In Practicing Safe Sects F. LeRon Shults provides scientific and philosophical resources for having “the talk” about religious reproduction: where do gods come from – and what are the costs of bearing them in our culturally pluralistic, ecologically fragile environment?
F. LeRon Shults explores Deleuze's fascination with theological themes and shows how his entire corpus can be understood as a creative atheist machine that liberates thinking, acting and feeling.
While forgiveness has historically been regarded as a religious concern, it has also become a popular topic in contemporary psychology. Unfortunately, there has been little effort to combine a Christian understanding of forgiveness with psychology. The Faces of Forgiveness, winner of the Narramore Award from the Christian Association for Psychological Studies, steps in to fill this void. The authors fuse Christian forgiveness and psychology with the unifying motif of the face; thereby building on the considerable psychological research linking emotions related to forgiveness with the human face. At a deeper level, the face can serve as a metaphor for integrating forgiveness, wholeness, and salvation. The authors argue that forgiveness should take a central role in our understanding of salvation because it is warranted by the Bible and engages our postmodern context. Pastors, psychologists, family counselors, and students of psychology and theology will find The Faces of Forgiveness a helpful resource.
The twenty-first century has given rise to a growing interest in the intersection of science, religion, and spirituality. Few books address these issues from multiple perspectives and theories. To fill this void, F. LeRon Shults and Steven Sandage, coauthors of The Faces of Forgiveness (winner of the Narramore Award from the Christian Association for Psychological Studies) continue their interdisciplinary dialogue in their latest work, Transforming Spirituality. In this book Shults and Sandage address the subject of spiritual transformation through the lenses of psychology and theology. In addition to college and seminary students, Transforming Spirituality will appeal to readers interested in Christian spirituality. What is more, it provides helpful insights for counselors, psychologists, and others who work in the mental health field.
With the profound changes in today's intellectual and scientific landscape, traditional ways of speaking about human nature, sin, and the image of God have lost their explanatory power. In this volume F.LeRon Shults explores the challenges to and opportunities for rethinking current religious views of humankind in contemporary Western culture. From philosophy to theology, from physics to psychology, we find a turn to the categories of "relationality." Shults briefly traces this history from Aristotle to Levinas, showing its impact on the Christian doctrine of anthropology, and he argues that the biblical understanding of humanity has much to contribute to today's dialogue on persons and on human becoming in relation to God and others. Shults's work stands as a potent effort to reform theological anthropology in a way that restores its relevance to contemporary interpretations of the world and our place in it.
What role has religion played in the major civilizational transformations associated with the Neolithic Revolution, the Axial Age, and Modernity? This book introduces new methodological tools and material insights for guiding conversations about these debates. The authors introduce a new branch of computational humanities, using computational modeling to simulate civilizational transformations. They integrate multiple theories across many disciplines, including the scientific study of religion, and evaluate the relative importance of those causal theories in processes of civilizational change. Materially, the book sheds new light on major debates among historians, archaeologists, and other social theorists on the role of religion within these major transitions. The book tackles the urgent question of what sort of civilizational transformations might be possible in a world where the influence and significance of religion continues to decline wherever technology, education, freedom, and cultural pluralism are most advanced.
In recent years the theological writings of Wolfhart Pannenberg have exerted considerable influence. However, Pannenberg's work has also been criticized for not taking seriously the postmodern challenge to traditional conceptions of rationality and truth. This volume by F. LeRon Shults argues that the popular "foundationalist" reading of Pannenberg is a misinterpretation of his methodology and shows that, in fact, the structural dynamics of Pannenberg's approach offer significant resources for the postfoundationalist task of theology in our postmodern culture. Shults begins by laying out the first comprehensive summary and interpretation of the emerging postfoundationalist model of theological rationality. He then revisits Pannenberg's theological method and finds the German theologian to be a surprising ally in the quest to reconstruct a theological rationality along postfoundationalist lines. In the course of his discussion, Shults challenges views that see the future, reason, or history as the central concept of Pannenberg's thought and offers instead a new interpretation of Pannenberg's basic theological principle as understanding and explaining all things sub ratione Dei (under the aspect of the relation to God)-an interpretation endorsed by Pannenberg himself in the book's foreword. Shults also focuses on Pannenberg's unique way of linking philosophical and systematic theology and demonstrates how the underlying reciprocity of this method can carry over into the postfoundational concern to link hermeneutics and epistemology in the postmodern context.
This introductory text by F. LeRon Shults and Andrea Hollingsworth outlines the major movements and figures in the historical unfolding of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, with special attention on the role of philosophical interpretation and spiritual transformation, showing how historical developments have shaped contemporary trends in pneumatology.
Linking traditional attributes of God with contemporary philosophy, F. LeRon Shults culminates with a reformed doctrine of God that revolves around themes of God's omniscient faithfulness, omnipotent love, and omnipresent hope.
The dialogue between theology and science has blossomed in recent decades, but particular beliefs about Jesus Christ have not often been brought to the forefront of this interdisciplinary discussion even in explicitly Christian contexts. This book breaks new ground by explicitly bringing the specific themes of Christology into dialogue with contemporary science. It engages recent developments in late modern philosophy of science in order to articulate the Christian beliefs about Jesus Christ in a way that responds to challenges and opportunities that have arisen in light of various scientific discoveries. The main chapters deal with Incarnation, Atonement and Parousia. After a brief treatment of the history of the shaping of these ideas, the author traces developments in some of the sciences that have challenged these formulations: evolutionary biology, cultural anthropology and physical cosmology. Each chapter also summarises some of the popular constructive responses to these developments. After clarifying the way in which the Christian understanding of God and of humanity shape the task of reforming Christology, each chapter concludes with a programmatic outline of ways in which we might articulate the identity, agency and presence of Jesus Christ in dialogue with late modern science and culture.
This volume brings together some of the leading voices in the field of Deleuze studies to explore – and practice – a variety of approaches to the schizoanalysis of religion. The authors share an enthusiasm for applying Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalytic project to “religion,” but they display significantly different ways of carrying out its creative and destructive tasks. As a whole, the book addresses the relevance of Deleuze for contemporary developments in political theology, liberation theology, Christian doctrine, and the recent growth of interest in spirituality and atheism. Opening up new lines of flight for Deleuze studies, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Religion makes rhizomic connections that will be of interest to scholars in other fields including theology, psychology of religion, philosophy of religion and the history and practice of Western esotericism.
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