Description: This work models a creative exercise in ecclesiology based on a Latino/a practical theology of the Spirit, which designs theological discourse based on its encounter with the Spirit in human culture. Hence, it is a theology appreciative of and attentive to the ""multiple matrices and intersections"" of the Spirit with cultures. Garcia-Johnson offeres an appreciative and critical analysis of the uses of culture among Latino/a theologians, followed by the proposal for a postmodern Spirit-friendly cultural paradigm based on the narratives of the cross and the Pentecost. He develops...

Description: The Fourfold Gospel, most often associated with Albert B. Simpson, founder of The Christian and Missionary Alliance, which focuses on the doctrines of Christ as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King, has been identified as a key contributing factor to the birth and development of the modern Pentecostal movement. Through a close observation of the doctrinal themes of select and renowned Evangelical leaders in America (A. J. Gordon of Boston, D. L. Moody of Chicago, A. T. Pierson of Philadelphia/Detroit, and A. B. Simpson of New York), this work shows that the Fourfold Gospel...

Description: This essay on Soren Kierkegaard and economic matters from a theological perspective is well grounded in the Dane's journals. In these writings, the late nineteenth-century thinker shows his solidarity with rural residents (90 percent of the population) and urbanite menial workers. Topics include the option for the poor; the ideology of impotence; the denouncing of a competitive society; the correlation of wealth and poverty; media, church, university, and theater as social institutions shaping reality; Christendom; and the retribution doctrine. A Vexing Gadfly develops the...

Description: This book constitutes the second volume of a three-volume study of Christian testimonies to divine suffering: God's Wounds: Hermeneutic of the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering, vol. 2, Evil and Divine Suffering. The larger study focuses its inquiry into the testimonies to divine suffering themselves, seeking to allow the voices that attest to divine suffering to speak freely, then to discover and elucidate the internal logic or rationality of this family of testimonies, rather than defending these attestations against the dominant claims of classical Christian theism that...

Description: Now and then through the history of the church a great light appears, a prophet who calls the church back to its missional vocation. These reformers are lovers of God, mystics whose lives are utterly given to the divine vision. Yet as Jesus noted, a prophet is often without honor among her own people. In the case of Phoebe Palmer (1807-1874), honor was lost posthumously, for within a few decades after her death her name all but disappeared. Palmer's sanctification theology was separated from its apophatic spiritual moorings, even as her memory was lost. Throughout most of the...

Description: This volume is the biography of Paul Tschetter, a leading figure in late nineteenth-century Hutterite history, the ""Hutterite Joshua,"" who convinced 1,250 Hutterites to leave Russia in the 1870s and resettle in Dakota Territory. Tschetter's life elucidates the way that an immigrant community fought for survival in a North American environment that stressed assimilation to radically different political, economic, cultural, and religious values. Janzen provides an in-depth narrative and analysis of Tschetter's influence based on diaries, sermons, hymns, interviews, and other...

Description: Polish messianism tells the story of a nation struggling to survive and regain its independence. As narrated by the poets Jan Pawe_ Woronicz and Adam Mickiewicz, its vision of patriotism and civil responsibility, first told two hundred years ago, contains promising resources today for a world facing challenged by pluralism, secularization, nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Yet this messianism has a dark side. The romantic philosophy of history that funded this messianism proved an inadequate defense against Prussian and Russian military might, and failed to inoculate...

Description: Historians have traditionally interpreted the American land-grant higher-education movement as the result of political and economic forces. Little attention has been given, however, to any explicit or implicit theological motivations for the movement. This book tells the story of how the Christian belief of many founders of the University of Illinois motivated their educational theory and practice. Constructing a social gospel of labor's millennium (their shorthand for God's kingdom being enhanced through agricultural and mechanical education), they initially proposed that the...

Description: The medieval worldview that regarded human beings as at the center of God's plans for His universe has long been regarded as obsolete; its synthesis of Christian theology and Greek philosophy having collapsed under the weight of Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin. The popular stereotype is that Science, both in the Copernican revolution that dethroned the earth-centered view of the cosmos and in subsequent developments in evolutionary theory and general relativity, has marginalized and trivialized human existence, revealing humanity's ""place in the cosmos"" to be accidental,...

On Faith, Rationality, and the Other in the Late Middle Ages is an investigation of Nicholas of Cusa that seeks a deeper understanding of this important medieval intellectual and his importance for us today. One of Gergely Bakos's primary aims in this study is to understand Nicholas of Cusa's important and underexamined dimensions of his approach to dialogue with Islam. The framework and the methodology that informs this investigation was inspired by the late Professor Jos Decorte (1954-2001), a Flemish philosopher and mediaevalist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Bakos...