This is an edited volume aiming to recover a Christian humanist ethos. It provides a historical overview and individual examples of past Christian humanisms.
Since the early 1980s, there has been renewed scholarly interest in the concept of Christian Humanism. A number of official Catholic documents have stressed the importance of "Christian humanism," as a vehicle of Christian social teaching and, indeed, as a Christian philosophy of culture. Fundamentally, humanism aims to explore what it means to be human and what the grounds are for human flourishing. Featuring contributions from internationally renowned Christian authors from a variety of disciplines in the humanities, Re-Envisioning Christian Humanism recovers a Christian humanist ethos for our time. The volume offers a chronological overview (from patristic humanism to the Reformation and beyond) and individual examples (Jewell, Calvin) of past Christian humanisms. The chapters are connected through the theme of Christian paideia as the foundation for liberal arts education.
Jens Zimmermann locates Bonhoeffer within the Christian humanist tradition extending back to patristic theology. He begins by explaining Bonhoeffer's own use of the term humanism (and Christian humanism), and considering how his criticism of liberal Protestant theology prevents him from articulating his own theology rhetorically as a Christian humanism. He then provides an in-depth portrayal of Bonhoeffer's theological anthropology and establishes that Bonhoeffer's Christology and attendant anthropology closely resemble patristic teaching. The volume also considers Bonhoeffer's mature anthropology, focusing in particular on the Christian self. It introduces the hermeneutic quality of Bonhoeffer's theology as a further important feature of his Christian humanism. In contrast to secular and religious fundamentalisms, Bonhoeffer offers a hermeneutic understanding of truth as participation in the Christ event that makes interpretation central to human knowing. Having established the hermeneutical structure of his theology, and his personalist configuration of reality, Zimmermann outlines Bonhoeffer's ethics as 'Christformation'. Building on the hermeneutic theology and participatory ethics of the previous chapters, he then shows how a major part of Bonhoeffer's life and theology, namely his dedication to the Bible as God's word, is also consistent with his Christian humanism.
An innovative study of the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which elucidates that his work teaches and represents a Christian humanism that is also present in the wider Christian tradition.
Jens Zimmermann suggests that the West can rearticulate its identity and renew its cultural purpose by recovering the humanistic ethos that originally shaped Western culture. He traces the religious roots of humanism, and combines humanism, religion and hermeneutic philosophy to re-imagine humanism for our current cultural and intellectual climate.
New Thinking, New Scholarship and New Research in Catholic Education gives a forum to many established and leading scholars to review and critically appraise the research contribution of Gerald Grace to Catholic education. The book demonstrates the way in which the field of Catholic Education Studies has developed under the influence of Grace, to become internationally recognised. This book demonstrates the ways in which Gerald Grace has shaped Catholic education since 1997. This begins with the primacy of empirical study and carefully conducted fieldwork when researching Catholic education. Many contributors focus on the way Grace champions the alignment between Catholic education and what we have come to know as the option for the poor. The collection also reflects Grace's intention to ensure the voices of women are properly represented in the field of Catholic education. The book is based on an inclusive and open principle that seeks to establish dialogue with educators of different faiths and different religious backgrounds, as well as secular and humanist critics. It will be of great interest to academics, scholars and students of religious education, the history of education and all those interested in the developing field of Catholic Education Studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
This volume draws together leading theologians and Christian ethicists from across the globe to critically engage with and reflect upon Gerald McKenny, widely acknowledged as one of the most original and important Christian ethicists working today. The essays highlight the significance of McKenny's interventions with a range of important debates in contemporary theological ethics, ranging from analyses of the Protestant conception of grace to bioethics and medicine. The Ethics of Grace is the first volume to facilitate critical engagements with a number of key themes in McKenny's work, not in the least his interpretation of Karl Barth. Among the contributions, Jennifer Herdt discusses McKenny's Barthian interest in the relationship between nature and grace; Angela Carpenter uses his Barthian understanding of grace and human action as a framework to discuss Jonathan Edwards; Stanley Hauerwas pushes McKenny's theology beyond Barth. Economic, political, and technological themes are also discussed in depth, for instance in Robert Song's chapter on the phenomenology of biotechnological enhancement. Reaching far beyond the work of Gerald McKenny, this multifaceted volume is a high-level resource for students and scholars of theological and philosophical ethics.
This book is a contribution to scholarship in the field of religious education. Its aim is simple: to offer a critical perspective on the nature of religious education in the light of contemporary developments in Catholic thinking in catechesis and wider thinking in education. The issues raised in the book will provide ample material for fruitful dialogue and constructive debate in the world of Catholic education. Part One revolves around four historical contexts selected specifically to illuminate contemporary developments in the field. While these historical periods have porous boundaries, they offer a working structure in support of the core claims of the book. Part Two explores the complex genealogy of the relationship between catechesis and Religious Education. Key thematic frames of reference within which the relevant Magisterial documents and associated academic literature are set out and explored chronologically thus allowing for some cross-referencing across the themes: unsurprisingly the range of the issues for debate resists a neat packaging within specific time-frames but does provide a helpful working structure. Part Three proposes that a Spirituality of Communion should underpin the Church's work in catechesis, education and Religious Education. Shared Mission seems to be a satisfactory articulation of the necessary dialogic relationship between both fields and offers a suitable space for both distinction and reciprocity. The revised edition contains an appendix on the Global Compact on Education.
For 50 years, Margaret Mead told Americans how cultures worked, and Americans listened. While serving as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and as a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, she published dozens of books and hundreds of articles, scholarly and popular, on topics ranging from adolescence to atomic energy, Polynesian kinship networks to kindergarten, national morale to marijuana. At her death in 1978, she was the most famous anthropologist in the world and one of the best-known women in America. She had amply achieved her goal, as she described it to an interviewer in 1975, "To have lived long enough to be of some use." As befits her prominence, Mead has had many biographers, but there is a curious hole at the center of these accounts: Mead's faith. Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith introduces a side of its subject that few people know. It re-narrates her life and reinterprets her work, highlighting religious concerns. Following Mead's lead, it ranges across areas that are typically kept academically distinct: anthropology, gender studies, intellectual history, church history, and theology. It is a portrait of a mind at work, pursuing a unique vision of the good of the world.
In Lucy Hutchinson and the English Revolution, Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille explores Lucy Hutchinson's historical writings and the Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, which, although composed between 1664 and 1667, were first published in 1806. The Memoirs were a best-seller in the nineteenth century, but largely fell into oblivion in the twentieth century. They were rediscovered in the late 1980s by historians and literary scholars interested in women's writing, the emerging culture of republicanism, and dissent. By approaching the Memoirs through the prism of history and form, this book challenges the widely-held assumption that early modern women did not - and could not - write the history of wars, a field that was supposedly gendered as masculine. On the contrary, Gheeraert-Graffeuille shows that Lucy Hutchinson, a reader of ancient history and an outstanding Latinist, was a historian of the English Revolution, to be ranked alongside Richard Baxter, Edmund Ludlow, and Edward Hyde.