Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N2A1
A. Tayob
The term ‘religion’ as a discursive term occupies a dominant, but neglected feature of Muslim intellectual reflections since the 19th century. Intellectuals from Muḥammad ʿAbduh (he died in 1905) to recent scholars like Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd (he died in 2010) have used religion as a critical term to develop a critique of tradition and modernity, and a strategy for renewal. This discourse may be compared with the study of religion since the 19th century that has also used religion to develop a perspective on the religious history of humankind. In this contribution, I argue that the two intellectual traditions that have employed religion – Kantian and the modern Islamic – point to very different ways of relating to the world, to the self and the ‘other’, and to the political condition of modernity. Rather than using the hegemonic Western tradition to make a judgment on the modern Islamic, I use the latter to point to the former’s peculiar proclivities. Using the modern tradition among Muslim intellectuals, I invite an inquiry into both from each other’s positions.Keywords: Islamic studies, Islamic modernism, Islamic reform, religious studies, religion, Talal Asad, postcolonial, decolonial
{"title":"Decolonizing the Study of Religions: Muslim Intellectuals and the Enlightenment Project of Religious Studies","authors":"A. Tayob","doi":"10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N2A1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N2A1","url":null,"abstract":"The term ‘religion’ as a discursive term occupies a dominant, but neglected feature of Muslim intellectual reflections since the 19th century. Intellectuals from Muḥammad ʿAbduh (he died in 1905) to recent scholars like Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd (he died in 2010) have used religion as a critical term to develop a critique of tradition and modernity, and a strategy for renewal. This discourse may be compared with the study of religion since the 19th century that has also used religion to develop a perspective on the religious history of humankind. In this contribution, I argue that the two intellectual traditions that have employed religion – Kantian and the modern Islamic – point to very different ways of relating to the world, to the self and the ‘other’, and to the political condition of modernity. Rather than using the hegemonic Western tradition to make a judgment on the modern Islamic, I use the latter to point to the former’s peculiar proclivities. Using the modern tradition among Muslim intellectuals, I invite an inquiry into both from each other’s positions.Keywords: Islamic studies, Islamic modernism, Islamic reform, religious studies, religion, Talal Asad, postcolonial, decolonial","PeriodicalId":42808,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion","volume":"31 1","pages":"7-35"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67489074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N2A12
M. Prozesky
Underlying this article are the questions of how to demarcate the phenomena to which the term ‘religion’ refers, and of how to differentiate between interpreting and explaining such phenomena – a matter to which David Chidester has offered guidance. These questions are approached by considering a different but closely related question: Does religion have a future, as answered in important recent books by two eminent scholars, both of them atheists, working in very different academic disciplines. These are the books of archaeologist, David Lewis-Williams, Conceiving God: The cognitive origins and evolution of religion (Lewis-Williams 2010) and philosopher of religion, J.E. Schellenberg’s more recent work, Evolutionary religion (Schellenberg 2013). These works provide divergent answers to whether religion has a future – a divergence arising from different views about what constitutes religion. This article refers to their respective views, then provides a critical discussion of both, and ends by engaging, where relevant, with ideas in the work of David Chidester.Keywords: future religion, evolution, brain science, unethical religion, explanation, interpretation
{"title":"Will religion survive? A critical discussion of the divergent answers of two atheists: archaeologist David Lewis-Williams and philosopher of religion J.L. Schellenberg","authors":"M. Prozesky","doi":"10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N2A12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N2A12","url":null,"abstract":"Underlying this article are the questions of how to demarcate the phenomena to which the term ‘religion’ refers, and of how to differentiate between interpreting and explaining such phenomena – a matter to which David Chidester has offered guidance. These questions are approached by considering a different but closely related question: Does religion have a future, as answered in important recent books by two eminent scholars, both of them atheists, working in very different academic disciplines. These are the books of archaeologist, David Lewis-Williams, Conceiving God: The cognitive origins and evolution of religion (Lewis-Williams 2010) and philosopher of religion, J.E. Schellenberg’s more recent work, Evolutionary religion (Schellenberg 2013). These works provide divergent answers to whether religion has a future – a divergence arising from different views about what constitutes religion. This article refers to their respective views, then provides a critical discussion of both, and ends by engaging, where relevant, with ideas in the work of David Chidester.Keywords: future religion, evolution, brain science, unethical religion, explanation, interpretation","PeriodicalId":42808,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion","volume":"31 1","pages":"259-275"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67489271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A16
J. Smit, Denzil Chetty
This article primarily outlines the discursive threads in Prozesky’s ‘Implications of Apartheid for Christianity in South Africa’ in the book he edited, Christianity Amidst Apartheid: Selected Perspectives on the Church in South Africa ([1985] 1990); his first book, Religion and Ultimate Well-Being: An Explanatory Theory (1984); and his latest book, Conscience: Ethical Intelligence for Global Well-Being (2007). This is under three headings: Apartheid as Heresy; Explaining Religion; and Conscience Ethics. We conclude with some appreciative and critical reflections, that we believe, can take Prozesky’s life-long project, further. This is positioned in the social transformation paradigm.Keywords: well-being, apartheid as heresy, explain religion, conscience ethics, religion and social transformation
{"title":"Martin Prozesky and 'Well-being': Retroactive and proactive perspectives on religion and ethics in the social transformation of South Africa","authors":"J. Smit, Denzil Chetty","doi":"10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A16","url":null,"abstract":"This article primarily outlines the discursive threads in Prozesky’s ‘Implications of Apartheid for Christianity in South Africa’ in the book he edited, Christianity Amidst Apartheid: Selected Perspectives on the Church in South Africa ([1985] 1990); his first book, Religion and Ultimate Well-Being: An Explanatory Theory (1984); and his latest book, Conscience: Ethical Intelligence for Global Well-Being (2007). This is under three headings: Apartheid as Heresy; Explaining Religion; and Conscience Ethics. We conclude with some appreciative and critical reflections, that we believe, can take Prozesky’s life-long project, further. This is positioned in the social transformation paradigm.Keywords: well-being, apartheid as heresy, explain religion, conscience ethics, religion and social transformation","PeriodicalId":42808,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion","volume":"31 1","pages":"277-306"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67489316","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N2A2
Federico Settler
This article intends to explore the various approaches to materiality and religion that have been used in the study of religions in Africa, and in South Africa in particular. It explores recent scholarship on materiality and religion advanced by David Morgan (2012) as well as Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer (2012), and then turn to David Chidester (2018), with some attention to Johan Strijdom (2014) to examine the framing of the debate in the Southern African context. The aim is to point out specific ways in which religion scholars privilege materiality of visuality, space, and ritual studies, at the expense of other ways of knowing and being. The article then advances some suggestions as to why or how these regimes are sustained and point out some problematics.It examines the use of everyday material objects in new religious movements in South Africa and interrogate their contested reception. The article moves to unpack how contemporary debates about the indigenous and new religious movements or cults in South Africa represent conflicts on what ‘things’ may possess sacred qualities and how they may be endowed with religious authority. In this regard, the article will focus on the taxonomies and afterlife of things in the work of Arjun Appadurai (1988, 2006) and its location in relation to the black body, to explore how black bodies are scripted and imagined in relation to material religion. Finally, it raises some questions on how local debates about religion and materiality – with respect to the embodied and things – represent not just disruptions over what constitute religion, but also about how contests over the use of everyday objects signal the emergence of indigenous ways of knowing and being in African religious contexts.Keywords: race, materiality, things, body, senses
{"title":"Race and Materiality in African Religious Contexts","authors":"Federico Settler","doi":"10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N2A2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N2A2","url":null,"abstract":"This article intends to explore the various approaches to materiality and religion that have been used in the study of religions in Africa, and in South Africa in particular. It explores recent scholarship on materiality and religion advanced by David Morgan (2012) as well as Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer (2012), and then turn to David Chidester (2018), with some attention to Johan Strijdom (2014) to examine the framing of the debate in the Southern African context. The aim is to point out specific ways in which religion scholars privilege materiality of visuality, space, and ritual studies, at the expense of other ways of knowing and being. The article then advances some suggestions as to why or how these regimes are sustained and point out some problematics.It examines the use of everyday material objects in new religious movements in South Africa and interrogate their contested reception. The article moves to unpack how contemporary debates about the indigenous and new religious movements or cults in South Africa represent conflicts on what ‘things’ may possess sacred qualities and how they may be endowed with religious authority. In this regard, the article will focus on the taxonomies and afterlife of things in the work of Arjun Appadurai (1988, 2006) and its location in relation to the black body, to explore how black bodies are scripted and imagined in relation to material religion. Finally, it raises some questions on how local debates about religion and materiality – with respect to the embodied and things – represent not just disruptions over what constitute religion, but also about how contests over the use of everyday objects signal the emergence of indigenous ways of knowing and being in African religious contexts.Keywords: race, materiality, things, body, senses","PeriodicalId":42808,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion","volume":"31 1","pages":"36-56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67489338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N2A7
J. Strijdom
The purpose of this article is to illustrate and assess Chidester’s use of the ‘senses’ as an analytical term in his study of religion. Under ‘senses’ Chidester includes not only the five conventional senses of Aristotle, but also analyzes metaphorical uses of the senses in religious discourse, the visions and dreams of mystics and shamans, and eventually new media as extensions of the human senses. Chidester’s analysis of the senses in European Christian discourses on the one hand, and in colonial and postcolonial African indigenous religion and imperial religious studies on the other hand, is compared and assessed. Although he does not offer a systematic comparison of these case studies, I argue that his analysis lends itself to an explicit comparison of the senses as material aspects of religion and show how his contextualized and historically nuanced analysis of the senses in religion and religious studies informs a critical study of religion. Since critical assumes judgment, values need to be explicated in terms of critical theories, which in my view need further elaboration.Keywords: senses, visions, dreams, media, analytical terms in religious studies, critical theory, interior senses in medieval European theories and practices, African indigenous religions
{"title":"‘Senses’: assessing a key term in David Chidester’s analysis of religion","authors":"J. Strijdom","doi":"10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N2A7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N2A7","url":null,"abstract":"The purpose of this article is to illustrate and assess Chidester’s use of the ‘senses’ as an analytical term in his study of religion. Under ‘senses’ Chidester includes not only the five conventional senses of Aristotle, but also analyzes metaphorical uses of the senses in religious discourse, the visions and dreams of mystics and shamans, and eventually new media as extensions of the human senses. Chidester’s analysis of the senses in European Christian discourses on the one hand, and in colonial and postcolonial African indigenous religion and imperial religious studies on the other hand, is compared and assessed. Although he does not offer a systematic comparison of these case studies, I argue that his analysis lends itself to an explicit comparison of the senses as material aspects of religion and show how his contextualized and historically nuanced analysis of the senses in religion and religious studies informs a critical study of religion. Since critical assumes judgment, values need to be explicated in terms of critical theories, which in my view need further elaboration.Keywords: senses, visions, dreams, media, analytical terms in religious studies, critical theory, interior senses in medieval European theories and practices, African indigenous religions","PeriodicalId":42808,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion","volume":"31 1","pages":"161-179"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67489468","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A17
M. Prozesky
The exploration of the ways ethical practice will change in the future is done in this article by means of five great transitions. They are as follows: firstly, from the ethics of obedience to an ethic of creative commitment; secondly, from a primary concern with micro-ethics to an equal and even greater concern with macro-ethics; thirdly, from a cluster of regional value systems to a cooperatively created global ethic; in the fourth place, from a conceptual base in western philosophy and theology to an academic base in the social and natural sciences; and in the fifth place, from dependence on religion in important parts of the world, including ours, to what I want to call a relationship with religion characterized by cooperative, critical and creative independence for ethics.Keywords: ethic of creative commitment, macro-ethics, a cooperatively created global ethic, academic base in the social and natural sciences, a relationship with religion
{"title":"Tomorrow's ethics in a globalizing world","authors":"M. Prozesky","doi":"10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A17","url":null,"abstract":"The exploration of the ways ethical practice will change in the future is done in this article by means of five great transitions. They are as follows: firstly, from the ethics of obedience to an ethic of creative commitment; secondly, from a primary concern with micro-ethics to an equal and even greater concern with macro-ethics; thirdly, from a cluster of regional value systems to a cooperatively created global ethic; in the fourth place, from a conceptual base in western philosophy and theology to an academic base in the social and natural sciences; and in the fifth place, from dependence on religion in important parts of the world, including ours, to what I want to call a relationship with religion characterized by cooperative, critical and creative independence for ethics.Keywords: ethic of creative commitment, macro-ethics, a cooperatively created global ethic, academic base in the social and natural sciences, a relationship with religion","PeriodicalId":42808,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion","volume":"31 1","pages":"307-319"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67489330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A12
L. Geering
Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God (1963) may be judged as a bombshell that blew the roof off the church, not because it introduced original thinking, but because it brought to unsuspecting people in the pews some knowledge of the developments that had been taking place for quite some time in academic theology. It initiated the turbulent sixties from which time onwards the slow decline in church allegiance began to accelerate in the Western world. The thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich, which Robinson summarized in his book, were themselves simply the twentieth century version of the radical changes in theology made necessary by the advent of the post-Enlightenment world, and which had been set in motion in rather different ways at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. Since the Enlightenment brought to humans the freedom to think for themselves – Bonhoeffer labelled this phenomenon ‘Humanity’s coming of age’ – so the theological enterprise gradually changed from being the exposition of divinely revealed dogmas to the human exploration of religious experience. In retrospect, Robinson’s book is to be judged a significant marker in a process of ever-changing theological thought. Keywords: J.A.T. Robinson, Post-Enlightenment World, humanity’s coming of age, theological thought
{"title":"Theology before and after Bishop Robinson's Honest to God (1963)","authors":"L. Geering","doi":"10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A12","url":null,"abstract":"Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God (1963) may be judged as a bombshell that blew the roof off the church, not because it introduced original thinking, but because it brought to unsuspecting people in the pews some knowledge of the developments that had been taking place for quite some time in academic theology. It initiated the turbulent sixties from which time onwards the slow decline in church allegiance began to accelerate in the Western world. The thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich, which Robinson summarized in his book, were themselves simply the twentieth century version of the radical changes in theology made necessary by the advent of the post-Enlightenment world, and which had been set in motion in rather different ways at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. Since the Enlightenment brought to humans the freedom to think for themselves – Bonhoeffer labelled this phenomenon ‘Humanity’s coming of age’ – so the theological enterprise gradually changed from being the exposition of divinely revealed dogmas to the human exploration of religious experience. In retrospect, Robinson’s book is to be judged a significant marker in a process of ever-changing theological thought. Keywords: J.A.T. Robinson, Post-Enlightenment World, humanity’s coming of age, theological thought","PeriodicalId":42808,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion","volume":"31 1","pages":"224-236"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67489199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A15
J. Cobb
In this article, ‘God and Universities’, I argue that the exclusion of God from contemporary academia did not come about because of evidence or argument. Rather, it is due to the fact that the scientific adherence to the treatment of the objective world as self-contained, was increasingly applied to everything. Also the limiting of acceptable thinking to topics falling within one academic discipline or another had no place for continuing a discussion of the topic. The self-assurance of academia is beginning to weaken. The exclusion of God as a causal factor, is part of the exclusion of purpose including human purpose. This leads to implausible explanations that are assumed to be needed but rarely explicitly defended. If the evidence for the importance of subjective experience is allowed, the door will be opened to changes that eventually could reinstate God.Keywords: God, university, objective world, purpose, subjective experience
{"title":"God and universities","authors":"J. Cobb","doi":"10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A15","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, ‘God and Universities’, I argue that the exclusion of God from contemporary academia did not come about because of evidence or argument. Rather, it is due to the fact that the scientific adherence to the treatment of the objective world as self-contained, was increasingly applied to everything. Also the limiting of acceptable thinking to topics falling within one academic discipline or another had no place for continuing a discussion of the topic. The self-assurance of academia is beginning to weaken. The exclusion of God as a causal factor, is part of the exclusion of purpose including human purpose. This leads to implausible explanations that are assumed to be needed but rarely explicitly defended. If the evidence for the importance of subjective experience is allowed, the door will be opened to changes that eventually could reinstate God.Keywords: God, university, objective world, purpose, subjective experience","PeriodicalId":42808,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion","volume":"31 1","pages":"260-276"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67489307","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A5
B. Moore
Black Theology had a profound effect on the religious, especially Christian scene in South Africa in the late 1960, 1970s and 1980s. The traditional stance was that clergy should not get involved in politics. What Black Theology in fact enabled clergy to understand, was that the Gospel was not primarily about the forgiveness of sins but about setting the oppressed free. Thus, politics was at the heart of the work of the clergy in South Africa. Black Theology also had a radical understanding of God. While the need for Black Theology may be less critical in post-Apartheid South Africa, there are major lessons to be learned from how it constructed the Gospel message in the then current context of the oppression and exploitation of the oppressed South African blacks. (This article is an edited version of my honorary doctorate presentation at Rhodes University in 2012.)Keywords: Black Theology, politics, oppressed, freedom, radical under-standing of God, post-apartheid South Africa, Gospel message
{"title":"Learning from Black Theology","authors":"B. Moore","doi":"10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A5","url":null,"abstract":"Black Theology had a profound effect on the religious, especially Christian scene in South Africa in the late 1960, 1970s and 1980s. The traditional stance was that clergy should not get involved in politics. What Black Theology in fact enabled clergy to understand, was that the Gospel was not primarily about the forgiveness of sins but about setting the oppressed free. Thus, politics was at the heart of the work of the clergy in South Africa. Black Theology also had a radical understanding of God. While the need for Black Theology may be less critical in post-Apartheid South Africa, there are major lessons to be learned from how it constructed the Gospel message in the then current context of the oppression and exploitation of the oppressed South African blacks. (This article is an edited version of my honorary doctorate presentation at Rhodes University in 2012.)Keywords: Black Theology, politics, oppressed, freedom, radical under-standing of God, post-apartheid South Africa, Gospel message","PeriodicalId":42808,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion","volume":"31 1","pages":"86-95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67489412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A7
L. Kretzschmar
The aim of this article is to identify areas of convergence and divergence in the value systems of secular ethics and Christian ethics and to address what is meant by the moral development of individual persons and communities. The article discusses the views of Martin Prozesky on religion, the creation of a global ethic and secular spirituality from the perspective of Christian ethics. The discussion draws on the ‘Barthian-Thomism’ of Nigel Biggar and the four key moral questions posed by Dallas Willard in order to identify elements of convergence and divergence related to worldviews, values, virtues and the moral development of persons and groups.Keywords: value systems, secular ethics, Christian ethics, moral development, global ethics, secular spirituality, worldviews, values, virtues
{"title":"Convergence and divergence: a Christian response to Prozesky’s ‘global ethic’ and secular spirituality","authors":"L. Kretzschmar","doi":"10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2018/V31N1A7","url":null,"abstract":"The aim of this article is to identify areas of convergence and divergence in the value systems of secular ethics and Christian ethics and to address what is meant by the moral development of individual persons and communities. The article discusses the views of Martin Prozesky on religion, the creation of a global ethic and secular spirituality from the perspective of Christian ethics. The discussion draws on the ‘Barthian-Thomism’ of Nigel Biggar and the four key moral questions posed by Dallas Willard in order to identify elements of convergence and divergence related to worldviews, values, virtues and the moral development of persons and groups.Keywords: value systems, secular ethics, Christian ethics, moral development, global ethics, secular spirituality, worldviews, values, virtues","PeriodicalId":42808,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion","volume":"31 1","pages":"112-134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67489505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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