Theopoetics in Color

Theopoetics in Color PDF Author: Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 1467463892
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
A collaborative book project centering the liberative theopoetics practiced by a new generation of scholars of color What is theopoetics? Once a field dominated by white liberals in the ivory tower, this embodied form of theology has flourished in the work of a new generation of scholars of color. In this groundbreaking book edited by Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein and Lakisha R. Lockhart-Rusch, a diverse team of theologians shows how theopoetics can be practiced “in color.” Featuring unconventional and artistic forms of religious reflection, this collection demonstrates how theology can become accessible when it reflects the embodied experiences of marginalized people and communities. These creative contributions defy the limitations of the white, Eurocentric academy, including such works as: • an explanation on the use of experimental theater to express theological theses • a guide to spiritual disciplines for metaphorical cyborgs seeking liberation • a meditation on the theological import of Filipino potlucks • a literary reflection on the meaning of religion to Black boys and men Diverse in scope and radical in perspective, this bold volume reclaims the liberative potential of theopoetics. Scholars and students of theology and the arts will discover inspiring new methodologies and fresh ideas in these pages. Contributors: Brian Bantum, Yara González-Justiniano, James Howard Hill Jr., Carolina Hinojosa-Cisneros, Yohana Agra Junker, Peace Pyunghwa Lee, Lakisha R. Lockhart-Rusch, Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein, Patrick B. Reyes, Joyce del Rosario, Tiffany U. Trent, Tamisha A. Tyler, Lis Valle-Ruiz

Theopoetics in Color

Theopoetics in Color PDF Author: Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 1467463892
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
A collaborative book project centering the liberative theopoetics practiced by a new generation of scholars of color What is theopoetics? Once a field dominated by white liberals in the ivory tower, this embodied form of theology has flourished in the work of a new generation of scholars of color. In this groundbreaking book edited by Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein and Lakisha R. Lockhart-Rusch, a diverse team of theologians shows how theopoetics can be practiced “in color.” Featuring unconventional and artistic forms of religious reflection, this collection demonstrates how theology can become accessible when it reflects the embodied experiences of marginalized people and communities. These creative contributions defy the limitations of the white, Eurocentric academy, including such works as: • an explanation on the use of experimental theater to express theological theses • a guide to spiritual disciplines for metaphorical cyborgs seeking liberation • a meditation on the theological import of Filipino potlucks • a literary reflection on the meaning of religion to Black boys and men Diverse in scope and radical in perspective, this bold volume reclaims the liberative potential of theopoetics. Scholars and students of theology and the arts will discover inspiring new methodologies and fresh ideas in these pages. Contributors: Brian Bantum, Yara González-Justiniano, James Howard Hill Jr., Carolina Hinojosa-Cisneros, Yohana Agra Junker, Peace Pyunghwa Lee, Lakisha R. Lockhart-Rusch, Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein, Patrick B. Reyes, Joyce del Rosario, Tiffany U. Trent, Tamisha A. Tyler, Lis Valle-Ruiz

Theopoetic

Theopoetic PDF Author: Amos N. Wilder
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1625645058
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 119

Get Book Here

Book Description
In today's crucible of myths, theology has a special problem. Ancient scenarios provided by Scripture are especially vulnerable to the modern outlook. Amos Wilder, a distinguished scholar and critic, here relates the Christian faith, in depth, to the changes in modern man's sense of reality, and to the powerful new forms of spirituality that reflect these changes. The focus is upon the deeper dynamics of the religious situation--that is, upon its myths and dreams, symbols and arts--rather than upon its doctrines and social forms. A total vision requires a mythopoetic and not only isolated visions and epiphanies. The testimony of contemporary poets and believers demonstrates that world-old myths and sagas can still have living power. As Wilder writes, "Before the message, the vision; before the sermon, the hymn; before the prose, the poem. The discursive categories of theology as well as the traditional images of sermon and prayer require a theopoetic."

Theopoetics and Religious Difference

Theopoetics and Religious Difference PDF Author: Marius van Hoogstraten
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 3161598008
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Why are interreligious encounters and relations both more troubling and more promising than typically assumed, and how can this be embraced? In engaging the contemporary theological discourse of "theopoetics," Marius van Hoogstraten offers a way of approaching religious difference that, while perhaps unusual to readers familiar with more conventional theology, may be especially fitting for this age."--Provided by publisher

Way to Water

Way to Water PDF Author: L. Callid Keefe-Perry
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1630874434
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Get Book Here

Book Description
Way to Water has two primary intentions: to trace the development of the nascent field of theological inquiry known as theopoetics and to make an argument that theopoetics provides both theological and practical resources for contemporary people of faith who seek to maintain a confessional Christian life that is also intellectually critical. Beginning with the work of Stanley Hopper in the late 1960s, and addressing the early scholarship of key theopoetics authors like Rubem Alves and Amos Wilder, this text explores how theopoetics was originally developed as a response to the American death-of-God movement, and has since grown into a method for engaging in theological thought in a way that more fully honors embodiment and aesthetic dimensions of human experience. Most of the extant literature in the field is addressed to allow for a cumulative and comprehensive articulation of the nature and function of theopoetics. The text includes an exploration of how theopoetic insights might aid in the development of tangible church practices, and concludes with a series of theopoetic reflections.

Theopoetics

Theopoetics PDF Author: Phillip Michael Garner
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498243738
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 115

Get Book Here

Book Description
Theopoetics is a collection of poetry filled with reflective inspiration from the heart and mind of a person filled with pathos over the plight of humanity. Each poem reflects his personal wrestling with theology and reality as he is determined to bring God into the world with a synthesis of pathos, intellect, experience, and words. The aesthetic of poetry provides the author with an expressive outlet to imagine life within a genre where limitations give way to possibilities, in a world where the concretization of society prevails. Theopoetics is an effort to communicate spirituality combined with theology into words; words that ignite the soul with hope and challenge. Each poem contains numerous theological insights born from years of teaching students both in the classroom and abroad. These efforts at educating have been in active pursuit of bringing tikkun olam, that is repairing the world, to oppressed persons and various communities of need. The author is committed to the idea that theology must be practical with ready application for participating in salvation as both personal and historical. As a practitioner of nonviolence his calls for peace resonate throughout the book. Theopoetics is for persons seeking a spiritually challenging devotional experience.

A Theology of Literature

A Theology of Literature PDF Author: William Franke
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532611021
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 113

Get Book Here

Book Description
With the tools of far-reaching revolutions in literary theory and informed by the poetic sense of truth, William Franke offers a critical appreciation and philosophical reflection on a way of reading the Bible as theological revelation. Franke explores some of the principal literary genres of the Bible—Myth, Epic History, Prophecy, Apocalyptic, Writings, and Gospel—as building upon one another in composing a compactly unified edifice of writing that discloses prophetic and apocalyptic truth in a sense that is intelligible to the secular mind as well as to religious spirits. From Genesis to Gospel this revealed truth of the Bible is discovered as a universal heritage of humankind. Poetic literature becomes the light of revelation for a theology that is discerned as already inherent in humanity’s tradition. The divine speaks directly to the human heart by means of infinitely open poetic powers of expression in words exceeding and released from the control of finite, human faculties and the authority of human institutions. CHRIS BENDA: The main title of your book, A Theology of Literature, is rather expansive in scope - it's the title of a manifesto - while the subtitle, The Bible as Revelation in the Tradition of the Humanities, narrows the focus to a particular text. This title seems to adumbrate your conception of the relationship between literature and the Bible. What is that relationship? WILLIAM FRANKE: Picking up on your suggestions, I would say that the book is a manifesto for literature as a revelation of the highest sort of truth of which the human heart and intellect are capable, and at the same time a manifesto for theology as the source and core of traditions of human knowledge. The Bible is taken as an outstanding example of both types of discourse, literature and theology, in some of their most marvelous and miraculous revelatory capacities. CB: In the introduction to your book, you ask, "What is a theological reading of the Bible, and what is a literary reading?" This question suggests different methods, different purposes, different outcomes. But you put forward another way of thinking about the relationship between the theological and the literary. What is that way? WF: The usual idea of the "Bible as literature" is that one can read the Bible just as good literature without presupposing any kind of religious belief. This makes it palatable to many who would otherwise not be interested. My approach, likewise, is to read the Bible for all that it is worth as literature, but I find precisely there the Bible's most challenging and authentic theology. Understanding literature in its furthest purport requires a kind of belief in language and the word. It entails a hopeful, loving, and faithful sort of understanding of what is said, and that already constitutes the rudiments of a theology. This is to take the Bible as an especially revealing example of a humanities text. The greatest of these texts generally contain an at least implicitly theological (or sometimes a/theological) dimension to the extent that they envision the final purpose of life and the meaning of the world as a whole. Whether or not they speak of "God," such texts are in a theological register wherever the unity and origin of existence are in question. Personalizing this origin as "God" is one interpretation that remains inevitable and imaginatively compelling for us, since we are persons. CB: You are not reading the Bible as literature in the same way that many others have been doing over the last several decades (even though Robert Alter, one of the foremost practitioners of that art, appears frequently in the pages of your book). Which aspects of the "Bible as literature" approach are, in your view, problematic, at least for your project, and which do you find of continuing value? WF: The tendency to reduce the Bible to mere literature is the approach that I wish to eschew. I emphasize that the Bible is truly revelatory as literature. This enables us to understand theological revelation, too, in a non-dogmatic sense, as having a much more general human validity. Appreciating the literary qualities and excellence of the Bible remains as crucial to my project as to the traditional approach. However, I stress that these literary features are not merely aesthetic effects or ornaments. They can be revelatory of the real. The ultimately real and true, which exceeds objectification and its inevitable oppositions, cannot be apprehended except through the imagination. CB: When you speak of the Bible as revelation, what do you mean? WF: I mean especially that it enables uncanny insight into the nature of reality as a whole and in its deepest core. Revelation conveys an infinite intelligence of life and of everything that concerns us as humans. I recognize knowledge as "revealed" to the extent that it rises beyond ordinary limits to a degree of knowing that somehow fathoms the whole or total or infinite. This means for many that revelation comes from God. But even before presupposing that we know anything about God, we can simply let revelation emerge from this extraordinary capacity of the mind to transcend itself toward what it cannot comprehend. In certain encounters with others, we can experience an infinite depth of love and life that boggles the mind and exceeds comprehension. It can transform our lives. Theological revelation is a compelling interpretation, handed down over generations in the human community, of this register of experience. CB: You seem to make a distinction between revelation and theological revelation. What is that distinction, and what import does it have for your argument? WF: No, I would rather emphasize the continuity between theological revelation and revelation in a more general, phenomenological sense of things simply coming to be known or openly "disclosed." This is important for keeping theology connected with the rest of human knowledge, although human knowledge itself, all along, has also harbored something that transcends it and all its finite means. I say "all along" because this problematic of the self-transcendence of knowledge towards an extra-worldly Other can be traced to the Axial Age in the middle of the first millennium BCE. Of course, a relationship with the Other who reveals himself or herself or itself as God belongs to the full sense of theological revelation as understood in biblical tradition. I consider this as a degree of revelation of our relationship with others envisaged in its absoluteness. CB: What do you mean when you talk about the "poetic potential" of language? Does all language have such potential, even what we might not typically think of as poetic - or even literary? WF: Language has infinite potential for meaning, and poetic language shows and exploits this potential most intensively. Language can be thought of as beginning with one word like "OM" that means everything all at once. By a process of disambiguation, more limited and specific meanings are differentiated from each other and assigned to different words. However, poetic language reverses this process and allows us to hear the multiple meanings buried in our metaphors and to divine the original unity of meaning in language behind the rationally differentiated senses of words in the language that we pragmatically employ, yet with loss of its potential wholeness of meaning. CB: Your book is concerned with the Bible as a humanities text. What is a humanities text and what does a humanities text do? Might we think of any text as having the potential to be a humanities text, as long as it is read "humanistically"? WF: Yes. Being a humanities text is a matter of how a text is read. But certain texts lend themselves more than others to touching on matters of deep and perennial human concern: life and death and love and war, greed and heroism, suffering and hope for liberation, redemption, etc. CB: You state that, prior to modernity, texts, including the Bible, "exercise[d] sovereign authority in determining [their] own meaning and in interrogating the reader and potentially challenging the reader's insight and very integrity." In secular modernity, by contrast, "texts taken as specimens for analysis are dissected according to the will and criteria of a knowing subject considered to be wholly external to them." What implications have modern, secular readings of the Bible, and of literature more generally, had for human knowledge and, indeed, for human existence; and how does our present time - what you call "the 'post-secular' turn of postmodern culture" - change how we relate to the Bible and literature? WF: The modern, secular era is the era of the individual knowing subject. The self-conscious human subject becomes the ground and foundation of all knowing, emblematically with Descartes's "I think therefore I am" as the inaugural proposition of modern philosophy. Hegel construed the history of philosophy this way. Texts become artifacts created by finite human subjects. Prior to this modern era and its constitutive Narcissism, the creation of the text was a much more open affair. It was not under the control of a unitary finite subject, the author. Human authors could be channels for revelations from beyond their own ken. Readers could explore texts for revelations from a higher authority than just the author's own intention. Augustine's reading the Bible as meaning infinitely more than its presumable human authors, starting with Moses, were able to comprehend is a good example (Confessions, Book X-XIII). CB: You quote John 1:14 ("The Word became flesh and dwelt among us") and claim that this statement "announces a general interpretive principle: the meaning of tradition is experienced only in its application to life in the present." Could you unpack that a bit? WF: Meaning in literature and life is much more than just an intellectual sense or dictionary definition. How words mean for us is rooted in our way of existing in the world. They have to take on our own flesh and dwell in and with us in order to realize their full potential to signify. This fact is conveyed poetically by the doctrine of the Incarnation that is clairvoyantly and beautifully expressed in the Gospel of John. CB: A Theology of Literature largely consists of explorations of the revelatory aspects of varying literary genres in the Bible. You look at mythology, epic, history, prophecy, apocalyptic, literature, poetry, and gospel. In the conclusion of your book, you suggest that "[a]ll of these genres, in some manner, are summed up and recapitulated in the Gospel." This is convenient, since we can't discuss each of these genres in depth. How, in brief, does the Gospel provide such a summation and recapitulation? WF: The gospel is a prophetic word in which the archetypal myth of Genesis and the epic history of Exodus and the words of the prophets are fulfilled by the apocalyptic event of Christ as Savior. It contains the life history of the Redeemer and includes many of his own sayings uttered with all their poetry ("Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin," etc.). It brings all these various forms and genres of revelation to a culmination in a word that exceeds all genres, not least history, in order to recast the mold of meaning and the very meaning of "truth." Its truth is made in being enacted and incorporated by those who believe in it and live it. In the terms of I John 1: 6, these are those who would "do the truth." CB: Your book is able to cover significant portions of the Bible despite its brevity, but of course it can't cover everything. The legal materials are one type of literature that doesn't get extended treatment, so I'm curious how you might understand them as revelatory texts within the tradition of the humanities. WF: The legal materials fundamentally express a relationship with God. They enable Israel to live in fellowship with the Lord and as sanctified by his love. "O Lord how I love thy law!" (Psalm 119: 97) exclaims the psalmist. The legal prescriptions in the Bible reveal God and the way to God in very particular circumstances and social conditions. But the relationship with God that they model is potentially valid in all times and places for those who wish to embrace the law as a gift for living in intimacy with the Almighty. CB: What dangers might accompany the recovery of texts as authoritative sources of truth in our post-secular, postmodern age? How might those dangers, should they exist, be avoided or met? WF: The authority of texts read in the perspective of a theology of literature never exempts the readers from responsibility for the implications and consequences that they draw from the text. The authoritativeness of the infinite potential for meaning that is inherent in these texts is in a dimension of depth that underlies all meanings and all being and all creatures. It does not valorize some over others. These determinations are always made by human beings, and they alone bear the responsibility for their choices and acts. The power and authority of the text resides in its infinite potential before the emergence of any divisive distinctions and oppositions. This type of authority of the text does not absolve humans of responsibility. It rather reveals their infinite responsibility for whatever authority they claim or evoke. They give this authority a determinate shape and particular application that is all their own. They are answerable for whether or not their interpretation respects and protects all creatures and creation. Questions by Chris Benda, Divinity Librarian, Vanderbilt University

Types of Pentecostal Theology

Types of Pentecostal Theology PDF Author: Christopher A. Stephenson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190634324
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this, the first critical study of the major theologians of pentecostalism, Christopher A. Stephenson establishes four original categories that classify recent pentecostal theologians' methodologies in systematic/constructive theology.

A Beautiful Bricolage

A Beautiful Bricolage PDF Author: Silas Krabbe
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498295363
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Get Book Here

Book Description
Theopoetics is a plea for a more fully human way of speaking about God in the twenty-first century, a way that offers new life to dry and dying platitudes. Drawing deeply from linguistics, theology, philosophy, and even quantum mechanics, theopoetics attempts to reimagine the relationship between human language and speech about God through poetic phrasing and metaphor--thereby proposing a new God-talk. Interacting with selective works from within the discipline, Silas Krabbe offers a guide that not only maps the diversity of thought but also charts what is going on in the depths of the field. Using the metaphor of a river, Krabbe attempts to baptize the reader into theopoetics by leading an immersive exploration: sounding its waters, hearing resonances and echoes, feeling its flow, and becoming entangled in the braiding of its streams. Plunging ever more deeply into the differences that exist within the discourse of theopoetics, Krabbe is able to identify common aims, currents, and even hints of where this theopoetic river may lead. Not only a text about theopoetics, A Beautiful Bricolage is a work of theopoetics itself. It thereby draws the reader into a mode of inquiry that repudiates those who attempt to grasp it.

Learning Theology

Learning Theology PDF Author: Amos Yong
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN: 1611648807
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 151

Get Book Here

Book Description
Theology—the attempt to come to a deeper, more faithful understanding of one's encounter with God—is something to which all Christians are called. In Learning Theology, Amos Yong invites the reader to lay claim to that calling and to see it as yet another opportunity to love God. Written for those taking their first course in the subject, this book introduces the foundational sources and tasks of theology. It asks what difference theology makes in our lives, how it can influence the way we write and study, and how we understand other forms of learning as part of the Spirit's leadership. Yong encourages the reader to see all of life through the lens of faith, and Learning Theology offers tools to more thoughtfully and faithfully perform that task.

Calvin and the Resignification of the World

Calvin and the Resignification of the World PDF Author: Michelle Chaplin Sanchez
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108473040
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Get Book Here

Book Description
Provides the first extended study of Calvin's 1559 Institutio in conversation with critical theorists of religion, modernity, sovereignty, and political theology.