himself, that he only tried to understand what seemed odd, deluded, perverse or unusual; and his understanding consisted in showing how the odd, deluded, etc, came to be believed, in contrast to the true and usual-what his own society believed" (70) By contrast, contemporary interpreters typically strive to overcome their own professed biases and to "appreciate" the participant's point of view What Mircea Eliade says of the interpretation of myth in particular applies to the interpretation of human phenomena in general: "For the past fifty years at least, Western scholars have approached the study of myth from a viewpoint markedly different from, let us say, that of the nineteenth century Unlike their predecessors, who treated myth in the usual meaning of the word, that is, as 'fable,' 'invention,' 'fiction,' they have accepted it as it was understood in the archaic societies, where, on the contrary, 'myth' means a 'true story' and, beyond that, a story that is a most precious posses

Evil: A challenge to philosophy and theology

Abstract: Extended Introduction by Graham Ward Preface by Pierre Gisel 1. The experience of evil 2. The levels of discussion and discourse on evil 3. Thinking, acting, feeling.

The Labor of Compassion: Voices of “Churched” Korean American Women

Abstract: (1996). The Labor of Compassion: Voices of “Churched” Korean American Women. Amerasia Journal: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 91-106.

Black theology in american religion

Abstract: It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.' The "two warring ideals" that DuBois described in 1903 have been at the center of black religious thought from its origin to the present day. They are found in the heated debates about "integration" and "nationalism" and in the attempt to name the communitybeginning with the word "African" and using at different times such terms as "Colored," "Negro," "Afro-American," and "Black." In considering black religious thought in this essay, let us give clearer names to the "two warring ideals"-clearer, that is, from the point of view of religion. I shall call them "African" and "Christian." Black religious thought is not identical with the Christian theology of white Americans. Nor is it identical with traditional African beliefs, past or present. It is both-but reinterpreted for and adapted to the life-situation of black people's struggle for justice in a nation whose social, political, and economic structures are dominated by a white racist ideology. It was the "African" side of black religion that helped African-Americans to see beyond the white distortions of the gospel and to discover its true meaning as God's liberation of the oppressed *Charles A. Briggs Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary in