Bøger i AAR ACADEMY SERIES serien

In Drifting Through Samsara, Masoumeh Rahmani provides a fieldwork-based study of Goenka's Vipassana meditation movement in New Zealand. This group is distinguished by its refusal to identify as Buddhist and by a rich rhetorical repertoire for repackaging Theravada Buddhist teachings in pseudo-scientific and secular language. Drawing from qualitative research, the book examines the way the movement's discourse shapes unique processes and narratives ofconversion and disengagement.

In Melville's Wisdom: Religion, Skepticism, Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, Damien B. Schlarb explores the manner in which Herman Melville responds to the spiritual crisis of modernity by using the language of the biblical Old Testament wisdom books to moderate contemporary discourses on religion, skepticism, and literature. Schlarb argues that attending to Melville's engagement with the wisdom books (Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes) can help usunderstand a paradox at the heart of American modernity: the simultaneous displacement and affirmation of biblical language and religious culture.

Evan Kuehn argues that historiographical assumptions about twentieth-century religious thought have obscured the coherence and relevance of the Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch's understanding of God, history, and eschatology. Kuehn argues that an eschatological understanding of the Absolute stands at the heart of Troeltsch's theology and the problem of historicism with which it is faced. Troeltsch's theory of the Absolute is shown to be central to his views onreligion and religious ethics and provides practitioners of constructive studies in religion with important resources for engaging with sociological and historical studies.

In this, the first critical study of the major theologians of pentecostalism, Christopher A. Stephenson establishes four original categories that classify recent pentecostal theologians' methodologies in systematic/constructive theology.

Journey Back to God explores Origen of Alexandria's creative, complex, and controversial treatment of the problem of evil. It argues that his layered cosmology functions as a theodicy that explains unjust suffering and shows how that theodicy hinges on the journey of the soul back to God.

In this wide-ranging contribution to Christian theological anthropology, Natalia Marandiuc offers a constructive theological argument for the function of love attachments as sources of subjectivity and enablers of human freedom. Human loves and the love of God are portrayed here as co-creating the self and situating human subjectivity in a relational "home."

The book provides an original analysis of the central philosophical differences between liberal and postliberal theology. Knight argues that important developments in philosophy of language reveal serious problems with the central methodological commitments of liberalism and postliberalism and suggest ways in which the divide can be bridged.

Coming to the Edge of the Circle offers an ethnographic study of the initiation ritual practiced by one coven of Witches located in Ohio. As a High Priestess within the coven as well as a scholar of religion, Nikki Bado is in a unique position to contribute to our understanding of this ceremony and the tradition to which it belongs.

This volume examines what it is to be a woman in the context of the Korean-American Church. Drawing on participant observation, interviews and a review of historical documents, the author considers issues including status inconsistency and role conflict in marginalized communities.

This book raises in a new way a formerly central but recently neglected question in systematic theology: what is the divine motive for the incarnation? Throughout Christian history theologians have agreed that God's decision to become incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ was made necessary by humanity's fall from grace. If Adam and Eve had not sinned, the incarnation would not have happened. This position is known as "infralapsarian." In the 19th and 20thcenturies, however, some major theological figures championed a "supralapsarian" Christology, arguing that God had always intended the incarnation, independent of "the Fall." Edwin van Driel offers the first scholarly monograph to map and analyze the full range of supralapsarian arguments. He gives a thick description of each argument and its theological consequences, and evaluates the theological gains and losses inherent in each approach. Van Driel shows that each of the three ways in which God is thought to relate to all that is not God - in creation, in redemption, and in eschatological consummation - can serve as the basis for a supralapsarianargument. He illustrates this thesis with detailed case studies of the Christologies of Schleiermacher, Dorner, and Barth. He concludes that the most fruitful supralapsarian strategy is rooted in the notion of eschatological consummation, taking interpersonal interaction with God to be the goal of the incarnation.He goes on to develop his own argument along these lines, concluding in an eschatological vision in which God is visually, audibly, and tangibly present in the midst of God's people.

Christian tradition holds that an individual's ability to respond to God's graceto love both God and neighbor is not wholly vulnerable to earthly contingencies, such as victimization. Today, however, trauma theory insists that situations of overwhelming violence can permanently damage a person's capacity for responsive agency. For Christians, this theory raises the very troubling possibility that humans can inflict ultimate harm on each other, such that someindividuals' eternal destiny can be determined not by themselves but by those who do great harm. Offering crucial insights that lead to a more adequate understanding of the relation between Gods grace and human freedom, Bestes important theory reconfigures our visions of God and humanity and alters ourperceptions of what it means to truly love ones neighbor.

Reflecting on St Paul's construal of Christian identity, this book stresses the communal aspects of Paul's thought and his narrative understanding of the self. It offers an analysis of Rudolph Bultmann's phenomenology of the self and its impact on his demythologizing interpretation of Paul's writings.

Graham Greene's early books are usually described as 'Catholic Novels'. Greene's later work, by contrast, is generally regarded as falling into political and detective genres. This book argues that this is a false dichotomy created by a narrowly prescriptive understanding of the Catholic genre.

Gudmundsdottir argues that a feminist theology of the cross serves a dual purpose in feminist christology: it discloses the patriarchal distortion of traditional christology, and can also reveal lost dimensions in the understanding of the person and work of Jesus Christ.