Christian Realism and the New Realities
| Preis: | 32.95 EUR* (inkl. MWST zzgl. Versand - Preis kann jetzt höher sein!) |
| Versand: | 0.00 EUR Versandkostenfrei innerhalb von Deutschland |
| Partner: | buecher.de |
| Hersteller: | Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematic (Lovin, Robin W.) |
| Stand: | 2015-08-04 03:50:33 |
Produktbeschreibung
Are religion and public life really separate spheres of human activity? Should they be? In this book, Robin W. Lovin criticizes contemporary political and theological views that separate religion from public life as though these areas were systematically opposed and makes the case for a more integrated understanding of modern society. Such an understanding can be underpinned by ?Christian realism´, which encourages responsible engagement with social and political problems from a distinctive perspective. Drawing on the work of Rawls, Galston, Niebuhr, and Bonhoeffer, Lovin argues that the responsibilities of everyday life are a form of politics. Political commitment is no longer confined to the sphere of law and government, and a global ethics arises from the decisions of individuals. This book will foster a better understanding of contemporary political thought among theologians and will introduce readers primarily interested in political thought to relevant developments in recent theology. Table of Contents: 1. Reflections on the end of an era; 2. A short history of Christian realism; 3. Contexts of responsibility; 4. Unapologetic politics; 5. A global order; 6. Human goods and human dignity. Excerpt: Christian realism is a reminder of our limits and an affirmation of our hope. It tells us that our knowledge is imperfect, our plans are incomplete, and our expectations are inevitably distorted by self-interest. We are always trying to overcome these limitations, and we are often partly successful; but our partial successes make it all the more important to remember that the limits remain, mocking our confidence with ironic reversals and threatening our pride with forces beyond our control. Final answers and permanent solutions elude us. Nevertheless, we live in a meaningful universe. Conflict, violence, and the relentless background drone of anxiety are not the ultimate reality. The coherence of our partial truths and the justice that expresses our imperfect love point to reality in a way that incoherence and injustice do not. So we feel ourselves always obliged to work toward a better approximation of justice and peace, and we cannot rest content merely in prevailing with our own interests. Everyone experiences this dialectic of power and finitude, meaning and incoherence, hope and anxiety. For some, it signals a need to dig through the distortions of human subjectivity to the hard core of objective fact. For others, the persistence of incoherence and violence suggests that objectivity itself is an illusion, and the only order we will find is the one we make for ourselves. For biblical faith, however, this unresolved tension in all human experience reveals the nature of ultimate reality and locates our place within it. Biblical faith articulates this revelation by saying both that we are ?created in the image of God? and that we are ?fallen.? We have used the image of God, which is our power to know, imagine, and choose, to separate ourselves from God. As a result, we are unable rightly to choose or to know a good which is nonetheless always present to us, shared by all of us, engaging us in pursuit of its partial and limited realizations, and judging our failures to comprehend it as a whole. This assessment of the human situation is shared by all Christian theology. What distinguishes Christian realism is the conviction that the best place to see this human condition in ordinary experience is in those large-scale relationships and interactions we call politics. As Edmund Santurri puts it, ?Political life displays in a peculiarly transparent way the fallen condition of the world.?1 Although many people center their moral reflections in personal relationships and close communities, Christian realists find the moral life more clearly presented in political problems that show the limits of our understanding, demand higher levels of self-restraint, and demonstrate our dependence on powers and forces outside of our control. Seen from a Christian realist perspective, politics demands our best efforts at the same time that it undermines our self-righteousness. Politics condemns injustice without promising us that good will and sincerity will always be rewarded. ?In such a faith, both sentimentality and despair are avoided. The meaningfulness of life does not tempt to premature complacency, and the chaos which always threatens the world of meaning does not destroy the tension of faith and hope in which all moral action is
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