Journal•ISSN: 0009-6407
Church History
Cambridge University Press
About: Church History is an academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Protestantism & Christianity. It has an ISSN identifier of 0009-6407. Over the lifetime, 4302 publications have been published receiving 21308 citations.
Topics: Protestantism, Christianity, Politics, Church history, Faith
Papers published on a yearly basis
Papers
More filters
TL;DR: McDannell as mentioned in this paper investigates the history and meaning of Christian material culture in America over the last 150 years, drawing on a rich array of historical sources and on in-depth interviews with Protestants, Catholics, and Mormons.
Abstract: What can the religious objects used by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americans tell us about American Christianity? What is the relationship between the beliefs of the faithful and the landscapes they build? This lavishly illustrated book investigates the history and meaning of Christian material culture in America over the last 150 years. Drawing on a rich array of historical sources and on in-depth interviews with Protestants, Catholics, and Mormons, Colleen McDannell examines the relationship between religion and mass consumption. McDannell claims that previous studies of American Christianity have overemphasized the written, cognitive, and ethical dimensions of religion, presenting faith as a disembodied system of beliefs. She shifts attention from the church and the theological seminary to the workplace, home, cemetery, and Sunday school. Thus McDannell highlights a different Christianity - one in which average Christians experience the divine, the nature of death, the power of healing, and the meaning of community through interacting with a created world of devotional images, environments, and objects.
329 citations
TL;DR: Coiling-wood as discussed by the authors argued that this view presupposes both the human experience of designing and constructing machines and the Christian idea of a creative and omnipotent God, and that the world, to such a view, is devoid both of intelligence and life, the movements which it exhibits are imposed from without.
Abstract: R. G. Collingwood has suggested that the basic contrast between the Greek view of nature and what he calls the Renaissance view, springs from the difference between their respective analogical approaches to nature. Whereas, he argues, the Greek view of nature as an intelligent organism was based on an analogy between the world of nature and the individual human being, the Renaissance view conceived the world analogically as a machine. Instead of being regarded as capable of ordering its own movements in a rational manner, and, it might be added, according to its immanent laws, the world, to such a view, is devoid both of intelligence and life, the movements which it exhibits are imposed from without, and “their regularity due to 'laws of nature' likewise imposed from without.” Coiling- wood concludes, therefore, that this view presupposed both the human experience of designing and constructing machines, and the Christian idea of a creative and omnipotent God.
128 citations
TL;DR: For instance, this article pointed out that history has no distinctively historical method, but borrows its models and methods from a variety of other disciplines, such as the natural sciences and social sciences.
Abstract: History, Hayden White remarks, has no distinctively historical method, but borrows its models and methods from a variety of other disciplines. These disciplines, however, have varied over time. Latenineteenth-century German historiography looked to the rigorous procedures of the natural sciences to reconstruct the past “as it actually happened“; mid-twentieth-century historians turned to the social sciences, especially to anthropology and sociology, for their models and methods. More recently, historians' appropriation of (and experimentation with) concepts derived from literary and critical theory has occasioned much heated discussion within the field.
123 citations
TL;DR: Berrigan's To Dwell in Peace as discussed by the authors is a classic example of religious autobiography and an account of ongoing Christian conversion, and it uncovers the roots of a radical impulse deep within twentieth-century American Catholicism.
Abstract: childhood into a time punctuated by Dickensian moments. The intrepid Berrigan journeys through pain and spiritual growth, the harshness of a restless, demanding father, buffeted by economic uncertainty and unfulfilled personal promise. Throughout his chronicle, colorful characters abound: mystics, martinets, eccentrics, innovators. Berrigan's recollections of Jesuit training include an unnamed novice master, \"at odds with his time and place,\" from whose example Berrigan gleaned that \"serious Christians . . . exist in the world as in a conscientious limbo, out of their element, walking uneasily\" (p. 94), and Pere Charmot, a Jesuit who introduced the young priest to a new understanding of Scripture and to the worker priest movement of France, which was then under fire by the Vatican. The latter portion of the autobiography, more than one half of the volume, covers Berrigan's emergence as an antiwar leader during the Vietnam War. The influence of his younger brother, Philip, and his experiences as a member of the social justice program frame Berrigan's radicalization. Yet throughout the tumultuous sixties, seventies, and eighties, it is clear that his spirituality and activism nurtured each other. Daniel Berrigan raises a rare prophetic voice, urging Christians to live the gospel and to question complacency within the church as rigorously as they challenge the injustices of the secular order. To Dwell in Peace is a classic example of religious autobiography and an account of ongoing Christian conversion. Along with Dorothy Day's Long Loneliness and Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain, it uncovers the roots of a radical impulse deep within twentieth-century American Catholicism. Berrigan's autobiography, full of wit and irony, also explores the sources of turmoil in the Catholic church and presents a thoughtful memoir of the role that committed Christians played in the eclectic antiwar coalition of the 1960s. Most importantly, Berrigan's life illustrates how a prophetic voice might emerge from a conventional church.
108 citations
TL;DR: Tillich's social analysis is politically realistic insofar as it is grounded in the tension between power and justice in the travail of history as discussed by the authors. But this political realism does not lead to moral cynicism or a crass realpolitik, according to Tillich.
Abstract: that is a person or a nation. Power is in tension with the non-being that threatens all finite existence. \"Justice\" \"is the order of powers according to their dynamic and static potentialities\" (p. 90). Justice is not only rendering each their due, the usual concern of ethics with distributive justice; it is, much more, the proper ordering of a being's powers. \"Love,\" Tillich argues, is the uniting principle of power and justice. It is the fundamental structure of being-itself. Given these concepts, Tillich's social analysis is politically realistic insofar as it is grounded in the tension between power and justice in the travail of history. He is quick to criticize proposals which are too optimistic about the harmony of power and justice, something he sees, for instance, in John XXIII 's Pacem in Terris. Yet this political realism does not lead to moral cynicism or a crass realpolitik, according to Tillich. This is because love is the essential structure of being-itself. This fact about being-itself, which is also a theological claim, warrants hope as a motivating factor in persons' lives. The insistence on realism and on hope led Tillich to call his approach to social thought \"faithful realism.\" The strength of Tillich's analysis is that it provides insight into the questions of meaning and value that have dominated life in modern western cultures. The weakness of his social thought is that at crucial points Tillich adopts standard ethical and political concepts without considering their validity for theological ethical reflection. For instance, Tillich endorses some form of Just War theory, but he qualifies this in light of the development of nuclear weapons. Yet the actual logic of Just War thinking and the assumptions about social existence it must endorse are simply not explored. Tillich's approach to theological reflection moves at a level of generality that weakens the force of the ethical and political argument. That said, he still offers a compelling existential analysis of the crisis of meaning and value in contemporary life. Ronald H. Stone has done us a service by bringing these essays together in this volume. Stone himself claims that Tillich offers us a \"theology of peace\" which can inspire and sustain the Christian peace movement. I have suggested that any theology of peace needs an ethics of peace as well. Be that as it may, the essays collected in this book provide an insightful interpretation of our tumultuous century.
107 citations