Given that comparative theology is aimed at learning from the insights of other religious traditions, the comparative theologian‘s confessional perspective must be engaged and subject to possible transformation through the discovery of truth in those traditions. Despite Francis Clooney‘s and James Fredericks‘ attempts to distance comparative theology from the theology of religions, its truth-se...

Practical theology describes a context, interprets what has been discovered, brings in Christian norms, and constructs models of Christian practice. It is a process that involves epistemology and hermeneutics. For practical theology to be transformative, a postfoundational theological framework that allows interdisciplinary work and interpretation of experience in a given context is essential. ...

Taking the case of ‘spiritual gardening’ as a starting point, this paper reflects on praxis as the object of practical theology. Praxis is understood as the domain of lived religion and focuses on what people do rather than on official institutionalized religious traditions. Praxis refers to fields of practices like care or community building and to the patterned configurations of action, exper...

The two previous articles in this three part series on the subject of systematic theology [published in the Conservative Theological Journal – see footnotes] dealt with the definition of systematic theology as well as the contribution that dispensational premillennialism makes to systematic theology. This final article of the series gets to the most fundamental issue by answering the question, ...

This paper explores a futures perspective for practical theology. Although there are some examples of a future orientation, a systematic futures perspective has not been developed. Building on futures studies (including predictive studies on foresight and design and architecture studies), the authors propose a methodological model for future-sensitive practical theology, accounting for the prob...

[Reflection on human suffering is a formative factor in the development of the theology of Schillebeeckx. The dynamic of "negative contrast experience" is significant not only for his approach to suffering but for his method of doing theology in the face of the world's suffering. Schillebeeckx dialectically incorporates the reality of suffering into the construction of a theology that neverthel...

Natural theology is reading the book of nature, not the book of revelation, for knowledge of God. Natural theology, as a category employed by practitioners, originated within the history of Christianity, as passages from the New Testament such as Romans 1:20 raised the possibility of knowledge about God without revelation. The best-known work of natural theology is William Paley’s (d. 1805 AD) ...

In his article "Radical Theology and the Reorganization of the US-American Religious System," Philippe Codde uses the example of the highly popular movement of death-of-God theology in the 1960s to demonstrate the wide applicability for cultural research of Itamar Even-Zohar's polysystem theory and to illustrate the validity of Even-Zohar's assertion that peripheral elements in any system can y...

A "political theology," as I use the term here, is a society's understanding of its ultimate meaning in the context of reality as a whole, and in particular in light of what is taken to be divine or ultimate reality. Because human beings collectively as well as individually need their lives to have meaning, they will have a political theology of some sort, whether explicit or implicit, whether ...

'Modernity, having removed God from the world, not only has not exited theology, but it has only, in a certain sense, brought to completion the project of providential oikonomia'. i With these lines, Giorgio Agamben closes his latest, and longest, addition to the Homo Sacer project begun in 1995, Il Regno e la Gloria. Per una genealogia teologica dell'economia e del governo (The Kingdom and the...