Against the Stream, How Karl Barth Reframed Church-State Relations (Chapter 3 of Keine Gewalt! No Violence!)

Excerpt: Defenders of the Barmen Declaration\u27s apolitical tone remind us that it was never intended to establish a program of political protest, that Karl Barth and the others were pastors not politicians; that the goal was to reassert the integrity of the gospel in the face of the attempted subversion by the German Christians. On the one hand, the soundness of this interpretation is self-evident. And yet it should surprise no one that an apolitical strategy would have little political impact on the German state. It is also true that Barth\u27s views on church and state relations changed after Barmen; that afterward he expressed remorse over his own sins of omission. If we explore Barth\u27s writings over a twenty-year period, the change will become evident and so also his impact on the emerging political theology in Eastern Europe. The next two chapters will chronicle this development

Enough, Already-But Perhaps Not Yet: Liturgy, Church Unity, and Eschatology

(Excerpt) Enough, as we have been saying, ought to be enough. We\u27ve heard the crucial sentence from Article VII of the Augsburg Confession over and over these days, about what\u27s enough for the true unity of the church, namely the one and only gospel proclaimed and enacted in the assembly of believers. We have to suppose that the confessors that sunner day in 1530 meant precisely what they said about preserving and maintaining the genuine unity of the church-enough to have some prima facie acknowledgment that it is indeed the Christian gospel being said and done in this and that assembly of the faithful. Not that gospel plus some theological proposition or some canonical requirement, we\u27d want to say. For we\u27ve learned the lesson well: gospel plus anything is always less than gospel

From "Adjuncts" to "Subjects" parental involvement in a working-class community

This paper focuses on a project of parental involvement in a state primary school located in a predominantly working-class area in Malta. The authors are two of the project's coordinators. The paper reviews the international literature on parental participation in schools, gives an account of the socio-economic context of the school, and foregrounds, through empirical data culled from transcribed semi-structured interviews, the voices of parents, administrators, school-council members and teachers. The paper argues that, if this project is to develop into a genuine exercise in democratic participation, parents must begin to be conceived of not as 'adjuncts', but 'subjects'. The parents interviewed in this empirical work see themselves as such, and derive confidence from the fact that their claims and recommendations are translating into concrete developments.peer-reviewe

Menorah Review (No. 22, Spring, 1991)

The Christian-Jewish Encounter -- Hooked on Academic Freedom and Integrity -- Genesis and Semiosis: Structural Reading of a Biblical Book -- Book Briefing