Tomoko Masuzawa and a number of other contemporary scholars have recently problematized the categories of “religion” and “world religions” and, in some cases, called for its abandonment altogether as a discipline of scholarly study. In this collaborative essay, we respond to this critique by highlighting three attempts to teach world religions without teaching “world religions.” That is, we attempt to promote student engagement with the empirical study of a plurality of religious traditions without engaging in the rhetoric of pluralism or the reification of the category “religion.” The first two essays focus on topical courses taught at the undergraduate level in self‐consciously Christian settings: the online course “Women and Religion” at Georgian Court University and the service‐learning course “Interreligious Dialogue and Practice” at St. Michael's College, in the University of Toronto. The final essay discusses the integration of texts and traditions from diverse traditions into the graduate theology curriculum more broadly, in this case at Loyola Marymount University. Such confessional settings can, we suggest, offer particularly suitable – if somewhat counter‐intuitive – contexts for bringing the otherwise covert agendas of the world religions discourse to light and subjecting them to a searching inquiry in the religion classroom.
The trauma that results from violence against women presents a challenge to theological reflection on the meaning of suffering. The mysticism of suffering unto God in the theology of J.B. Metz offers an essential contribution to this reflection. There is a remarkable compatibility between women's experiences of trauma and healing and Metz's understanding of suffering unto God, especially in its refusal to glorify suffering. Further, Metz's understanding presents a much needed mystical-political dimension to theological reflection on violence against women, because of its capacity to nurture on going resistance to the victimization of all women, past and present. Metz's mystical stance, holding together both anguish and radical hope, challenges feminist theology, in its treatment of violence against women, to attend to the relationship between the mystical and political.
, in a panel discussion on the topic "Issues and Questions in American Catholic Theology Today." The Awards Committee presented awards for best book and article at the banquet on Saturday evening. Of the thirteen books and sixteen articles sub
ethical, and cultural consequences of those decisions." 2 But Copeland went on to ask why the rather elegant proposals of political theologians such as Johann Baptist Metz, Jürgen Moltmann, and Dorothee Soelle have hardly been taken up by American theologians. She suggests that a political theology is too close to home: we don't really want to address the degradation of the marginal, the despised, and the powerless in our church or in our own social lives. The essays below briefly begin to take up this challenge of political theology. The authors constituted a roundtable discussion of the future of political theology in the Philosophy of Religion section of the 2007 College Theology Society Convention at the University of Dayton. The roundtable continued the work begun in a collection of essays on political theology from European and American scholars, Missing God? Cultural Amnesia and Political Theology. 3 In what follows, Maureen O'Connell most directly takes up Copeland's challenge to frame what O'Connell describes as "faith in North American history and society." I begin, however, with a brief overview of the concerns of this new political theology and some implications for the structure of the academy. The contributions by Steve Ostovich and Johann Vento also are concerned with specific contexts for doing political theology: critical theory in Ostovich's case, feminist theology and Eastern religious thinking in Vento's. Gonzaga University JOHN K. DOWNEY I. Cultural Amnesia and the Theological Agenda Political theology is simply a call to remember who we are as human beings. Control and subjugation are not what make us humanor reasonable. Metz cautions against living off a "bread of domination" that disconnects people: subjugation does not give lives their value. 4 All human beings are called to be subjects, that is, to be agents of human value in the world, actors who declare human value in their actions. To be human is to realize our connectedness, our responsibility as well as our vulnerability. Christian discipleship offers as its hope human solidarity rather than domination. It is founded on a hope that the human heart will turn outward. The touchstone of political theology is not an abstract idea of being 2
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