The rich legacy of black critical thought, creative expression, and religious reflection come together in these creatively imagined conversations between the elders about the shape and conditions of Black liberation. Barbara A. Holmes has defined key issues of freedom and identity, hypothesizing a meeting of the ancestors assembled "on the other side" to discuss them. Imagine a conversation between Barbara Jordan and Thurgood Marshall on what freedom looks like in relation to law and politics. Or, between Tupac Shakur, Nina Simone, and James Baldwin on art, culture, and liberation. Malcolm X and Harriet Tubman discuss freedom and wholeness, while Audre Lorde, Fannie Lou Hamer, and George Washington Carver talk about liberated bodies. These imagined dialogues open up rich reflection and insight and offer a unique vantage point for understanding the luminaries of liberation down through the generations. An important resource for the contemporary task of Black liberation.
These imagined dialogues between the elders on freedom, liberation, and more offer rich reflection and a unique vantage point for understanding the luminaries of liberation through the generations. An important resource for the contemporary task of Black liberation.
Argues that theoretical physics and cosmology can provide a key to overcoming race-related problems, explaining how they enable a means for discussing individual and communal quests for fulfillment beyond racial, ethnic, class, and sexual barriers. Original.
Drawing on insights from quantum physics, deep ecology, and the new cosmology, they articulate a new vision of liberating action. Hathaway and Boff lay out a path of spiritual renewal, ecological transformation, and authentic liberation.
With the approach of the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s inauguration of the Protestant Reformation and the burgeoning dialogue between Catholics and Lutherans opened under Pope Francis, this new edition of Walter Altmann’s Luther and Liberation is timely and relevant. Luther and Liberation recovers the liberating and revolutionary impact of Luther’s theology, read afresh from the perspective of the Latin American context. Altmann provides a much-needed reassessment of Luther’s significance today through a direct engagement of Luther’s historical situation with an eye keenly situated on the deeply contextual situation of the contemporary reader, giving a localized reading from the author’s own experience in Latin America. The work examines with fresh vigor Luther’s central theological commitments, such as his doctrine of God, Christology, justification, hermeneutics, and ecclesiology, and his forays into economics, politics, education, violence, and war. This new edition greatly expands the original text with fresh scholarship and updated sources, footnotes, and bibliography, and contains several additional new chapters on Luther’s doctrine of God, theology of the sacraments, his controversial perspective on the Jews, and a new comparative account with the Latin American liberation theology tradition.
Astrophilosopy, Exotheology, and Cosmic Religion: Extraterrestrial Life in a Process Universe applies Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy and the associated process philosophies of Henri Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, and others to the interdisciplinary layers of astrobiology, extraterrestrial life, and the impact of discovery. This collection, edited by Andrew M. Davis and Roland Faber, asks questions such as “How have process thinkers imagined universal creative evolution and its implications for philosophies, theologies, and religions beyond earth?” and “How might their claims as to the primacy of organism, temporality, novelty, value, and mind enrich current discussions and debates across disciplines?” As experts in their fields, the contributors are informed by, but not limited to, process conceptualities. The chapters not only advance recent discussions in astrobiology, cosmology, and evolution but also consider a constellation of philosophical topics, from shared extraterrestrial knowledge and values to the possibilities or limitations afforded by A.I. technology, the Fermi Paradox, the Drake Equation, and the increasing need to nurture the cosmic dimensions of theological and religious traditions.
The Buddha-Womb and the way to Liberation This volume resolves the ontology from the two previous volumes concerning the concept of a ‘subtle self’. First a commentary of the Tantra Great Gates of Diamond Liberation, that presents detailed information concerning the nature of the Heart, Throat, Diaphragm, and Splenic centres I and II. This adds to what was earlier provided on the Solar Plexus, Sacral and Base of Spine centres. The focus of this book concerns the attributes of the Sambhogakāya Flower, utilising The Uttaratantra of Maitreya and the Buddha’s testimony, thus revealing an esoteric doctrine that has been veiled in Buddhist scriptures.
Historically speaking, theology can be said to operate “materiaphobically.” Protestant Christianity in particular has bestowed upon theology a privilege of the soul over the body and belief over practice, in line with the distinction between a disembodied God and the inanimate world “He” created. Like all other human, social, and natural sciences, religious studies imported these theological dualisms into a purportedly secular modernity, mapping them furthermore onto the distinction between a rational, “enlightened” Europe on the one hand and a variously emotional, “primitive,” and “animist” non-Europe on the other. The “new materialisms” currently coursing through cultural, feminist, political, and queer theories seek to displace human privilege by attending to the agency of matter itself. Far from being passive or inert, they show us that matter acts, creates, destroys, and transforms—and, as such, is more of a process than a thing. Entangled Worlds examines the intersections of religion and new and old materialisms. Calling upon an interdisciplinary throng of scholars in science studies, religious studies, and theology, it assembles a multiplicity of experimental perspectives on materiality: What is matter, how does it materialize, and what sorts of worlds are enacted in its varied entanglements with divinity? While both theology and religious studies have over the past few decades come to prioritize the material contexts and bodily ecologies of more-than-human life, Entangled Worlds sets forth the first multivocal conversation between religious studies, theology, and the body of “the new materialism.” Here disciplines and traditions touch, transgress, and contaminate one another across their several carefully specified contexts. And in the responsiveness of this mutual touching of science, religion, philosophy, and theology, the growing complexity of our entanglements takes on a consistent ethical texture of urgency.
As advanced by astronomer-cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle, astronomy, biology, astrobiology, astrophysics, and cosmology converge agreeably with natural theology. In The Big Bang and God, these interdisciplinary convergences are developed by an astronomer collaborating with a theologian.
In March 2005, the United Nations released its Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Among the findings: 2/3 of the world's ecosystems are seriously degraded; 90 percent of the world's fish stocks are depleted; and climate change is not just something that might happen, it is already upon us. Many people, including many Christians, will hear this and delude themselves into thinking that technology can and will save the day. A wiser and more helpful response, especially for Christians, is to find a way to step back into the flow of nature from which we have extricated ourselves. In Darwin, Divinity, and the Dance of the Cosmos, Bruce Sanguin shows us the way. Sanguin draws on the latest scientific understandings of the nature of the universe and weaves them together with biblical meta-narratives and frequently overlooked strands of the Judeo-Christian tradition to create an ecological and truly evolutionary Christian theology - a feat few theologians have even attempted. The importance of this accomplishment can hardly be overstated. As Sanguin writes, "It's time for the Christian church to get with the cosmological program. We need new wineskins for the new wine the Holy One is pouring out in the 21st century. Twenty-first-century science has provided us with new a new story of creation that needs to inform our biblical stories of creation. We now know, for instance, that we live in an evolving or evolutionary universe. Evolution is the way that the Holy creates in space and in time, in every sphere: material, biological, social, cultural, psychological, and spiritual. This new cosmology simply cannot be contained by old models and images of God, or by old ways of being the church." As his starting point, Sanguin encourages readers to rediscover awe - an attitude very much absent from the modern mindset. "We don't see what is before us," he writes, "and as a result, we are plundering our planet at an unprecedented rate. If we could see what is before our eyes, day in and day out, the sacred radiance of creation would drop us to our knees and render us speechless." Central to this recovery of awe is the new Great Story, the 14-billion-year history of the cosmos. Into this Great Story, first told by Thomas Berry and by mathematical physicist and cosmologist Brian Swimme, Sanguin reintroduces the presence God. Heady as all this sounds, it has very practical implications for the mission of the church. Sanguin writes: "In the first centuries after Jesus' death, his disciples looked around at their world and found that what was needed by way of response to the crisis of their age was hospitals for the sick and food for the poor. This is what compassion required of them. Mission is determined by the context in which the church finds itself in each new age. I am suggesting that, today, there is nothing more critical than a compassionate response to the plight of our planet. The church must be at the forefront of shifting human consciousness away from an ethic of domination for economic gain and toward a spirituality of awe. This book - and more importantly the work of integration it suggests - represents a fundamental challenge to our theological and liturgical models. But for those who are ready and willing to embark on an exciting theological journey of discovery, it also represents a rich opportunity to become reacquainted with the Spirit of God moving in and through the very dynamics of an unfolding universe.
