By: Telile Fikru Badecha on May 8, 2015
A couple of years ago two of my coworkers went to visit a new small church in a village. Upon arriving, they asked the villagers what they knew about the community that meets there. The villagers told them that they were Protestant Christians. They come on Sundays, they dance and they go home. The villagers…
By: Dawnel Volzke on May 8, 2015
Simon Chan’s book, Grassroots Asian Theology: Thinking the Faith from the Ground Up, draws the reader into a discovery of authentic faith in relation to cultural expression. While Chan’s book focuses on Asian theology, we can observe religion within this cultural context to better understand the dynamics in the relationships between people and theology. In the…
By: Carol McLaughlin on May 7, 2015
I am influenced by my geography, the culture and context of the Pacific Northwest. Stephen Bevans identifies contextual theology as a way of doing theology that involves two realities, “The first of these is experience of the past, recorded in Scripture and preserved and defended in the church’s tradition. The second is the experience of…
By: Julie Dodge on May 7, 2015
Theology. David Ford suggests that “(t)heology at its broadest is thinking about questions raised by and about the religions.” [1] Grenz and Olson narrow that definition down to “any reflection on the ultimate questions of life that point toward God.” [2] I might narrow it further to be man’s attempt to understand God. That definition…
By: Ashley Goad on May 7, 2015
Under the Mango Tree… The Next Chapter I will freely admit, I know very little about Asia, Asians, or religion in Asia. In fact, I have never even been curious. That is one part of the world that has never captured my wanderlust. While I studied a bit on Zen Buddhism throughout seminary, I never…
By: Michael Badriaki on May 7, 2015
Simon Chan’s book In Grassroots Asian Theology is on point and timely indeed. There is more one could say about the issues concerning Ferguson, New York, the Officer Slager and Scott Walker case, the late Freddie Gray and Baltimore city , but one common theme in all these instances has been the presence of grassroots…
By: Bill Dobrenen on May 7, 2015
I have been in school for a long time, not only as a student, but also as a teacher. Knowledge and information runs through my academic veins. I like to know things. But the more I know, the less I realize I know. And this is particularly true with the study of theology. What do…
By: Jon Spellman on May 7, 2015
This week, Who Needs Theology by Grenz and Olsen came to mind. I was reminded if their concerns that Christian theology in the West could deteriorate into a “mere ‘folk religion’ (unreflective believing based on blind faith in a tradition of some kind), relegated to the realms of sheer subjectivity and emptied of public credibility.”1…
By: Liz Linssen on May 7, 2015
Asian and Western cultures are worlds apart. Many of the issues that faced Asian Christians are simply non-existent for the Western believer. For example, one of the issues that South Koreans face once they have chosen to follow Jesus Christ is the question of ancestral worship. Each year, families throughout the country visit the graves…
By: Deve Persad on May 7, 2015
When stepping inside an airplane, if you take a quick glance to your left, while making the turn to walk down the aisle to your seat, you will notice a radar screen in the center of the console between the pilot and co-pilot. It’s a digital display whose scale can be adjusted to show all…
By: Mary Pandiani on May 6, 2015
Last fall, I was first introduced to Simon Chan through his book Spiritual Theology. For my essay on theology, this core text summed up much of my own understanding of God. With a contextual theology to be in a “conscious, personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ,”[1] Chan applies his systematic understanding about God to…
By: Nick Martineau on May 6, 2015
My Uncle lives in Nanning, China. He moved there a number of years ago because he was unsatisfied with the American way of life. Just a year after living in China we weren’t too surprised to learn he had gotten married. His wife is a school principal and it appears he will spend the…
By: Phillip Struckmeyer on May 6, 2015
Grassroots . . . the hope of the Church! If the Bible fell onto a planet that knew nothing of orthodox Christianity, would orthodox Christianity be discovered by the reading and living out of the text? Would the Jesus of an orthodox Christianity be made known? Would the Church of orthodox Christianity be made known?…
By: Dave Young on May 5, 2015
A church member asked me, “What’s Asian theology?” when she saw the book I was reading. For point of reference, she’s a bright teacher, has served a number of years as a missionary, and she’s more aware than most of cultural differences. She simply didn’t know, and neither did I—that the Eastern civilization needs theology…
By: Stefania Tarasut on May 1, 2015
I really enjoyed reading chapter 19 out of Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age. Earlier this week I had to update my parent’s insurance policy. Because I’m the oldest, the responsibilities of taking care of my family falls on me. I sat down my parents and started talking about end of life decisions. We talked…
By: Stefania Tarasut on April 30, 2015
Where to begin? Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age is a “collection of interlocking essays, which shed light on each other, and offer a context of relevance for each other.”[1] In this post, I’m going to focus on Chapter 13, The Age of Authenticity. I’m choosing to focus on this chapter because this ethic of…
By: Stefania Tarasut on April 30, 2015
When these articles were assigned, I was in Haiti. I tried reading them over and over again, but being in that context, reading these articles was over my head. I picked them up again this week and though they are still over my head, I was able to find some things that are important. This…
By: Clint Baldwin on April 29, 2015
Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone offer a window into wonderfully holistic engagement with ourselves and the world around us in their text Active Hope. I appreciate that early on in their work the authors note that this is a text about practicing and doing more than it is a text about arriving or having per…
By: Clint Baldwin on April 29, 2015
In a previous post I looked at the first three parts of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Here I will be focusing on the last two sections of his 800+ page text – “Narratives of Secularization” and “Conditions of Belief.” Pausing for a brief moment of overview, we previously considered Taylor’s presentation that we exist…
By: Clint Baldwin on April 29, 2015
Andrew Marin wrote a text in 2009 titled, Love Is An Orientation: Elevating the Conversation with the Gay Community. In 2011, Adrian Thatcher published God, Sex and Gender: An Introduction. Thatcher’s text is broader in scope than Marin’s, but engages some of the same principles at core. In both of these texts there is a…
