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Abstract
While the climate crisis was denied for many years in right-wing movements, shifts in discourse have become apparent recently. Right-wing populists and extremists are developing their own narratives, such as population growth in the Global South. Religious references also become relevant in these right-wing narratives but empirical studies on religion in right-wing environmental discourse have been rare for the German-speaking region so far. The paper examines religious motifs and arguments in the new-right periodical Die Kehre representing the line of thought of the new-right discourse on ecology. 15 issues of the journal are analysed with the help of the structuring qualitative content analysis. The analysis aims to develop a first descriptive assessment of the significance of religion in the right-wing ecological discourse. Therefore, this paper is also critical to the thesis that religion contributes substantially to global climate justice.
Abstract
In this contribution, I will focus on Hegel’s presentation of the practice of baptism as found in his work, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate. First, I contextualize the motif of baptism in its variegated forms in the New Testament and especially in Paul’s theology (Rom 6:4). Subsequently, I situate Hegel’s engagement with baptism in his early philosophy of religion, demonstrating how he refers to biblical accounts of baptism and then transforms them. My thesis is that Hegel transformed baptism from a biblical motif in his Early Theological Writings into an entrance into philosophical thought, as can be observed repeatedly in several of his later works such as the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences and the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Abstract
In this paper, I examine the role that the biblical story of Adam and Eve, Genesis 2–3, plays for philosophers and biblical scholars who advocate a weak metaphysics. In particular, I discuss writings by Mark Glouberman, Richard Kearney and Gianni Vattimo. I examine the question of whether and in what sense Genesis 2–3 can be said to be a primal scene for weak thinking or weak metaphysics.
Abstract
While recognizing that Michel de Certeau is not a Christian theologian, this essay argues for a way in which we might read his oeuvre as a mode of Jesuit apologetics. The basis for reading him as such is twofold. First, Certeau pays attention to the various movements of desire beneath the signs composing the discourses in the various fields of his enquiry. In tracing that transgressive desire, he is always to listening for the voice of the Other; an Other that transcends and subtends human language, but resists capture by it. Secondly, the style in which he writes allows for the ambiguities and ironies that must necessarily attend any attempt to give definitive voice to the Other. Examining these two aspects of Certeau’s oeuvre reveals a way, this essay argues, his work bears witness to the Unnamed in the secular world in which he works and the secular studies in which he engages.
Abstract
This article explores the contingency of the encounter between Jesus of Nazareth as representative of YHWH and Mary Magdalene that occurs at Jesus’s tomb. It interprets two important passages from the Gospel of Mark (Mk 16:1–8) and the Gospel of John (Jn 20:11–18) in order to reflect upon the Absolute which arises from this encounter. In Mark’s Gospel, the result of the encounter is the reference to a never-derivable and unrepresentable beginning, on which the text of Mark is built. The Gospel of John, which refers to Mark, concretizes this as the beginning of love and the covenant partnership between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. It is a contingent encounter because there is no external necessity for it. The crucial point is that the event of God only manifests itself in unforeseen encounters. Therefore the experience of an encounter which sets a new beginning in motion and the existence of God are inextricably linked.
Abstract
Cornel West lectured to the ministerial leadership at the House of the Lord Pentecostal Church in Brooklyn, New York, pastored by Bishop Herbert D. Daughtry, Sr, which became the bases for Prophesy Deliverance! My article lays the context and historical circumstances that brought West to the church. The essay explains theological, political nexus, and the critical moment in which the church, as a central member of the Black United Front, found itself at the center of the call for justice and social change amid police murders and abuses in New York City during the mayoral administration of Edward Koch.
Abstract
Early lectures, which became the book Prophesy Deliverance! by Cornel West, were delivered at the House of the Lord Pentecostal Church in Brooklyn, New York. The location of House of the Lord, which West argued was an exemplar of Afro-American revolutionary Christianity, demonstrates the relational and reciprocal insights Pentecostalism shares with West’s commitments to radical historicism and prophetic pragmatism. Several Black descended Pentecostals–scholars Leonard Lovett and Keri Day, and denominational leader Smallwood Williams–enact both a complex cultural analysis, and a robust social analysis. I argue Pentecostal praxis and critical reflection engage and extend West’s corpus and Black critical thought.
Abstract
Black Apostolic Pentecostal Bishop Arthur M. Brazier employed various discursive practices to promote an integrationist agenda by affirming Black Power as a complex constellation of ideologies for achieving self-determination, Black pride, and self-sufficiency. Brazier deployed a Black Power/Black Liberation Theology-informed social program to help Black Chicagoans vie for their piece of the [American] pie in the name of cultural assimilation and socio-economic inclusion. Here, I reflect on Professor West’s proposal for an Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity. Recognizing that his discussion of the practical and programmatic dimensions of revolutionary Christian perspective and praxis were never intended to reify religious parochialism, in it, I find a theoretical framework with which to examine the religio-social consciousness of Black Pentecostals like Brazier, who prophesied deliverance via Black liberation.