Author : Alan Thomson
Publisher : James Clarke & Company
ISBN 13 : 0227902777
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)
Book Synopsis Culture in a Post-Secular Context by : Alan Thomson
Download or read book Culture in a Post-Secular Context written by Alan Thomson and published by James Clarke & Company. This book was released on 2014-11-27 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is culture a theologically neutral concept? The contemporary experts on culture - anthropologists and sociologists - argue that it is. Theologians and missiologists would seem to agree, given the extent of their reliance on anthropological and sociological definitions of culture. Yet this appears a strange reliance given that presumed neutrality in the sciences is a consistently challenged assumption. It is stranger still given that so much theological energy has been expended on understanding and defining the human person in specifically theological as opposed to anthropological terms when culture is in some sense the expression of this personhood in corporate and material forms. This book argues that culture is not and has never been a theologically neutral concept; rather, it always expresses some theological posture and is therefore a term that naturally invites theological investigation. Going about this task is difficult, however, in the face of a long-term reliance on the social sciences that seems to have starved the contemporary theological community of resources for defining culture. However, rich subterranean veins for such a task do exist within the recent tradition, most notably in the writings of John Milbank, Karl Barth, and Kwame Bediako.