Theological Voices. PAC Politics and the Abortion Debate: Abortion Politics and the Reagan Era

This investigation shall focus upon the issue of legalized abortion. I believe the complex controversy surrounding the issue of abortion, demonstrates more clearly than any other single contemporary issue the social, political, moral and religious forces working for change in a post-Reagan America. I shall examine in depth the theology, writings, strategies and activities of those Americans who seek to express themselves and their beliefs in religious, or religiously supported interest groups. The current debate surrounding abortion legislation lends itself to several forms of analysis: religious, political, sociological, etc. I will write from the perspective of a student of religion. I shall focus more upon the religious, moral and theological conviction-s of the abortion activists than upon their constitutional right to free speech or assembly. I shall give more attention to denominational structures and church/state relations than to the structuring of representative districts and democratic theory.

New way of seeing things : Ernst Troeltsch and the theological agenda

The aim of this thesis, as set out in the Introduction, is to assess the (seminal) significance of Troeltsch as one who set the agenda for twentieth century theology, particularly modern sociopolitical theology, and whose thought still has a special relevance. The first main chapter deals with the implications of the philosophy of history for theology. The Protestant theological orthodoxy of Troeltsch's time was essential ahistorical: he thought this to be untenable. Theology had to come to terms with the historical method, which was ‘a leaven which transforms everything, and finally bursts all previous forms of theological method.’ This chapter discusses Troeltsch's work concerning the principles, the cultural matrix, and the philosophy of history. The second main chapter examines another main concern of Troeltsch, namely, the status of Christianity vis-a-vis other religions. The background to this was the increasing awareness of the existence of other religions and the question of relativity and universality which this posed. Troeltschfs major response was Die Absolutheit des Christentums in which the ideas of essence, Europeanism, and absolutism were discussed, The third, and longest, chapter looks at the impact of social theory on theology. Sociology gave Troeltsch ‘a new way of seeing things’, and this new perspective is to be seen pre-eminently in The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. Discussion of this centres on the three main concepts that Troeltsch delineated, compromise, natural law, and church/sect typology.

A Jamesonian theory of theological practice: a critical response to the work of Roland Boer

In a conjuncture marked by the “resurgence of religion,” the problem of historical materialism’s relation to religious ideologies has acquired a new urgency. The work of Roland Boer, recently awarded the Deutscher Prize for his magnum opus on Marxism and Theology poses this question from a surprising perspective. While his main claim is that religious influences in Marxist theory represent a sort of theological unconscious in historical materialism, at the same time Boer also advances an original Marxist interpretation of the Abrahamic religions, especially Christianity. This line of research, which extends from his dissertation on Jameson and Jeroboam through to his most recent work on The Sacred Economy, proposes that theology is a reflective representation of the social totality. In this article, I criticise Boer’s valorisation of theology as a practical discourse that is post-ideological but non-theoretical, and conclude by indicating an alternative.

The Automatic Mapping of Princeton WordNet Lexical-Conceptual Relations onto the Brazilian Portuguese WordNet Database

Princeton WordNet (WN.Pr) lexical database has motivated efficient compilations of bulky relational lexicons since its inception in the 1980's. The EuroWordNet project, the first multilingual initiative built upon WN.Pr, opened up ways of building individual wordnets, and interrelating them by means of the so-called Inter-Lingual-Index, an unstructured list of the WN.Pr synsets. Other important initiative, relying on a slightly different method of building multilingual wordnets, is the MultiWordNet project, where the key strategy is building language specific wordnets keeping as much as possible of the semantic relations available in the WN.Pr. This paper, in particular, stresses that the additional advantage of using WN.Pr lexical database as a resource for building wordnets for other languages is to explore possibilities of implementing an automatic procedure to map the WN.Pr conceptual relations as hyponymy, co-hyponymy, troponymy, meronymy, cause, and entailment onto the lexical database of the wordnet under construction, a viable possibility, for those are language-independent relations that hold between lexicalized concepts, not between lexical units. Accordingly, combining methods from both initiatives, this paper presents the ongoing implementation of the WN.Br lexical database and the aforementioned automation procedure illustrated with a sample of the automatic encoding of the hyponymy and co-hyponymy relations.

Teaching the Millennial Generation in the Religious and Theological Studies Classroom

This essay provides an overview of the distinctive challenges presented to teaching and learning in religious and theological studies by the conditions and characteristics of “millennial” students. While the emerging literature on this generation is far from consistent, it is still instructive and important to engage, as students that are immersed in technology and social networking have different facilities and difficulties that educators would do well to carefully address and critically employ. Teachers in theological and religious studies are distinctly positioned to grapple with such conditions, particularly around the practices of identity formation, media literacy, and embodiment. Attention to the development of such practices engages key issues for both the millennial students and the religious and theological studies teacher: virtual reality, spiritual identity, globalization and violence, critical consumption and ethical creativity, focused and contemplative thinking, and intercultural and interpersonal respect.