Law, Theology, and Morality: Conceptions of the Rights to Relief of the Poor in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

This article presents an analysis of certain ways of thinking about law and its relationship to the poor, in particular the rights and entitlements of the poor to the basic necessities of life and the obligations of society to provide those necessities. It focuses on the works of Peter the Chanter and his “circle” at Paris in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Significant in their writings on the quandary between respect for private property and the need to allow those in need to take a share of this private property in order to survive is their negotiation of the intellectual boundaries and understandings between law, theology, and morality. In addition, an understanding of their discussions in light of canonistic and theological works of the time reveal a hitherto under-appreciated contribution to the “subjective rights” language in Peter the Chanter.

The Black Side of the Sun: Camus, Theology, and the Problem of Evil

Albert Camus is typically categorized as an atheistic thinker, in the same breath as Sartre. Yet there is a sizable, often sympathetic, theological response to his works, which deal at great length with Christian themes, wrestle with the problem of evil, and are animated by his own avowed desire — in strong contrast with Sartre and other existentialists — to preserve a sense of the sacred without belief in human immortality. This essay reconstructs three components of Camus’s rapport and disagreement with Christian theology, which he approached pre-eminently through the figure of Augustine, central to his early Diplome thesis. First, we recount the young Camus’s neopagan ‘‘religiosity’’ — a sense of the inhuman majesty and beauty of the natural world at the heart of what he termed (and later regretted terming) the ‘‘absurd,’’ and rooted in Camus’s own unitive experiences growing up amidst the sea, sand, and blazing sun of North Africa. Second, we look at Camus’s engagement with the problem of evil, which for Camus — as for many early modern thinkers such as Bayle or Voltaire — represented the decisive immanent tension in later medieval theology, vindicating — in ethical terms — the modern rebellions against altar, pulpit, and throne. The essay closes by rebutting the charge, strongly argued recently by Ronald Srigley, that Camus was (both) anti-modern because anti-Christian. Camus’s aim, we propose, was instead to bring together a neopagan sense of the wonder of the natural world and our participation in it, with the egalitarian components of Christian ethics, severed from secularized eschatological content.

A critique of the political theology of Slavoj Zizek

This chapter critiques the political theology of Slavoj Zizek as beset by social theoretical and strategic political problems. Political theology here is a privileged intellectual terrain on which to simultaneously resolve questions about liberating forms of social cohesion in a post-revolutionary political community and about cultural strategy in the radical program. In connection with the Marxist critique of religious ideology, Zizek’s work represents an important contribution to the research program that emerged from the Althusserian approaches to social theory. But although Zizek has the conceptual resources to generate a dialectical theory of the connection between religious ideology and political strategy, he instead opts for a theory of radical rupture with existing forms of life. Detoured through the encounter with Carl Schmitt, Zizek’s doctrine of radical rupture quickly becomes an inverted Schmittianism, freighted with the problems of the militarisation of politics and the arbitrary designation of enemies that he diagnoses in Schmitt, but does not transcend in his own response. Zizek’s figure of the “religious suspension of the ethical” brings the politics of rupture to its most problematic (and baroque) formulations, revealing the fundamental problem of the ideological representation of political structures.

A constituição do sentimento religioso: da experiência do desamparo primordial à elaboração de um ideal vocacional

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Poder e memória: o autoritarismo na igreja presbiteriana do Brasil no período da ditadura militar

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

A mensagem na música: estudos da teomusicologia sobre os cânticos dos Adventistas do Sétimo Dia

Pós-graduação em Música - IA

Portraits of Protestant Teens: A Report on Teenagers in Major U.S. Denominations

This report examines the religious beliefs and practices of American Protestant teenagers using new, nationally representative survey data from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR). The NSYR is a major study of the religious and spiritual lives of contemporary American teens, which recently produced a book on its major findings entitled, Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (by Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Oxford University Press, 2005). In addition to broadly describing the religious outlook of Protestant teenagers today — and as a more detailed, descriptive follow-up to that book — this report highlights several positive and negative experiences and evaluations of teenagers in different Protestant denominations and groupings of denominations. In brief, this report presents the following findings in these areas of interest: ♦ Religious Participation: Protestant teenagers are relatively active in religious organizations and activities, both within and beyond their churches. About one-half of all Protestant teens attend church weekly, participate in Sunday school or in a religious youth group, pray and attend a religious summer camp or retreat, though less than one-third read the Bible each week. This also means, however, that substantial numbers of Protestant teens are not actively participating in their religious traditions. Teens from conservative denominations such as Southern Baptist Convention and Assemblies of God are especially likely to regularly attend church and participate in other religious activities. ♦ Theological Beliefs: Protestant teenagers are likely to hold many traditional Christian religious beliefs. The majority of Protestant teens say they believe in God, the afterlife, angels, demons, miracles, judgment day and they view God as a personal being involved in the lives of people today. Sizable numbers of Protestant teens, on the other hand, do not hold these traditional Christian religious beliefs. Teens from conservative and black Protestant denominations are more likely than mainline Protestant teens to hold these religious beliefs. ♦ Importance of Faith: The majority of Protestant teenagers report that their religious faith is very important in their lives. Most of them also say that their families talk about religion together, that they have shared their faith with someone not of their faith and that they have had a powerful worship experience. A large minority of all Protestant teenagers, and in the case of some denominations a majority of teenagers, do not report that religious faith is very important in their lives. Teens from conservative and black Protestant denominations are particularly likely to report that faith is important in their lives. ♦ Evaluations of Churches: The majority of Protestant teenagers express relatively positive views of their churches and fellow church members. They typically report that they would continue to attend church if it were totally up to them, that they would attend a similar church if given the choice and that their current church is generally warm and welcoming. Protestant adolescents, however, do have some reservations about and problems with their churches and fellow church attendees, as spelled out in the following pages, particularly with other teenage attendees.