Contemporary Christian Culture

2017-11-30

Author: Omotayo O. Banjo

Publisher: Lexington Books

ISBN: 9781498553902

Category: Language Arts & Disciplines

Page: 218

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This book explores Christian messages, meanings, and their impact in a multicultural context, using a communication framework to help Christians and non-Christians alike navigate challenging issues surrounding ethnic and racial division in the United States today.

Foundations of Christian Culture

2019-08-06

Author: Ivan Ilyin

Publisher: Waystone Press

ISBN: 9781732087385

Category: History

Page: 66

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There was a time when society was inspired by Christian principles. Art, government, society emulated, as much as possible, the search for perfection dictated by the call to virtue. Ultimately, the twentieth century's many disasters and Christendom's failure to stop revolution and world war have discredited Christianity itself in the eyes of many. Nevertheless, I am convinced that only Christianity can revitalize a culture that has lost most of its connection with beauty and that glorifies banality, variety, and diversity as ends in themselves. However, this would not be a retread of historical Christendom, but a new vision, predicated on the new realities of an increasingly Neo-pagan and Transhumanist West. According to Ivan Ilyin, "The Gospel teaches not flight from the world, but the Christianization of the world. Thus, the sciences, the arts, politics, and the social order can all be those spiritual hands with which the Christian takes the world. And the calling of a Christian is not to chop off those hands, but to imbue their work and toil with the living spirit of Christ. Christianity has a great calling, which many do not ever realize. This purpose can be defined as the creation of a Christian culture." This book is Ivan Ilyin's spiritual and practical handbook at creating Christian culture in an increasingly post-Christian world. Translated by Nicholas Kotar

Producing Christian Culture

2017-06-26

Author: Giles E. M. Gasper

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

ISBN: 9781317075431

Category: Religion

Page: 218

View: 297

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Producing Christian Culture takes as its thread the 'interpretative genres' within which medieval people engaged with the Bible. Contributors to the volume present specific material as a case study illustrative of a specific genre, whether devotional, homiletical, scholarly, or controversial. The chronological range moves from St Augustine to the use of gospel texts in polemical writing of the first two decades of the 1500s, with focal sections on early medieval Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian theology, the scholastic turn of the High Middle Ages, and the influence of vernacular writing in the later Middle Ages. The tremendous range and vitality of medieval responses to biblical texts are highlighted within the studies.

Christian Popular Culture from The Chronicles of Narnia to Duck Dynasty

2021-05-13

Author: Eleanor Hersey Nickel

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

ISBN: 9781725281202

Category: Fiction

Page: 238

View: 192

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Christian popular culture has tremendous influence on many American churchgoers. When we have a choice between studying the Bible and reading novels, downloading movies, or watching television, we become less familiar with Numbers than with Narnia. This book examines popular Christian narratives with rigorous scholarly methods and assumes that they are just as complex, fascinating, and worthy of investigation as the latest secular Netflix series or dystopian novel. While most scholars focus on the religious aspects of Christian texts, this study takes a new approach by analyzing their social responsibility in portraying the complex dynamics of race, class, and gender in a profoundly unequal America. Close readings of six case studies—The Chronicles of Narnia, Francine Rivers’s Redeeming Love, Jan Karon’s Mitford novels, Left Behind, the films of the Sherwood Baptist Church, and Duck Dynasty—uncover both harmful stereotypes and Christians serving as leaders in social justice.

Approaches to Monasticism in the Context of Christian Responses to Modern Culture

Author: Kevin Maddy

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

ISBN: 9783643915030

Category:

Page:

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Approaches to Monasticism in the Context of Christian Responses to Modern Culture is a study of how the values and practices of monasticism are being shaped by the shift to a cultural understanding of Christianity in modern times. The values and practices of traditional monasticism are contrasted with those of various expressions of new monasticism against the background of a multicultural and fluid social environment in an effort to find some reciprocal illumination. The study aims to describe monasticism in terms of authenticity and lived religion.

Demonic Bodies and the Dark Ecologies of Early Christian Culture

2022

Author: Travis W. Proctor

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780197581162

Category: Religion

Page: 289

View: 922

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"Drawing insights from gender studies and the environmental humanities, Demonic Bodies analyzes how ancient Christians constructed the Christian body through its relations to demonic adversaries. Case studies on New Testament texts, early Christian church fathers, and "Gnostic" writings trace how early followers of Jesus construed the demonic body in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways, as both embodied and bodiless, "fattened" and ethereal, heavenly and earthbound. Across this diversity of portrayals, however, demons consistently functiond as personfications of "deviant" bodily practices such as "magical" rituals, immoral sexual acts, gluttony, and "pagan" religious practices. This demonization served an exclusionary function whereby Christian writers marginalized fringe Christian groups by linking their ritual activities to demonic modes of (dis)embodiment. Demonic Bodies demonstrates, therefore, that the formation of early Christian cultures was part of the shaping of broader Christian "ecosystems," which in turn informed Christian experiences of their own embodiment and community"--

Feminist Theology and Contemporary Dieting Culture

2019-08-08

Author: Hannah Bacon

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

ISBN: 9780567659965

Category: Religion

Page: 352

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Hannah Bacon draws on qualitative research conducted inside one UK secular commercial weight loss group to show how Christian religious forms and theological discourses inform contemporary weight-loss narratives. Bacon argues that notions of sin and salvation resurface in secular guise in ways that repeat well-established theological meanings. The slimming organization recycles the Christian terminology of sin – spelt 'Syn' – and encourages members to frame weight loss in salvific terms. These theological tropes lurk in the background helping to align food once more with guilt and moral weakness, but they also mirror to an extent the way body policing techniques in Christianity have historically helped to cultivate self-care. The self-breaking and self-making aspects of women's Syn-watching practices in the group continue certain features of historical Christianity, serving in similar ways to conform women's bodies to patriarchal norms while providing opportunities for women's self-development. Taking into account these tensions, Bacon asks what a specifically feminist theological response to weight loss might look like. If ideas about sin and salvation service hegemonic discourses about fat while also empowering women to shape their own lives, how might they be rethought to challenge fat phobia and the frenetic pursuit of thinness? As well as naming as 'sin' principles and practices which diminish women's appetites and bodies, this book forwards a number of proposals about how salvation might be performed in our everyday eating habits and through the cultivation of fat pride. It takes seriously the conviction of many women in the group that food and the body can be important sites of power, wisdom and transformation, but channels this insight into the construction of theologies that resist rather than reproduce thin privilege and size-ist norms.

The Christian Culture Survival Guide

2004

Author: Matthew Paul Turner

Publisher: Relevant Media Group

ISBN: 0974694207

Category: Religion

Page: 178

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The Christian Culture Survival Guide is about the author's humorous experiences growing up in the Christian subculture and what he's learned along the way. From overcoming the temptation to wear W.W.J.D. bracelets to the disparaging experience of witnessing to a gay man at a bar, Matthew Paul Turner offers a fun read that's packed with profound insight and truth.

Food and Faith in Christian Culture

2011-12-27

Author: Ken Albala

Publisher: Columbia University Press

ISBN: 9780231520799

Category: Cooking

Page: 272

View: 110

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Without a uniform dietary code, Christians around the world used food in strikingly different ways, developing widely divergent practices that spread, nurtured, and strengthened their religious beliefs and communities. Featuring never-before published essays, this anthology follows the intersection of food and faith from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century, charting the complex relationship among religious eating habits and politics, culture, and social structure. Theoretically rich and full of engaging portraits, essays consider the rise of food buying and consumerism in the fourteenth century, the Reformation ideology of fasting and its resulting sanctions against sumptuous eating, the gender and racial politics of sacramental food production in colonial America, and the struggle to define "enlightened" Lenten dietary restrictions in early modern France. Essays on the nineteenth century explore the religious implications of wheat growing and breadmaking among New Zealand's Maori population and the revival of the Agape meal, or love feast, among American brethren in Christ Church. Twentieth-century topics include the metaphysical significance of vegetarianism, the function of diet in Greek Orthodoxy, American Christian weight loss programs, and the practice of silent eating rituals among English Benedictine monks. Two introductory essays detail the key themes tying these essays together and survey food's role in developing and disseminating the teachings of Christianity, not to mention providing a tangible experience of faith.

Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture

2011-11-08

Author: Victor Turner

Publisher: Columbia University Press

ISBN: 9780231527828

Category: Religion

Page: 336

View: 132

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First published in 1978, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture is a classic work examining the theological doctrines, popular notions, and corresponding symbols and images promoting and sustaining Christian pilgrimage. The book examines two major aspects of pilgrimage practice: the significance of context, or the theological conditions giving rise to pilgrimage and the folk traditions enabling worshippers to absorb the meaning of the event; and the images and symbols embodying the experience of pilgrimage and transmitting its visions in varying ways. Retelling its own tales of "mere mortals" confronted by potent visions, such as the man Juan Diego who found redemption with the Lady of Guadalupe and the poor French shepherdess Bernadette whose encounter with the Lady at Lourdes inspired Christians across the globe, this text treats religious visions as both paradox and empowering phenomena, tying them explicitly to the times in which they occurred. Offering vivid vignettes of social history, it extends their importance beyond the realm of the religious to our own conceptions of reality. Extensively revised throughout, this edition includes a new introduction by the theologian Deborah Ross situating the book within the work of Victor and Edith Turner and among the movements of contemporary culture. She addresses the study's legacy within the discipline, especially its hermeneutical framework, which introduced a novel method of describing and interpreting pilgrimage. She also credits the Turners with cementing the link between mysticism, popular devotion, and Christian culture, as well as their recognition of the relationship between pilgrimage and the deep spiritual needs of human beings. She concludes with various critiques of the Turners' work and suggests future directions for research.

Christian Fundamentalism and the Culture of Disenchantment

2013-02-05

Author: Paul Maltby

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

ISBN: 9780813933467

Category: Religion

Page: 248

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Within the familiar clash of religious conservatism and secular liberalism Paul Maltby finds a deeper discord: an antipathy between Christian fundamentalism and the postmodern culture of disenchantment. Arguing that each camp represents the poles of America's virulent culture wars, he shows how the cultural identity, lifestyle, and political commitments of many Americans match either the fundamentalist profile of one who cleaves to metaphysical and authoritarian beliefs or the postmodern profile of one who is disposed to critical inquiry and radical-democratic values. Maltby offers a critique that operates in both directions. His use of the resources of postmodern theory to contest fundamentalism's doctrinal claims, ultra-right politics, anti-environmentalism, and conservative aesthetics informs his engagement with contemporary fundamentalist painting, spiritual warfare fiction, dominionist attitudes to nature, and a profoundly undemocratic interpretation of Christianity. At the same time, Maltby identifies some of fundamentalism’s legitimate spiritual concerns, assesses the cost of perpetual critique, and exposes the deficit of spiritual meaning that haunts the culture of disenchantment.

Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture

1997-04-28

Author: Frances M. Young

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

ISBN: 9780521581530

Category: Religion

Page: 341

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This book challenges standard accounts of early Christian exegesis of the Bible. Professor Young sets the interpretation of the Bible in the context of the Graeco-Roman world - the dissemination of books and learning, the way texts were received and read, the function of literature in shaping not only a culture but a moral universe. For the earliest Christians, the adoption of the Jewish scriptures constituted a supersessionary claim in relation to Hellenism as well as Judaism. Yet the debt owed to the practice of exegesis in the grammatical and rhetorical schools is of overriding significance. Methods were philological and deductive, and the usual analysis according to 'literal', 'typological' and 'allegorical' is inadequate to describe questions of reference and issues of religious language. The biblical texts shaped a 'totalizing discourse' which by the fifth century was giving identity, morality and meaning to a new Christian culture.

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