Andrew Walls - The American Dimension of the Missionary Movement
Key quote: Americans must in order to see Religion count religion or show its value…. To them big churches are successful churches…. To win the greatest number of converts with the least expense is their constant endeavour. Statistics is their way of showing success or failure in their religion as in their commerce and politics. Numbers, numbers, oh, how they value numbers!…Americans are essentially children of this world; that they serve as teachers of religion…is an anomaly….From Corporate Church to Missional Church: The Challenge Facing Congregations Today - Craig Van Gelder
Van Gelder contrasts what he calls Corporate and Missional church self-understandings. He contextualizes the appearance of what he calls the Corporate Church model as an American development growing from the unique, religiously plural context of the early USA, as distinct from a European “Established Church” (state church/Constantinian) model. He then walks through five stages of its development, and then argues how a Missional Church self-understanding is more theologically and biblically appropriate.Lecture : Panchuck (& Hareth) All Things Work Together for Good: Theodicy as Gaslighting
(Keynote address at the conference Epistemic Injustice and Religious Identities, held at McGill this week) Panchuk (pesenter) and Hareth (co-author) have two arguments in this paper; a weak one, that theodicy can be gaslighting, and a strong one, that thodicy is always gaslighting. Panchuk is quite convinced of the former, and makes a compelling case for it, but she herself is only marginally convinced of the strong case, though she attempted to argue for a general connection.Zigmunt Baumann - Liquid Modernity
Liquid Modernity is a way of describing contemporary culture, as opposed to the “solid culture” of the past. Previously, the idea of “culture” signified a certain elite or stratification of society; it was used to separate the classes, and to give a model to which “cultured” people would conform – culture meant high culture, it was Beethoven and Mozart, not folk music. The contemporary cultral ethos is, by contrast, one of eclecticism – being “cultured” means selecting from and enjoying cultural artefacts regardless of their source.
Danièle Hervieu-Leger, The recomposition of the religious in modernity
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Contemporary times (“High Modernity”) are a time of religious paradoxes: religious institutions are losing influence and membership, but people are as practicing and believing as ever. The modern ideals of rationality, autonomy and differentiation of spheres led people to believe that religion would disappear, but instead it has become individualised.
Aim of the lecture: to give tools to understand the paradoxes of religion in modernity, such as the ebb of religious institutions, but more extremism, etc.
set de note d’étude fr