Practical Christianity: Religion in Jane Austen\u27s Novels

A beloved English novelist of the late eighteenth century, Jane Austen captures the attention and emotion of readers through timeless insights into the inner workings of the human heart as characters navigate society, family life, and love. Her novels’ attention to practical morality but reticence toward explicitly religious subject matter raises conjecture concerning the religion behind her values; however, Austen’s Christian upbringing, Anglican practice, and Christian values suggest a foundation of faith from which the morality in her novels emanates. In Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park, Austen demonstrates her eighteenth-century Anglican worldview in the lives of her characters as they grow in virtue and good character

Preachers Magazine Volume 12 Number 08

Editorial – The Preacher and the Sermon”; Doctrinal; Devotional; Homiletical, including Sermon Outlines; Practical. Cover: The old religion crumbled and fell, beaten in thought, in morals, in life, and in death. T. R. Glover, writing on The Christian in the Roman Empire, in The Jesus of History. .https://digitalcommons.olivet.edu/cotn_pm/1185/thumbnail.jp

Health, wealth or wisdom? Religion and the paradox of prosperity

This is the author's pdf version of an article published in International Journal of Public Theology 2009. The published version of the article is available at https://www.brill.nl/international-journal-public-theologyThis article discusses the role of religious values and participation in the 'happiness hypothesis'

Public Theology in the face of pain and suffering: A proletarian perspective

A basic understanding of theology is the quest for knowledge of the Divine—the study of God. But why, one may ask, undertake such an endeavour, and to what end? My simple response would be, to know God is to enhance and enrich my life and service. To know God is to understand His creation – humanity and, the created context. I practice theology to learn more about God and His creation. In the process, that knowledge serves to improve my professional practice as a spiritual care provider in a public health institution. Thus, originates the burden of this task – the implication of doing theology in a public domain. My hope is to reflect on the implications of my professional practice as a spiritual care provider engaging in theological discourse in a public health institution. I’ll attempt a discussion of the implications of public theology in a specific context – public health institution, employing a specific approach. By its nature, public theology may serve as a medium through which all the other branches of theology interact with the other disciplines and seek to promote the idea of individuals living out their spiritual values and beliefs for the good of the general public. This can be applied in any field including, educational, social, health, political, and/or religious institutions, whether public or private. Public theology may vary depending on the context and practitioners at any given time and place, but have similar goals. Before getting to how I practice theology publicly, I’ll first discuss my understanding of the term public theology

Eschatological Realism: A Christian View on Culture, Religion and Violence

It was already Hannah Arendt, who, referring to Kant, emphasized the difference betweentruth and meaning, between practical common sense and opinions. It is interesting that the common sense approach is still completely dominant today, even among theologians, who are so often accused of irrationality – or perhaps just because of it. Theology seems to feel compelled to appeal to common sense, to show the modern world, that it is useful, or at least that it is not harmful. Our discussion in this essay concerns the relationship between religion and violence. We will try and explore the problem on the fundamental level, with no pretensions to offer yet another proposal in the style of 'how to ...', that modern requirements for practicality require and expect

To Each According to their Needs: Anarchist Praxis as a Resource for Byzantine Theological Ethics

I argue that anarchist ideas for organising human communities could be a useful practical resource for Christian ethics. I demonstrate this firstly by introducing the main theological ideas underlying Maximus the Confessor’s ethics, a theologian respected and important in a number of Christian denominations. I compare practical similarities in the way in which ‘love’ and ‘well-being’ are interpreted as the telos of Maximus and Peter Kropotkin’s ethics respectively. I further highlight these similarities by demonstrating them in action when it comes attitudes towards property. I consequently suggest that there are enough similarities in practical aims, for Kropotkin’s ideas for human organising to be useful to Christian ethicists

Theological Ethics and Interreligious Relations:A Baptist Christian Perspective

This article offers a contribution to the ecumenical overview and exploration of issues in interreligious relations, and a theological and ecclesiological reflection upon these, that is self-consciously and explicitly from within a specific Christian confessional tradition – namely that of the Baptist tradition. Just as the early Baptists’ commitment to religious freedom and to an associated ecclesiology and scriptural hermeneutic challenged a totalizing religious vision of Christianity in which temporal structures were held to approximate to a divine blueprint, this article argues that such an approach presents an alternative to instrumentalization of religion in the service of politics or the state, or politics or the state in the service of religion. It emphasizes instead an understanding of the contribution to public life that service based on religious motivations can make, but as one contribution alongside others. The article argues that the patterns of Christendom were based on premises that are no longer pertinent to contemporary Church and society, but rooted in a context that has since been radically transformed by the twin impacts of secularization and religious plurality. In practical terms, this means it is necessary to find new ways of making a contribution to the wider society than those which rely upon the social, political, legal and constitutional institutionalization of position and role conferred by the inheritance of Christendom. This requires alternative theological and ecclesiological resources and it is the contention of this article that a Baptist theological and ecclesiological vision of the kind set out here can offer such resources because it makes a very basic methodological contribution that gives a far more prominent place to theological ethics than has hitherto been the case. It posits the context and content of the social and political (as well as specifically interreligious) relations of religious communities as an integral part of the central tasks of the Christian theology and practice. At the same time, rather than promoting a mere ‘adaptation’ of the Church to prevailing social trends, through its theologically rooted commitment to religious freedom it can provide an integrated theological basis for Christian attempts to engage with Europe’s ‘three dimensional’ socio-religious reality as the arena for contemporary Christian life and witness