Search Results

This chapter discusses the key findings of the second section of this book about the genealogical travel writings of the Hadramis. The focus of this section is mainly on the Hadrami sayyids who combined their genealogies with other textual genres such as mysticism, history, and law. This chapter discusses how the Hadrami canon that evolved in the diaspora articulated a universalizing narrative of Prophetic mission in a language of names. It also considers the genealogies of the Hadrami diaspora as traveling texts that enable persons to travel transculturally.

Paul writes within the biblical tradition, regarding the state as God’s minister for God’s purposes: therefore the state’s authority is legitimate but open to prophetic challenge. Paul urges Christians to pay tax and respect the state’s right to execute “wrath.” Probably he also urges wealthy Christians to benefaction, thereby seeking the good of the city. All this is with a view to the new age that Paul believes is dawning in Christ. Much rhetoric of Pauline proclamation—Jesus as “lord” and “son of God”—resonates with Roman imperial rhetoric: such resonance does not necessarily imply confrontation and may imply approval. Suggestions that Christians’ claims to heavenly “citizenship” were denials of their Roman citizenship involve a failure to understand metaphor. Mere constraints of language obliged Paul to use at times the same vocabulary to speak of the divine as did others. Paul writes only once directly of the Roman state (Rom 13.1–7), and there he is generally positive.

For Ludwig, Berrigan’s major contribution to Catholic social teaching is also his recovery, rehabilitation, and renewal of the prophetic voice and of prophetic action. In his chapter, Ludwig begins with an examination of Berrigan’s theological method. He finds, in short, that “Berrigan’s method is experiential and historical, heavily dependent upon scripture, and orientated toward decision and action.” He is particularly appreciative of Berrigan’s emphasis on the social dimensions of theology, which serve to temper the “hyper-individualism” of the American cultural ethos. Berrigan, according to Ludwig, has been a major force in making non-violence normative in Catholic social thought. More so, through his efforts to directly challenge the war-making state, Berrigan – and those who have acted with him – have introduced “resistance” as a vital component of Christian non-violence.

Chapter 6 examines Turner’s prophetic ire against America and how the country deals with race. The chapter offers analysis of speeches in which he condemns America, calls the flag a “contemptible rag,” and suggests that African Americans have nothing to obtain if they remained in the country.

In this chapter, Brown argues that, in their opposition to the inertial thinking characteristic to the conventional mind, and in arguing for a humane, Christian alternative, Berrigan and Lonergan have a basic affinity. Each in his own way is prophetic, visionary, and radical in trying to promote a cognitive and moral breakthrough in human history. Berrigan, of course, in Brown’s view, is obviously prophetic, visionary, and radical, but Lonergan is also in a less obvious way. Brown nails down this thesis by showing how Lonergan’s early philosophy of history underpins and informs all of his later work, and how his economic theory attempts to provide a more adequate alternative to both conventional capitalist and conventional state socialist alternatives. Lonergan’s radical, philosophical, theological, social, and historical theory compliments Berrigan’s radical prophetic politics and resistance, and vica versa.

This study begins in chapter 1 with an examination of Justin Martyr's understanding of the Spirit. The objective of this analysis is twofold. The first objective is to provide the reader with an example of the pneumatological milieu that existed at the commencement of Irenaeus’ writing. The second is to provide a basis from which to compare and contrast Irenaeus’ pneumatology and Trinitarian logic.Over the last hundred years scholars have debated the degree to which Justin Martyr distinguished the activity and identity of the Word and the Spirit. This chapter shows Justin's regular failure to distinguish the activity of the Spirit from that of the Word, which reveals the presence of a binitarian orientation or logic. On two occasions Justin subordinates his Trinitarian convictions to his binitarian logic producing a binitarian account of the Godhead, a Spirit-Christology predicated upon an angelomorphic understanding of the Word and Spirit, in which he does not distinguish the identities of the Word and Spirit. These occurrences ought to be understood as reflecting the transition of earliest Christian theologies from binitarian to Trinitarian theological accounts, for while Justin's commitment to Trinitarian belief is firm, his logic is not well enough developed to support his convictions.

This chapter stresses the fruitful interplay between philosophy and prophecy, and the way in which Berrigan mediates the prophetic tradition to the contemporary scene and a unique and compelling way. Self-appropriation, which starts intellectually, and is rooted in the desire to know must complete itself in commitment, in love, and the works of love. Christian philosophers work in a context in which they acknowledge the integrity and critical autonomy of intellectual inquiry, identify philosophical inquiry as a component of a more comprehensive project of self-transcendence and service to the ends of love, and identify the bases of the works of love as a necessary inter-relation between contemplations and engagement. For the Christian philosopher, it is important to call on the prophetic tradition as a resource in doing philosophical work, to critique systemic violence, to do philosophy of religion, and to do one’s work in a university which may be overly-identified with secular culture.

Rooted in an original theoretical perspective on how optimal marginality creates creative ideas, this chapter explains how the multiple social circles Fromm was involved in during his youth created unique non-academic scholar. Fromm was a thinker who was a sociologist, a psychoanalyst, a Frankfurt School critical theorist, a radical Prophetic Jewish thinker and a public intellectual all at the same time.

In this chapter the general issues of interpretation involving the differences and similarities between the Qur’an and the Old and New Testaments are critically discussed. Allegory and typology are discussed as overall hermeneutic categories and as ways of describing and approaching the Bible and the Qur’an. Reflections are offered here on the nature of the “Prophetic discourse” represented in the Qur’an, and questions of genre and contemporary approaches to scriptural reading are put forward. The appellatory nature of Prophetic speech in the Qur’an offers some of the clearest points of comparison and contrast with biblical texts, along with narrative passages and their relation to history.

This conclusion asks questions: Does a minister remain silent in the face of injustice? What happens to important ministerial concepts such as “freedom of the pulpit”? Can a pastor balance the prophetic with pastoral duties? Can he/she ignore the inclusive message of the Christian Church for fear of losing a pulpit? These ministers did not remain silent in the face of injustice. They believed in “freedom of the pulpit.” They did not ignore the inclusive message of Christianity. Many lost their pulpits and some were never given pulpits. As James Wall, a southern white minister who served as editor of The Christian Century magazine expressed, “These ministers carried a heavy burden and many were truly prophets without honor in ‘their own country. In answering a questionnaire, ministers responded that faith in the Christian message and their witness to racial atrocities were the two most important factors influencing their actions.

This chapter narrates the brief encounter between Habib Luthfi and Suryo that encapsulates the central concern on Islamic religious authorities and their roles in cultivating communities of Muslims that revolve around Prophetic teachings. Both Habib Luthfi and Suryo claim connections to the Prophet and deploy such claims to constitute a religious community. The chapter explains how Habib Luthfi has been able to seamlessly transmit Prophetic teachings to his disciples, while Suryo was perceived as an eccentric and became an object of ridicule. The chapter discusses the study of eccentric subjects that can shed light on sites and mechanisms of exclusion, creativity, and struggle beyond dominant categories and discourses. It focuses on Habib Luthfi and other Muslim saints and scholars who through arduous labor have succeeded in cultivating communities that can serve as sites for the transmission and social realization of Prophetic teachings.

This chapter sets out the monograph’s central thesis: that acts of reading and interpretation (both of scripture and the social, cultural, economic and environmental ‘signs of the times’ that presage the coming apocalypse) are not only intimately connected to evangelical identity, but are also crucial sites of personal agency. In a predetermined world in which history has been written in advance and cannot be altered by human will, the capacity to read, interpret, and anticipate the future becomes a means of acquiring agency. Thus, prophetic knowledge becomes a unique form of empowerment. However, the individual exercise of interpretive agency is carefully regulated by the religious community at large: contemporary prophecy experts, such as LaHaye and Jenkins, seek to police the interpretive activities of their readership by only sanctioning specific readings of prophecy which they deem correct.

The social theology of representative nineteenth century churchmen, Patrick Brewster, Robert Burns, Robert Buchanan and Norman Macleod are examined to show that the claim that Brewster was, in Donald Smith's words “the unique exception” to the failure of the Scottish Church's prophetic role in the middle of the nineteenth century. Brewster's role is shown to be less effective than has been thought due to his inability to compromise and his personal arrogance. Burns, Buchanan and Macleod are shown to have gradually understood that structural changes in society were as important for the improvement of social conditions as the religious conversion which had been assumed to be essential to that improvement.

This chapter focuses on al-Ḥaddād and his attempt to formulate a new mode of articulatory labor that shifts the emphasis of Islam away from the inimitable achievements of living figures to text-based Prophetic teachings accessible to the commoners. It follows the spread of this paradigm in Java in the early nineteenth century. In a sermon delivered in 1964 to six thousand worshippers gathered for the ʻĪd al-Fiṭr prayer, the former governor of Indonesia's Aceh province, Daud Beureu'eh enthused over global Muslim unity. The chapter talks about Beureu'eh's imagination of a global Islamic community that regimented toward Mecca, which is at variance with that encapsulated by the anecdote of the building of the Demak mosque. Beureu'eh's words are confronted with a pan-Islamic vision of global unity that posits the existence of localized Islamic communities with divergent sunnas as a problem to be surmounted.

This chapter observes Habib Luthfi's labor of recovering Indonesia's saintly past. Much of this labor has been devoted to the hagiographical composition of his own little-known and unrecorded forefathers. The chapter describes a hagiographical composition that presents Habib Luthfi as a lineal successor of an old but forgotten Bā ʻAlawī saintly dynasty closely linked to the Ḥaddādian scholars on the one hand and the Javanese royal dynasty on the other. It reviews Habib Luthfi's hagiography that works to articulate historically competing genealogies and itineraries of Islamic transmission. The convergence of multiple genealogies of Islamic transmission in Habib Luthfi allows him to situate himself as the living terminus of diverse historical itineraries that connect contemporary Java to the Prophetic past.

Using Charles Taylor’s A Catholic Modernity? as its starting point, David Cochrane explores the evolving role of Catholicism in Ireland over the last half century and concludes that the disentangling of the Church from the dominant political and cultural institutions of society has paradoxically extended many of the very values Catholicism celebrates. Due to the severing of its close traditional connection to the State, the Church has rediscovered its original mission to provide a prophetic spiritual voice, especially in favour of the poor, and to align itself more closely with the concerns of its founder, Jesus Christ.