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The New Christians

OK, this is the final part of what was meant to be a brief tangent. But Jimmy brings up an important caveat in his comment below. My not-so-hypothetical situation of a troubled teen in the school counselor’s office was sanitized of the real-life complications of power. Being a trained social worker, and a special ed.…

I’d been waiting for Publisher’s Weekly to file a report on the Christian Book Expo of last weekend, and now they have.  Marcia Nelson begins with this ominous lede, Stacks of unsold books and glum publishers stood for three days inside the cavernous Dallas Convention Center this past weekend at the Christian Book Expo, a…

OK, I’ll start with a concrete situation in order to illustrate the promise of “tranversal rationality.” [UPDATE: This is a hypothetical situation; the “boy” is meant to represent a concrete situation or problem. Another analogy could be, for instance, all the people who together had to decide what to build on the site of the…

I’ve posted on that question over at Religion Dispatches. We’re at a turning point, right now, because of a confluence of two events: 1) the MSM has finally figured out that 3/4s of American’s are religious, and 2) the Religious Right has lost its monopoly in the public square. Read the rest.

Following my panel discussion, about which I will report soon, I was approached by a well-dressed guy wearing name badge that identified him on the staff with the Institute for Creation Research, an organization with which I was not familiar.  Here’s how it went: Guy: Did that other panelist say that you think gays can…

How does one navigate the pluralism of our world today? There’s a lot at stake in this question. Currently, there are only a few options available to Christians in a globalized/pluralistic/postmodern society: liberal accomodationism, conservative retreatism, Hauerwasian sectarianism, and the newcomer: Milbankian (Radical Orthodoxy) withdrawal into the liturgy.

OK, I was all brewing up a great intermezzo post with a provisional definition of PT, then I got this anonymous comment that blew me away: Practical theology is that theological discipline which is concerned with the Church’s self-actualization here and now – both that which is and that which ought to be. That it…

Practical Theology is a self-consciously hermeneutical enterprise. Now, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I think that all of life is, essentially, a hermeneutical endeavor. Each of us is an interpreter, of our surroundings, our traditions, our conversations, the media we engage, etc. In the words of one philosopher, “Interpretation…

Practical theology (PT), as a discipline, takes a great deal of interest in empirical information. In fact, there is an entire school of thinking within PT — found mainly in the Netherlands and Germany — that’s called “Empirical Theology.” Practical theologians, because of the importance of the groundedness of the discipline, are often well-versed in…

Among my most popular posts from my old blog were those on my working definition of practical theology.  As I am engaged in the section of my dissertation in which I establish my version of practical theology, I’ll repost the series here at BNet.  Enjoy! I do get asked on occasion, “What is practical theology?”…
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