Daily Archives: March 27, 2008

Consuming Sensations: Zygmunt Bauman

Posted by on March 27, 2008 1 comment

“For the consumers in the society of consumers, being on the move — searching, looking for, not-finding-it or more exactly not-finding-it-yet is not a malaise, but the promise of bliss; perhaps it is the bliss itself.  Theirs is the kind of traveling hopefully which makes arriving into a curse. … Not so much the greed to acquire and possess, not the gathering of wealth in its material, tangible sense, as the excitement of the new and unprecedented sensation is the name of the consumer game.  Consumers are first and foremost gatherers of sensations; they are collectors of things only in a secondary and derivative sense.”

– Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 83.

David Ford: 12 Theses for Theolgy in the 21st Century

Posted by on March 27, 2008 5 comments

“These 12 theses articulate the main elements of what I hope twenty-first-century Christian theology can be about:

  1. God is the One who blesses and loves in wisdom.
  2. Theology is done for God’s sake and for the sake of the Kingdom of God.
  3. Prayer is the beginning, accompaniment and end of theology: Come Holy Spirit!  Hallelujah! and Maranatha!
  4. Study of scripture is at the heart of theology.
  5. Describing reality in the light of God is a basic theological discipline.
  6. Theology hopes in and seeks God’s purposes while immersed in the contingencies, complexities and ambiguities of creation and history.
  7. Theological wisdom seeks to do justice to many contexts, levels, voices, moods, genres, systems and responsibilities.
  8. Theology is practiced collegially, in conversation, and best of all, in friendship; and, through the communion of saints, it is simultaneously premodern, modern, and postmodern.
  9. Theology is a broker of the arts, humanities, sciences and common sense for the sake of a wisdom that affirms, critiques and transforms each of them.
  10. Our religious and secular world needs theology with religious studies in its schools and universities.
  11. Conversation around scripture is at the heart of interfaith relations.
  12. Theology is for all who desire to think about God and about reality in relation to God.”

–David F. Ford, Shaping Theology: Engagements in a Religous and Secular World (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 243-244.

Irenaeus: In search of a good translation

Posted by on March 27, 2008 9 comments

Do any of my faithful readers know of a good translation of Irenaeus’ Against Heresies?  I’ve read it in the old Roberts translation in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, but I want something more servicable.  Who’s got the scoop for me?

If you had to…

Posted by on March 27, 2008 21 comments

A while back I asked folks who they would study if they had to be a scholar of just one modern theologian.  The key word there was ‘modern’.  Now I want to open it up more.  Out of all premodern theologians, (lets say up until the 19th century) who would you most want to study?  I suppose I’d have to go with Augustine, with Luther being a close second.  Other runners-up would be Aquinas, Irenaeus, and Jonathan Edwards.  What say you?

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