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| SEEN IN VITAL THEOLOGY ARCHIVE | |
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“I think it’s possible for somebody to support civil unions without supporting homosexual marriage. I think that would be an acceptable position.” Scott B. Rae, professor of ethics, Talbot School of Theology “We need some kind of reciprocal respect, recognizing that we have plenty of errors marked in all of our traditions.” Thomas W. Ogletree, professor of theological ethics, Yale Divinity School “Merton saw a self-emptying that can occur in the active life as a way toward coming to a sense of the true self.” Albert J. Raboteau, professor of religion, Princeton University “There’s a kind of institutionalized forgetfulness in the nation-state that wants to erase the past constantly.” William J. Cavanaugh, associate professor of theology, St. Thomas University “The Israeli-Jewish community that designed the Zionism movement itself over the past 100 years has always had within it a current of self-criticism. Much more than has been the case in the Arab-Palestinian community.” Solomon Schimmel, professor of Jewish education and psychology, Hebrew College “Nothing is going to stop the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people unless the Americans wake up and start refusing to give unstinting and uncritical financial and diplomatic aid to Israel.” G. Simon Harak, anti-militarism coordinator, War Resisters League “In our system where people often see separate rules for rich and poor, (Eliot Spitzer’s) prosecuting seems to signal that the law is for everyone.” Leslie C. Griffin, Doherty Chair of Legal Ethics, University of Houston “I think justice ought to be a part of every Christian’s calling.” Shirley J. Roels, Lilly Vocation Project director, Calvin College “I think the word ‘values’ has tended to be illegitimately captured by the right. The values that they reflect religiously are more the values of Manichean dualism than they are of Christian monotheism.” William F. May, professor of ethics emeritus, Southern Methodist University “The discussion of gay unions is not simply about the morality of gay union or gay marriage, but it becomes an issue of the defense of marriage. Now a gay union becomes a threat to heterosexual marriage and the conversation then proceeds as a conversation of fear.” Scott Bader-Saye, associate professor of theology, University of Scranton “The promise for certitude is a promise that cannot be kept.” Walter Brueggemann, professor of Old Testament emeritus, Columbia Theological Seminary “There is no question that materialism is powerful. We simply accept , at a tragic level, what the culture says is right.” Ronald J. Sider, founder, Evangelicals for Social Action It’s not that politicians are showing us how to (lie). Politicians are our creatures. We make them in our own image and they behave as we do.” Paul J. Griffiths, Schmitt Professor of Catholic Studies, University of Illinois, Chicago “As heretical as this may sound to some people, there’s not much different going on out there as there is in the church in terms of how people are trying to make faith work in their lives.” Barry Taylor, adjunct professor of pop culture and theology, Fuller Theological Seminary “The film seems to dismiss the very idea of a useful conversation about good and evil.” Jeffrey H. Mahan, professor of ministry, media and culture, Iliff School of Theology, on the movie What the Bleep Do We Know!? “I’m trying to find a way of relating in a scholarly way the results of science interpreted philosophically with the results that I have in theology.” Robert J. Russell, director, Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences “Suicide bombers are a symptom of an underlying disease … We have leadership and a broad population investing enormous energy responding at the level of the symptoms who are totally clueless about the causes.” Ronald S. Kraybill, professor of conflict studies, Eastern Mennonite University “If our efforts are not taken seriously or are not acted upon, at least we have done what we could do. Success is not our criteria for actions. Faithfulness is.” David P. Gushee, Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy, Union College, on Christian responses to genocide “I take it on socialist and Catholic principles of ‘solidarity’ that we should reduce in every way we can the ability of the wealthy both to control and degrade the wealthy—in this case by visibly asserting their ability to exempt themselves from rules and conventions—and to erode the sense of commonality which is essential to any flourishing democracy.” Eugene McCarraher, history professor, Villanova University, on new ways in which the wealthy can pay to avoid lines “Public policy shaped by fear, cordoned off from genuine ethical discussion and daily driven into our hearts by repeated images of terror inevitably offers us the pathetic worship of a false God—the God that bears the name “Retaliation.” Philip A. Amerson, president, Claremont School of Theology “We wouldn’t want Christianity judged by the actions of the KKK or the Aryan Nation; therefore, we should not judge Islam by the actions of its worst followers. But, increasingly, that is what evangelical Christians are doing.” Tony Campolo, professor emeritus of sociology, Eastern University “Can we bring into being a form of human life and treat it entirely and simply as a means to another end?” Sondra Wheeler, Martha Ashby Carr Professor of Christian Ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary, on embryonic stem-cell research. “People like Bush and Kerry have to understand what the nature of their role requires and then understand how their religious beliefs factor into that.” James A. Donahue, president of the Graduate Theological Union. “My theory is, candidly, that the churches will cave.” Ralph C. Wood, university professor of theology and literature at Baylor University, on whether churches will diminish the centrality of the read word. “When you combine beauty, grace and power you basically get at the heart of the athlete and a good bit of what theology aspires to do at an intellectual level.” Joseph L. Price, professor of religious studies, Whittier College. ”We should hope to help the church to recover the aggressive habits which made Christians hated, and hopefully feared, by the powers that would rule the world as if our God does not exist.” Founding document of the Ekklesia Project “I think the public lands give us an opportunity for religious experience we would be devoid of having otherwise.” Holmes Rolston III, winner of 2003 Templeton Prize in religion and professor of philosophy at Colorado State University. “I don’t think our purchase on the importance of religion to politics is going to improve until some religious group offers an understanding of religious conviction that doesn’t so quickly become focused on issues of private morality.” Franklin I. Gamwell, professor of ethics at University of Chicago Divinity School. “This is a spiritual war. It’s not just a war over health because we need to restore discipline in the family and we need to make food an issue of religion once again.” Stephen H. Webb, professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College, on America’s obesity crisis. “Reagan’s funeral said things about him in a Christian sense that were even more positive than all the political flattery.” Thomas G. Long, Bandy Professor of Preaching at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. “The most important thing for Americans to understand theologically is that white supremacy and black inferiority are the foundation of American culsture and religion.” James H. Cone, Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology, Union Theological Seminary. “Racism has become a kind of diverting distraction. It provides white people with an ‘other’ to name as the source of their problems, rather than more attention being given to how the divisions of wealth and power in the country leave a lot of working-class and middle-class white people out. Jim Wallis, convenor, Call to Renewal “What I see in this picture and this article are the re-enactment of this selfless, unconditional loving mother which is just a fiction.” Bonnie Miller-McLemore, professor of pastoral theology and counseling, Vanderbilt University, commenting on the March 22, 2004 cover of Time magazine. "Many Jews in the stunned time after the holocaust said Jews need to hide. Christians kill us. Our lesson is the opposite." Peter Ochs, Bronfman professor of Modern Judiaic Studies at University of Virginia, on the characteristics of postliberal Jewish scholars "A lot of people believe that marriage is primarily an affective sexual relationship of such intensity that people want to feel committed to each other. Now we don’t know exactly how long they want to be committed, but they want to be committed to some extent. This is an unusually novel and narrow understanding of marriage when you place it historically." Don S. Browning, professor emeritus of ethics and social sciences in the University of Chicago Divinity School "If we’re going to make war, then protecting ourselves and making ourselves feel okay about it is really not okay. If we’re going to make war, then we have a responsibility to see what war is." Stephanie Paulsell, of Harvard Divinity School, on U.S. policy that denies media photographers access to the site of military coffins returning from Iraq "To be close to the god, one appeases the god, one makes offerings to the god, one sacrifices to the god. And clearly people have sacrificed their children to this god. Whether he is in fact a child molester or not, to allow young children to be unsupervised in the presence of any adult the family doesn't know well-but certainly an adult about whom there have been significant public charges and questions-seems just bizarre." Jeffrey H. Mahan, professor of ministry, media and culture at Iliff School of Theology, on Michael Jackson "You are risking cheating. You are risking bad faith and a failure to be a trustworthy person, and there's nothing that I can see in the Gospel or Christianity that said that we are to cheat or be untrustworthy with respect to our pagan or non-Christian neighbors." H. Jefferson Powell, professor of law and divinity at Duke University, on Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore's refusal of a court order to remove his Ten Commandments monument "The illusion that we can some way prove that religion is good for your health and that will give 'scientific credibility' to the inclusion of prayer in health care … sets the faith communities up to presume that their legitimacy grows out of some sort of scientific, evidence-based model." Dr. Keith G. Meador, professor of the practice of pastoral theology and medicine at Duke Divinity School and clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Duke Medical Center, on the spirituality-for-health movement |
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