A Covenantal Imagination
A Covenantal Imagination

Author: William Johnson Everett

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2021-12-15

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1666731544

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This harvest of articles drawn from William Johnson Everett’s career of teaching and research on four continents and in a variety of institutions shows the breadth, depth, and diversity of his interests. Like spotlights in the wider field of Christian social ethics, they illuminate the key threads that have held together an emerging tapestry of thought woven around the powerful concept of covenant. Whether lifting up concepts of covenant, federalism, and corporation, the “oikos” of work, family, and faith, the public nature and mission of the church, or the ethical meaning of journey metaphors, his rich and artful style leads us into thinking more deeply about the way our lives are joined in a “covenantal imagination” about a more just and sustainable world.

The Christian Imagination
The Christian Imagination

Author: Willie James Jennings

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2010-05-25

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 0300163088

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Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions? In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew, to reveal how Christianity's highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies. A probing study of the cultural fragmentation-social, spatial, and racial-that took root in the Western mind, this book shows how Christianity has consistently forged Christian nations rather than encouraging genuine communion between disparate groups and individuals. Weaving together the stories of Zurara, the royal chronicler of Prince Henry, the Jesuit theologian Jose de Acosta, the famed Anglican Bishop John William Colenso, and the former slave writer Olaudah Equiano, Jennings narrates a tale of loss, forgetfulness, and missed opportunities for the transformation of Christian communities. Touching on issues of slavery, geography, Native American history, Jewish-Christian relations, literacy, and translation, he brilliantly exposes how the loss of land and the supersessionist ideas behind the Christian missionary movement are both deeply implicated in the invention of race. Using his bold, creative, and courageous critique to imagine a truly cosmopolitan citizenship that transcends geopolitical, nationalist, ethnic, and racial boundaries, Jennings charts, with great vision, new ways of imagining ourselves, our communities, and the landscapes we inhabit.

The Prophetic Imagination
The Prophetic Imagination

Author: Walter Brueggemann

Publisher: Fortress Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 9780800632878

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In this challenging and enlightening treatment, Brueggemann traces the lines from the radical vision of Moses to the solidification of royal power in Solomon to the prophetic critique of that power with a new vision of freedom in the prophets. Here he traces the broad sweep from Exodus to Kings to Jeremiah to Jesus. He highlights that the prophetic vision and not only embraces the pain of the people but creates an energy and amazement based on the new thing that God is doing. In this new edition, Brueggemann has completely revised the text, updated the notes, and added a new preface.

Heaven in the American Imagination
Heaven in the American Imagination

Author: Gary Scott Smith

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-06-01

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0199830703

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Does heaven exist? If so, what is it like? And how does one get in? Throughout history, painters, poets, philosophers, pastors, and many ordinary people have pondered these questions. Perhaps no other topic captures the popular imagination quite like heaven. Gary Scott Smith examines how Americans from the Puritans to the present have imagined heaven. He argues that whether Americans have perceived heaven as reality or fantasy, as God's home or a human invention, as a source of inspiration and comfort or an opiate that distracts from earthly life, or as a place of worship or a perpetual playground has varied largely according to the spirit of the age. In the colonial era, conceptions of heaven focused primarily on the glory of God. For the Victorians, heaven was a warm, comfortable home where people would live forever with their family and friends. Today, heaven is often less distinctively Christian and more of a celestial entertainment center or a paradise where everyone can reach his full potential. Drawing on an astounding array of sources, including works of art, music, sociology, psychology, folklore, liturgy, sermons, poetry, fiction, jokes, and devotional books, Smith paints a sweeping, provocative portrait of what Americans-from Jonathan Edwards to Mitch Albom-have thought about heaven.

Imagining the Jewish God
Imagining the Jewish God

Author: Leonard Kaplan

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2016-09-09

Total Pages: 575

ISBN-13: 1498517501

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Jewish art has always been with us, but so has a broader canvas of Jewish imaginings: in thought, in emotion, in text, and in ritual practice. Imagining the Jewish God was there in the beginning, as it were, engraved and embedded in the ways Jews lived and responded to their God.This book attempts to give voice to these diverse imaginings of the Jewish God, and offers these collected essays and poems as a living text meant to provoke a substantive and nourishing dialogue. A responsive, living covenant lies at the heart of this book—a covenantal reciprocity that actively engages the dynamics of Jewish thinking and acting in dialogue with God. The contributors to this volume are committed to this form of textual reasoning, even as they all move us beyond the “text” as foundational for the imagined “people of the book.” That people, we submit, lives and breathes in and beyond the texts of poetry, narrative, sacred literature, film, and graphic mediums. We imagine the Jewish people, and the covenant they respond to, as provocative intimations of the divine. The essays in this volume seek to draw these vocal intimations out so that we can all hear their resonant call.

Covenant and the People of God
Covenant and the People of God

Author: Jonathan Kaplan

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2023-05-23

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 1666726168

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Covenant and the People of God gathers twenty-four essays from friends and colleagues of Messianic Jewish theologian and New Testament scholar Mark S. Kinzer, in honor of his seventieth birthday. The essays are organized around two central themes that have animated Kinzer's work: the nature of the covenant and what it means to be the people of God. The volume includes fascinating discussions of some of the most sensitive areas related to Jewish-Christian dialogue, post-supersessionist interpretation of Scripture, and the theological shape of Messianic Judaism. Among the contributors are scholars working in North America, Europe, and Israel. They include: Gabriele Boccaccini, Douglas A. Campbell, Holly Taylor Coolman, Gavin D'Costa, Jean-Miguel Garrigues, Douglas Harink, Richard Harvey, Vered Hillel, Jonathan Kaplan, Daniel Keating, Amy-Jill Levine, Antoine Levy, Gerald McDermott, Michael C. Mulder, David M. Neuhaus, Isaac W. Oliver, Ephraim Radner, Jennifer M. Rosner, David J. Rudolph, Thomas Schumacher, Faydra L. Shapiro, R. Kendall Soulen, Lee B. Spitzer, and Etienne Veto.

Communion, Covenant, and Creativity
Communion, Covenant, and Creativity

Author: Brian Haymes

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2020-03-16

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1532668651

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This book is a follow-up to a previous volume by the same three authors, Baptists and the Communion of Saints: A Theology of Covenanted Disciples, though it does not require familiarity with the first study. The present book offers new perspectives on belief in the "communion of saints" by interpreting it through the idea of "covenant," with its two dimensions of relations with God and with each other. Giving attention to the creative arts of painting, music, poetry, and story writing, the authors explore "indications" of a hidden "communion of saints" through embodiment, memory, and connectivity. Included are studies of the work of visual artists Paul Nash and Mark Rothko; musicians John Tavener, Elgar, and Brahms; and writers Thomas Hardy, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Theological reflection on these hints of communion offers a vision of an ongoing communion of prayer with the saints, alive and dead, which does not depend on a dualistic idea of a disembodied soul existing after death but which affirms the Christian tradition of the resurrection of the body. Communion, covenant, and creativity are thus linked to develop a Christian aesthetics based on a mutual indwelling between the triune God and the world.

Imagining the Other and Constructing Israelite Identity in the Early Second Temple Period
Imagining the Other and Constructing Israelite Identity in the Early Second Temple Period

Author: Ehud Ben Zvi

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-01-29

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 0567655342

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This volume sheds light on how particular constructions of the 'Other' contributed to an ongoing process of defining what 'Israel' or an 'Israelite' was, or was supposed to be in literature taken to be authoritative in the late Persian and Early Hellenistic periods. It asks, who is an insider and who an outsider? Are boundaries permeable? Are there different ideas expressed within individual books? What about constructions of the (partial) 'Other' from inside, e.g., women, people whose body did not fit social constructions of normalness? It includes chapters dealing with theoretical issues and case studies, and addresses similar issues from the perspective of groups in the late Second Temple period so as to shed light on processes of continuity and discontinuity on these matters. Preliminary forms of five of the contributions were presented in Thessaloniki in 2011 in the research programme, 'Production and Reception of Authoritative Books in the Persian and Hellenistic Period,' at the Annual Meeting of European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS).

Re-Imagining Abraham
Re-Imagining Abraham

Author: Megan Warner

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-10-02

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 9004355898

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In Re-Imagining Abraham: A Re-Assessment of the Influence of Deuteronomism in Genesis Megan Warner revisits the tradition that Genesis was edited by editors sympathetic to the theology of the Deuteronomist. On the basis of close, contextual readings of the four passages most commonly attributed to (semi-)Deuteronomistic hands, Warner argues that editorial use of Deuteronomistic language and themes points not to a sympathy with Deuteronomistic theology but rather to a sustained project to review and even subvert that theology. Warner’s ‘re-imagining’ of Abraham demonstrates how Israel’s forebear was ‘re-imagined’ in the post-exilic context for the purpose of offering the returning exiles a way forward at a time when all the old certainties, and even continued relationship with Yahweh, seemed lost.