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Even after fifty years of freedom, the Christian community in India is still struggling to find an identity of its own in the country, and a constructive role in the nation building process. It finds itself at the centre of controversy time and again.1 It is often attacked from without, and disunited from within. So this Golden Jubilee Year should be a time for introspection and reflection on its role in independent India. The author quotes M.M. Thomas perceptively : "The rights of religious minorities must be seen as coupled with the struggle for the rights of all minorities, regional, cultural, and most of all political . It is sheer immaturity which concentrates on Christian minority rights without any reference to issues of civil liberties and democratic rights of all citizens."

Presented in November, 1991, at a conference on "Christianity and Democracy" convened at Emory University Law School with co-sponsorship of Pew Trust and the Association for Public Justice. The title was assigned to Yoder. Corrected at numerous points thanks to counsel from R. Rodes.

The issue of the relationship between church and state has had a long and complex history. During the last two thousand years, many models of church"state relationships have been devised and put into practice in the political structures of different states. It should be noted that the possibility of the church's involvement in secular politics in Russia and Ukraine makes the need for theological conceptualisation in this field especially urgent. The article presents a holistic and comprehensive approach to the theological discussion of the church"state relationship that will certainly be of interest to many contemporary researchers, examining the unique experience of theocracy in Judaism; the historical formation of the idea of Caesaropapism in both pagan and Christian states; and the theological controversy between the monarchical and Berdyaev schools on the issue of close alliance between church and state.

No Christian mission was pursued among the Norse in Iceland before the latter part of the tenth century, and the ruling body of the Church took no part in this work. In the beginning, missionary activity was the private initiative of an Icelander, and the concluding chapter was supported by the Norwegian crown. Christian influence increased steadily then during this heathen period. The greatest hindrance to the propagation of Christianity among the Icelandic chieftains during the tenth century was undoubtedly the fact that Christians were denied seats in the legislative assembly; therefore it was not easy for the sons of the chieftains to be converted. Although pagans enjoyed a majority at the Althing in the year 1000, the Christians had increased their numbers. There was great danger of war in the land if agreement were not reached at the assembly. The choice consequently was either to reach an agreement or have a civil war, which would have led to the abrogation of the legal political and power structure. Older and peaceable chieftains wanted above all to protect the peace and they consequently accepted baptism and professed Christianity. This indicates that Christianity has had a great influence on Icelandic national life. The Christian conversion at the Althing in the year 1000 was, thus, both a religious and a political decision.

Bibliography: leaves 197-202. ; This dissertation studies the New Testament perspective of the Christian's attitude and duty towards the State. In it the first chapter is devoted to an investigation of the political attitude of Jesus of Nazareth as can be recovered from his reported actions and pronouncements concerning the Roman government of his day and his instructions to his followers about violence and their duties towards the State. Special attention is paid to the reasons for his crucifixion. In the second chapter an exegetical study is made of the apostle Paul's teachings about the State in Romans 13:1-7; and the third chapter is an exegetical discussion of Revelation 13 in which John assumes a very negative attitude towards the State. In the final short chapter the author draws the conclusion that as early as the first Christian century the attitude of the Church towards the State was to a large extent determined by the State's treatment of the Church. Although a definite difference is evident between the attitudes of Paul and John towards the State, they agree with Jesus that the State has a definite place in the divine order of the universe. This fact requires of the Christian and other citizens to give loyally to the State what it needs for its existence, to submit to its authority and obey just laws, to pray for those in authority, reject violence, resist any religio-ideological claims or injustices of the State, and participate in the prophetic role of the Church in relation to the State.

The noise is deafening, the scurry confusing. The ''public square,'' far from being ''naked,'' is teeming with activity, much of it explicitly Christian. Christian groups in America today can no longer be accused of ignoring public life and spurning politics. The problem is no longer neglect, as it once might have been, but disagreement, dissension, and bewilderment. A growing number of Christians in America now believe that their faith must shape public life. But many are not sure how. The cacophony of voices complicates the problem. Sincere Christians, claiming the Bible for infallible support, often come down on opposite sides of such contemporary issues as abortion, creationism in the classroom, prayer in public schools, and Latin American politics. Moreover, their theoretical views of the relationship between Christianity and public life often differ sharply from each other. While Christian activists debate each other, def end their own positions, and recruit new members to their organizations, many faithful members of local churches stand on the sidewalks of the public square, listen to the debate, and wonder whom they can trust and what they should believe. The proper relationship between religion and public life has become enormously complex in modern American society.

In 1993 The Parliament of the World's Religions produced a declaration known as A Global Ethic which set out fundamental points of agreement on moral tissues between the religions of the world. However, the declaration did not deal explicitly with medical ethics. This article examines Buddhist and Christian perspectives on euthanasia and finds that in spite of their cultural and theological differences both oppose it for broadly similar reasons. Both traditions reject consequentialist patterns of justification and espouse a 'sanctity of life' position which precludes the intentional destruction of human life by act or omission.

This paper is concerned with a complete set of rituals and certain connected ideas, namely the Roman emperor-cult, that had survived the change of religion from Roman religion to Christianity. The rituals endure, even while their mythological basis is perishing. The emperor-cult includes the rituals and symbols which surround the Roman emperor and clearly demonstrate that he is more than an ordinary human.

This is a preliminary paper following recent fieldwork in Vanuatu. The rhetorical question in the title challenges two pervasive stereotypes: first, the presumed universal applicability of the hierarchical opposition society:individual and its corollary, the conception of 'societies' as encompassing collectivities of bounded, autonomous 'individuals'; second, the hoary conventional opposition of 'Oceanic' (relational/communal) and 'Western' (bounded/individual) concepts of the person. The second stereotype categorically segregates so-called 'primitive' or 'traditional' societies from 'modern' or 'Western[ised]' ones on the basis that the former lack a concept of the self as an autonomous individual, regarded as an effect and a characteristic of 'civilisation' or modernity. Such unthinking identification of modernity with 'Westernisation' and individualism is ethnocentric, anachronistic and denies contemporaneity to present people, such as Melanesian villagers, whom it consigns to the archaic, backward status of non-modern/non-'Western'. A far more thoughtful and sophisticated variant is anthropologist Marilyn Strathern's abstract differentiation, along a 'we/they axis', of the (Western) unitary individual from the (Melanesian) 'partible person', conceived as a divisible composite of relations. Strathern destabilises the society:individual dichotomy itself, as an ethnocentric, hierarchised 'Western' construct inappropriate to 'Melanesian sociality'. Any analysis of actual indigenous conceptions of the person requires the profound familiarity with vernacular idioms and patterns of thought which can only be derived from lengthy ethnographic fieldwork. As a comparative anthropological historian I lack such access. Moreover, I dispute the assumption that very local, present ethnographic insights can be projected indiscriminately on to the region-wide past, as is logically entailed in the premise that there is an enduring, Oceania-wide, pre-modern theory of cultural and personal identity, in opposition to that of 'the West'. How one might know any such past regional theory of identity, other than deductively, is simply not addressed. My aims are more modest and my focus mundane. From a suggestive vignette of the early colonial past in Aneityum, southern Vanuatu, the paper shifts to scraps of narrative and testimony relating to my recent field trip in Vanuatu, with particular focus again on Aneityum. Vignette and fragments alike address a key issue in the politics of representing indigenous women: the need to dislodge the romantic secularism or feminist ethnocentrism which deride or deplore their strategic engagements in seemingly banal Christian settings—especially sewing circles—because such settings seem to advance hegemonic missionary, male and national agendas of conversion, domestication and modernisation. ; AusAID

In this article, I discuss the prospects of Christianity in the modern world from a philosophical perspective (section 1). In order to do so, I analyse in the second section Gianni Vattimo's and Charles Taylor's views of the problems of modernity. They interpret modern civilisation as being threatened by the violence of instrumental (technological and political) reason (Vattimo), and by the impasse of subjectivism (Taylor). In the third section, I query Vattimo's answers to the question of how to overcome the problems of modernity. From a philosophical perspective Vattimo focuses on the idea of weak thinking and the historicity of the subject in order to counter the violence of objectifying reason. From a religious point of view, he refers to the idea of a completely secularised Christianity, with the notion of love as its essential characteristic. But these answers do not put an end to the violence of instrumental reason, since they are based upon the identification of this violence with objectification and do not take into account the possibility of a violence of subjectivist reason. Moreover, the commandment of love as the essence of Christianity is of no help to confine secularisation and subjectification, and the violence they produce. The categorical status of this commandment is at odds with Vattimo's view of the hypothetical, historical and subjectivist character of humankind. Therefore, every appeal to this commandment is but an arbitrary choice, and can by no means put an end to the violence of the finite, historical subject. As a conclusion (section 4), I discuss an alternative answer to question whether Christianity can contribute to the solution of the problems of modern civilisation. I present the Christian view of God's transcendence as a way of stressing the substantiality of the true and the good, without thereby falling back into a metaphysics of objectivity and violence.

Beginning with the organizational difficulties that faced the post-resurrection communities of Jesus' followers and concluding nearly six centuries later as many regional representatives of the universal church came increasingly under the influence of Roman bishops, Church, Book, and Bishop is the story of leadership-- its successes and frustrations. It is a book about the managerial elites largely responsible for overcoming the theological, political, and social obstacles to organization. Through a series of scenes drawn from clerical life, Peter Iver Kaufman identifies and illustrates these executive strategies for conflict management and consensus-building. Whereas many accounts of this period emphasize nonconformity and conflict, Kaufman studies the distribution and exercise of authority that made if possible to articulate the conformists' positions effectively and to achieve an appreciable measure of institutional coherence. This story is told in a way that will appeal not only to scholars of the early church and their students but also to generalists interested in the development of Latin Christianity. It will be especially useful as a supplement to courses on the history of Western civilization and on the history of Christian traditions. ; https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1280/thumbnail.jpg

Although Lucien Rebatet's Les Deux étendards (The Two Standards) has been hailed by a number of critics as one of the best novels written in France since World War II, it is surrounded by a wall of silence because its author actively supported the Nazi movement before and during the war. Yet the novel does not deal with politics but with love, art, and religion. Based on real events, it is the story of a love triangle involving Michel, who has lost his Catholic faith, Régis, who studies to become a Jesuit priest, and Anne-Marie, a young student who shares a mystical love with Régis and also intends to join a religious order. When Michel meets Anne-Marie, he falls desperately in love with her, but hopelessly since she belongs to God and to Régis. Yet, fascinated by his friends' adventure, he tries to recover the faith he has lost in order to join them on their mystical plane, but eventually fails. The theme of religion and more specifically Catholicism dominates Les Deux étendards which treats the most complex religious issues with passion and intensity and tackles the history of the Church and religious exegesis with a thoroughness and a minuteness worthy of Proust. Over one thousand pages, Les Deux étendards, mainly through Régis and Michel's animated discussions, reenacts the quarrel that has been raging for two thousand years between believers and nonbelievers. If, in the end, Les Deux étendards condemns religion, it is in order to better affirm what can be called the sacred or the spiritual which stands in opposition to the religious. In any case, this passionate handling of religion, its place at the heart of the story and its intimate association with the other main themes, love and art, largely account for the originality of the novel.

This essay analyzes the recent film The Matrix from the perspective of modern-day myth-making. After a brief plot summary of the film, I note the well-documented parallels to the Christian messianic narrative of Jesus. I then go on to highlight the often overlooked parallels to the Buddhist existential analysis of the human condition. In particular, I note a remarkable resonance between The Matrix and the fourth century (C.E.) philosophical school of Buddhism known as Yogacara. By highlighting the syncretic or combinative nature of the film's symbolic narrative, I submit The Matrix as a cinematic example of the dialectical process of myth-making by means of Peter Berger's theory of socio-cultural construction. Humans are mythologizing and, as Peter Berger would suggest, "world-building" creatures. We appropriate elements from our past and present to fashion epic narratives and myths for a variety of existential, sociological, and religious ends. Myths are not fixed narrative forms, however. Studies of traditionally oral cultures evidence considerable elasticity in the details of a particular myth.[i] And history also demonstrates that myths often evolve as a result of cultural diffusion and contact. Myths are constantly adapted to new cultural contexts and worldly realities. While the invention of writing inspired a more fixed status for some myths, it did not halt the ongoing adaptation and amalgamation of previously disparate mythological themes and concepts. In this essay, I will examine the recent popular science-fiction film The Matrix, written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, from this perspective of mythological adaptation. While the Christian metaphors throughout the film have been well noted, significant elements of a Buddhist worldview are often overlooked. In particular, the symbolic and existential parallels to a fourth century (C.E.) philosophical school of Buddhism know as "Consciousness-only" (Vijñavada/Yogacara) are indeed striking. In addition to noting such parallels, I will submit The Matrix as a provocative example of modern-day myth-making. Appropriating familiar symbols and motifs into a new epic narrative is clearly not a contemporary phenomenon and I will borrow from Peter Berger's dialectical theory of "world building" to elucidate this process. The foundation myths of many religions arguably reflect the same dialectical process I will try to illuminate here. Although The Matrix is not likely to become the foundation myth for a new religion, it will perhaps inform the worldviews, if only subtly and temporarily, of thousands of young adults. Indeed, this is the destiny of most myths. But who knows, this may become a classic along the lines of The Wizard of Oz or Star Wars. To characterize a contemporary film as "myth" is not without problems, not the least of which is qualifying such a genre into an acceptable definition of myth. Here I will adopt a definition offered by Finnish folklorist Lauri Honko. She delineates four criteria of myth with respect to form (narrative of sacred origin), content (cosmogonic in terms of cultural origin or existential condition), function (model for human activity), and context (in the sense that myth provides "the ideological content for a sacred form of behavior").[ii] I suggest that The Matrix qualifies in all respects as a mythological narrative. It is also important to note that myths are not disembodied texts divorced from time or place. Their language, symbols, and meaning are invariably tied to the context and worldview of origin. Moreover, the functional use of myths may range from a children's story hour to a mechanism of political legitimization. In other words, myths serve any number of social, religious, ideological, or pedagogical functions. Movies, like any narrative form, can be considered a form of myth if they meet the criteria noted above. Star Wars, The Fisher King, Blade Runner, and 2001: A Space Odyssey represent appropriate examples according to this perspective. [i] See, for example, Raymond Firth's "The Plasticity of Myth," Ethnoligica 2 (1960), 181-88. [ii] Lauri Honko. "The Problem of Defining Myth" in Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 49-51.

This article focuses on the formal similarities between Christianity and the Islam resent during the later middle ages — a period in which both legacies subscribed to a relatively totalitarian societal condition manifested in the existence of their respective empires. The ideal of the Corpus Christi as the societas perfecta of medieval Christianity is explained in the light of the contest between church and state during the later middle ages. This legacy was eventually challenged by an intellectual movement initiated by John the Scott and William of Ockham that caused the breaking apart of the former ecclesiastically unified culture. The alternative development within the Islam world is sketched before the spirit of modernity is explained as a secularization of biblical Christianity. Humanism initially inspired explicitly totalitarian theories of the state. It was only within the Protestant countries of Europe that the modern constitutional state under the rule of law emerged, accompanied by a process of societal differentiation unparalleled in world history. Although the more recent attempts of Islamic countries to benefit from the fruits of the modern natural sciences inspired them to introduce the teaching of the natural sciences within the Muslim world, these countries did not succeed in benefiting from the significant transformation of the medieval empires into modern democratic states. Since the Muslim world is still embedded in the relatively undifferentiated embrace of a societal setting guided and integrated by the Muslim faith it did not succeed as yet to transcend the inherent limitations entailed in a typical empire in the classical sense of the word.

Bibliography: leaves 338-349. ; This study aims to contribute to the socio-political and cultural history of Langa during the years ca. 1927-1960 by exploring the critical religious influences, perceptions and ideologies that deeply shaped the longitudinal development of the local black township of Cape Town,South Africa. It is the contention of the thesis that religious factors and considerations were of fundamental significance to the marked processes of historical change that Langa underwent during this period, from being one of the most peaceful, cohesive and ""politically backward"" urban Mrican communities since its official opening in 1927, to becoming a place of militancy, violence and social polarisation by the time of the March 1960 uprisings against apartheid. In particular, the thesis seeks to trace the formative role of a combination of conservative and liberal modes of mission Christianity. Often loosely described as the ""Social Gospel"", this powerfully shaped the historical development and character of Langa – both positively and negatively, constructively and divisively, subtly and overtly - during a period of increasingly harsh and oppressive segregationist legislation in South Africa. It is argued that the variety of Christian forms of religious consciousness and ideological perceptions operated in a range of contradictory ways to effect historical patterns of social legitimation and solidarity on the one hand, and processes of liberation and dislocation on the other. Especially during the late 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s, it is claimed that the more conventional forms of a predominantly mission Christianity functioned to define a strikingly conservative, integrated and petty bourgeois-orientated township. The strength and influence of the ""respectable"" churches, the staunch, churchgoing petty bourgeoisie and their respective Christian-based cultural, educational and civic organisations, proved crucial in this regard in collusion with the municipal and township authorities. At the same time, it is held that the progressive strands of the Social Gospel, in particular, contributed towards the early shaping of an important dissenting tradition of protest in the township. In addition, the diverse influences of Social Christianity served to reinforce structural trends of class, religious and cultural differentiation and provoked more radical, even militant and antithetical, socio-religious and political responses. Amongst semi-urbanised, rural and migrant working-class elements in Langa, in particular, such processes had become especially evident by the late 1940s and into the 1950s. In this work, each chapter is geared historically towards examining these contradictory functions of the combination of conservative and progressive forms of Christianity, according to particular domains of social activity - the spheres of institutional religion, education and culture, and politics, respectively_ Thus, in a parallel fashion, the chapters address the themes of the Social Gospel's pervasive rise, mediation and consequent decline, together with the related questions of social integration, class differentiation and political liberation, towards assessing the historical role of religion in each distinctive social sphere in relation to the fundamental transition in Langa. The study concludes that Langa's socio-political and cultural history can be more effectively interpreted on the basis of this critical assessment of the Social Gospel's ambiguous impact during the inter-war and early apartheid years. Such an approach allows for conceptual constructs such as petty bourgeois identity, social group divisions, ideological expression and social change to be more fully explored. As such, this local study seeks to make a contribution to the growing body of scholarship that recognises the vital historical role of religion particularly Christianity, in the shaping of South African communities in the twentieth century.