Berkeley Journal of Religion and Theology, Vol. 3, No. 1. This is the regular issue journal. Featuring 2016 Distinguished Faculty lecture, the 2017 Surjit Singh Lecture, and articles by Pravina Rodrigues, Jennifer Fernandez, and Jaesung Ryu. Also featuring several book reviews.
Berkeley Journal of Religion and Theology, Vol. 2, No. 1. This is the regular issue Journal. Featuring 2015 Distinguished Faculty lecture, the 2016 Readings of the Sacred Texts Lecture, and the 2016 Surjit Singh Lecture, as well as articles by Shin Young Park, Brent Lyons, Wesley Ellis, and Jessica Tinklenberg. Featuring several book reviews as well.
A profound exploration into the spiritual beliefs and practices of Seattle’s unhoused youth Soul Woundedness is an intimate, piercing book about everyday life for young adults living on the streets of Seattle. Based on over five years of research and as a participant-observer, Paul Houston Blankenship-Lai presents the personal experiences of “street kids,” highlighting how their spiritual beliefs and practices offer them comfort, a sense of community, and a feeling of belonging amidst their struggles. They also demonstrate how spirituality on the streets can alienate people from themselves and the world. The stories Blankenship-Lai tells here are about how social wounds go soul deep, and how seemingly antireligious spiritual practices, fashioned in an almost unlivable local world, help people create a life still worth living. By paying deep, sustained attention to what spirituality is like on the streets and what difference it makes, Blankenship-Lai uncovers an important, overlooked dimension in the experience and study of homelessness. They invite us to enter these stories and to question how our own spiritual and otherwise practices can help create “a more loving love.” Aimed at a diverse audience, Soul Woundedness is a book not merely to educate but to transform. It is particularly relevant for those interested in spirituality’s role in addressing social inequities and underscores the importance of spiritual practices in overcoming adversity and promoting social change, making a compelling case for a world where everyone has a place to call home.
Residing at the intersection of constructive theology and critical social theory, this book provides a resource for both students and clergy to reinterpret Christian theology and re-imagine Christian faith in the twenty-first century. The author seeks “to encourage and equip Christian faith communities to move beyond the decades-long stalemate over human sexuality and gender identity” because “Queer gifts emerge in Christian communities when lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people no longer feel compelled to justify their presence in those communities.” Useful in both seminary classrooms and in congregational settings, the book is a contribution to the still-emerging field of queer theology, translating the rigors of scholarly research into transforming proposals for faith communities.
Film is popularly described as a mirror of culture. It plays a pivotal role in facilitating intercultural dialogue in our global village. World cinema helps us understand and appreciate each other’s cultural identity, and promotes harmony across different cultures in our pluralistic society. It introduces us to the life of “the other” in an entertaining yet engaging fashion, creating cultural bridges that foster a sense of unity in the midst of our diversity. This book argues that “cultural anthropology” and “theology” offer two distinct, yet intrinsically connected theoretical frameworks to formulate a more “holistic” reading of religion from world cinema. It proposes an integrated methodology for religious criticism of film in which we look at religion as a subsystem of culture and observe how religious experiences depicted on the screen are mediated through the personal bias of the auteur and the context in which the film is produced. It thus creates a renewed appreciation for the religious diversity in our world by providing a new way of observing and interpreting ethnographic information from world cinema.
The study of African philosophy, like all great philosophical enquiries around the world, is fraught with the wrecks of words, wrenched from their original meaning, widened or narrowed, and forced into a bewildering variety of vessels that chum their ways in seas of semantic confusion. African philosophical studies has acquired and added to the many philosophical verbal transmogrifications that came originally from the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria. In its turn, it has produced its own eccentric philosophical etymology, of which, perhaps the most striking example is Igwebuike philosophy. A reflection on Igwebuike philosophy reveals that it is a product of a meticulous and critical study of African philosophy. It is in this light that the scrupulous researcher would dissect the profound thinker behind the Igwebuike philosophy. In this book, scholars of different hues and academic endeavours have made excursus into the origin, originator, meaning and relevance of Igwebuike philosophy to contemporary African philosophical scholarship and African societies. Research shows that the brain behind Igwebuike philosophy that is gradually becoming a major part of African philosophical engagement is incontestably Prof Ikechukwu Anthony Kanu, O.S.A. Igwebuike itself is a philosophical principle that is drawn from African primordial practice of solidarity and complementarity; the works of professional African philosophers, African proverbs, African folk tales, African mythology, African symbols, African names and African songs. — Kanayo L. Nwadialor, Ph.D Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka
Augustine's Confessions: Conversion and Consciousness argues two original positions concerning the structure and meaning of the Confessions by Augustine. The structure is found to be a tool used by Augustine in his earlier pre-Confessions writings in which he uses the Allegory of the Cave in book VII of the Republic by Plato to both describe human consciousness and as a structural framework for his own life story. As with Plato's allegory, Augustine then uses Books X-XIII to do, what the author calls, "Scriptural Philosophical" analysis of the allegorical prayer previously given. The author shows that the Confessions is really an allegorical quasi-prayer that shows Augustine's state of mind or disposition through space/time—and at the same time uses different personas, schools of thought and metaphysical constructs to show the inadequacy of Plato's consciousness model of the cave to truly describe human ratiocination within consciousness in its totality—Synchronic-Synthetic-Triplex (SST) or body, mind, God-Will substance. Instead, Augustine demonstrates the superiority of the Christian conversion to that of the Platonic as described both by Platonic books and the books of the Platonists. The Christian conversion is based on the incarnate Wisdom of Christ Jesus within the Cave/World.
From case studies of Japanese life, distills theories to explore how the religion, culture, and values are related to society, social change, and economic development. Draws on the methodologies of sociology, anthropology, history, and other disciplines, and on interviews and observations, as well as on published literature. Paper edition (unseen),$16.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
In this book, Lehman compares the ministry styles of women and men focussing on clergy of Protestant Congregations (ministers, clerics, preachers, and parsons). He offers strong statistical support for the trend toward increasing numbers of women in clerical roles. His book is the first to make direct comparisons between men and women on several dimensions of ministry style (using a national sample): interpersonal style, theology, career goals, thought forms, power and authority, and ethics.
Charles Pemberton draws on interviews with foodbank users and volunteers to defend and advance a Christian vision of welfare beyond emergency food provision. He suggests that behind the day-to-day struggles of those using foodbanks there are wider much concerns about loneliness, marginalisation and the wholesale fragmentation of society.