Tag: Theology

Free Download Understanding Theology and Homosexuality in African American Communities By Sana Loue (auth.)
2014 | 107 Pages | ISBN: 1461490014 | PDF | 1 MB
​Understanding Theology and Homosexuality in African-American Communities focuses specifically on helping mental professionals understand the scriptural and historical bases for the negative stance of some African American churches towards same-sex relations, and how that understanding is relevant within the context of mental health care. It provides a summary of the relevant professional literature and examples from clinical practice and/or research. This Brief is a basic reference for social workers, psychologists, counselors and other mental health professionals engaged in direct practice with African American clients and families.

Free Download Michael Berra, "Towards a Theology of Relationship: Emil Brunner’s Truth as Encounter in Light of Relationship Science"
English | ISBN: 1666737658 | 2022 | 266 pages | PDF | 20 MB
We live in an era in which relations are considered to be of the utmost importance in almost every field of science and society. For theology, however, this is nothing new. Having a personal relationship with God is a common Christian expression, and while this notion of relationship with God usually lacks a clear definition and its explication is often deeply flawed, this book argues nevertheless for the centrality of a theology of relationship.

Free Download Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, "The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Judaism"
English | ISBN: 0827615213 | 2024 | 400 pages | PDF | 2 MB
Natan Fund’s 2024 Natan Prize Winner

Free Download Tim Stuart-Buttle, "From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy: Cicero and Visions of Humanity from Locke to Hume"
English | ISBN: 0198835582 | 2019 | 288 pages | EPUB | 806 KB
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represent a period of remarkable intellectual vitality in British philosophy, as figures such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Smith attempted to explain the origins and sustaining mechanisms of civil society. Their insights continue to inform how political and moral theorists think about the world in which we live. From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy reconstructs a debate which preoccupied contemporaries but which seems arcane to us today. It concerned the relationship between reason and revelation as the two sources of mankind’s knowledge, particularly in the ethical realm: to what extent, they asked, could reason alone discover the content and obligatory character of morality? This was held to be a historical, rather than a merely theoretical question: had the philosophers of pre-Christian antiquity, ignorant of Christ, been able satisfactorily to explain the moral universe? What role had natural theology played in their ethical theories – and was it consistent with the teachings delivered by revelation? Much recent scholarship has drawn attention to the early-modern interest in two late Hellenistic philosophical traditions – Stoicism and Epicureanism. Yet in the English context, three figures above all – John Locke, Conyers Middleton, and David Hume – quite deliberately and explicitly identified their approaches with Cicero as the representative of an alternative philosophical tradition, critical of both the Stoic and the Epicurean: academic scepticism. All argued that Cicero provided a means of addressing what they considered to be the most pressing question facing contemporary philosophy: the relationship between moral philosophy and moral theology.

Free Download Michael Anthony Abril, "Evolutionary Theology: A Critical Introduction"
English | ISBN: 1506491634 | 2024 | 248 pages | PDF | 3 MB
The last century witnessed an explosion of theologies born out of the conviction that the science of evolution can and must contribute to our understandings of God, humanity, technology, suffering, sin, and the natural world. Even today, a sense of development continues to shape contemporary understandings of not only our origins, but also our place in the world now and in the future. Evolutionary theology’s popularity continues to accelerate, but the conversation has lacked a critical, comprehensive, and accessible introduction to this field-until now.

Free Download Gabriel Fischer Hornung, "Esther against Joseph’s Backdrop: The Theology and History of an Intertextual Relationship "
English | ISBN: 3111214133 | 2024 | 170 pages | PDF | 1094 KB
An examination of MT Esther’s relationship to the Joseph story, this study employs recent advances in author-oriented biblical intertextuality to address the debate concerning the religious purpose of the Scroll. While previous scholarship has seen Esther’s divine silence indicating God’s hidden hand, the characters’ or readers’ quiet faiths, or the secular concerns of an ancient Jewish nationalism, key aspects of Esther’s allusive character illustrate how the book purposefully constructs a theology of divine absence. As good-looking Israelites continue to rise in foreign courts to deliver themselves and their people from imminent dangers, the patterns God initiated in the Egyptian past are shown to extend into the Persian present even when the divine remains out of sight. Since this diachronically-oriented analysis suggests this theological interest was developed by Esther’s authors, it engages with Esther’s ancient Greek witnesses to demonstrate that the MT redactors altered an earlier version of the Scroll to position the Hebrew Megillah alongside Joseph’s instructive backdrop. By attending to these historical and interpretive issues, this work thus speaks to both Scroll scholarship and the study of inner-biblical allusions.

Free Download Kevin O’Farrell, "Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a Theology of the Exception "
English | ISBN: 0567709396 | 2023 | 196 pages | EPUB | 432 KB
Engaging with the many debates about the meaning and character of Bonhoeffer’s late resistance theology and action, particularly as it relates to his participation in the attempted coup d’état against Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a Theology of the Exception attends to Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the exception. Resisting the common reduction of the exception to a political or ethical concept, O’Farrell argues that the exception for Bonhoeffer is an extraordinary moment in history that disarms persons, impinging on one’s understanding of politics and ethics. Through a wide engagement with the Bonhoeffer corpus, this book claims that this leads to distinctive narrations of key concepts in Bonhoeffer’s corpus: responsibility, the free venture, simple obedience, and action beyond the law. It also offers a different portrait of Bonhoeffer to contemporary narrations. The Bonhoeffer that emerges is neither a Niebuhrian realist, a pacifist, or a religious fanatic, but one who is impelled to act apart from the law without this action becoming arbitrary. This Bonhoeffer provides a hopeful political witness that seeks a world beyond the conflicts and divisions of this age.

Free Download Christopher B Kaiser, "Creational Theology and the History of Physical Science: The Creationist Tradition from Basil to Bohr "
English | ISBN: 9004106693 | | 464 pages | PDF | 67 MB
This volume documents the role of creational theology in discussions of natural philosophy, medicine and technology from the Hellenistic period to the early twentieth century. Four principal themes are the comprehensibility of the world, the unity of heaven and earth, the relative autonomy of nature, and the ministry of healing.

Free Download Nathan Israel Smolin, "Christ the Emperor: Christian Theology and the Roman Emperor in the Fourth Century AD "
English | ISBN: 019768954X | 2024 | 392 pages | EPUB | 1253 KB
Politics and diplomacy have always been as much about the social and cultural contexts within which political actors operate as they are about the political structures themselves. This was also true of the Roman Empire of the fourth century AD, ruled by the Emperor Constantine the Great-a society marked by social, religious, and political transformation as the empire came under the influence of the Christian Church. Studies of this period often note the difficulty of understanding its politics due to a lack of sources that discuss questions central to political theory. This has led to deprecating views of the Late Empire as an age of unquestioning despotism, political decline, and social decay. Recent scholarship has correctly pushed back against this viewpoint, emphasizing the vibrancy of art, architecture, and social life during this period; however, relatively little attention has yet been given to the deeply consequential effects of Christian theology on the period’s politics.

Free Download Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton by Matt Goldish
English | PDF | 1998 | 246 Pages | ISBN : 0792349962 | 29.4 MB
This book is based on my doctoral dissertation from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1996) of the same title. As a master’s student, working on an entirely different project, I was well aware that many of Newton’s theological manuscripts were located in our own Jewish National and University Library, but I was under the mistaken assumption that scores of highly qualified scholars must be assiduously scouring them and publishing their results. It never occurred to me to look at them at all until, having fmished my master’s, I spoke to Professor David Katz at Tel-Aviv University about an idea I had for doctoral research. Professor Katz informed me that the project I had suggested was one which he himself had just fmished, but that I might be interested in working on the famous Newton manuscripts in the context of a project being organized by him, Richard Popkin, James Force, and the late Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, to study and publish Newton’s theological material. I asked him whether he was not sending me into the shark-infested waters of highly competitive scholarship, and learned that in fact there were only a handful of scholars in the world who actively studied and published on Newton’s theology. At the time the group consisted mainly of Popkin, Force, Dobbs, Frank Manuel, Kenneth Knoespel, and David Castillejo.