Medieval religious rationalities

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John E. Tropman

Based on years of scholarly research, the Catholic Ethic in American Society reveals a Catholic ethic that parallels the more well-known Protestant ethic. Tropman presents an innovative analysis of the deeply ingrained attitudes Americans have about money and work and their view of people who have neither. In this book, Tropman offers a fresh perspective on the Protestant "achievement" ethic by contrasting it with the newly identified Catholic "sharing" ethic. He outlines the key features that distinguish the Catholic ethic from its Protestant counterpart, including the perspectives of each ethic on the value of money and work, the importance of family and community, and the individual. The Protestant ethic - first articulated by sociologist Max Weber in the early 1900s - is rooted in the values of work, wealth, and achievement, whereas the Catholic ethic is firmly based on longstanding traditions and beliefs of sharing. Given the fundamental differences between the two ethics, the Catholic ethic has a stronger value base for providing assistance to others, especially the poor and the disadvantaged. Because of the Protestant ethic's emphasis on achievement and self-reliance, charitable acts become fraught with concern, worry, and hesitancy. Distinguishing between the poor who are worthy and those deemed unworthy becomes an essential part of the helping activity. . The Catholic Ethic in American Society is a valuable work for sociologists, political scientists, social activists, religion scholars and students, and fundraisers of Catholic charitable organizations.

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Joel A. Carpenter

Skillfully blending painstaking research, telling anecdotes, and astute analysis, Carpenter - a scholar who has spent twenty years studying American evangelicalism reveals that, contrary to the popular opinion of the day, fundamentalism was alive and well in America in the late 1920s, and used its isolation over the next two decades to build new strength from within. The book describes how fundamentalists developed a pervasive network of organizations outside of the church setting and quietly strengthened the movement by creating their own schools and oragnizations, may of which are prominent today, including Fuller Theological Seminary and the publishing and radio enterprises of the Moody Bible Institute. Fundamentalists also used youth movements, missionary work and, perhaps most significantly, the burgeoning mass media industry to spread their message, especially through the powerful new medium of radio. Indeed, starting locally and growing to national broadcasts, evangelical preachers reached millions of listeners over the airwaves, in much the same way evangelists preach through television today. All this activity received no publicity outside of fundamentalist channels until Billy Graham burst on the scene in 1949. Carpenter vividly recounts how the charismatic preacher began packing stadiums with tens of thousands of listeners daily, drawing fundamentalism firmly back into the American consciousness after twenty years of public indifference. Alongside this vibrant history, Carpenter also offers many insights into fundamentalism during this period, and he describes many of the heated internal debates over issues of scholarship, separatism, and the role of women in leadership. Perhaps most important, he shows that the movement has never been stagnant or purely reactionary. It is based on an evolving ideology subject to debate, and dissension: a theology that adapts to changing times.

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John Halsey Wood, Jr

"Abraham Kuyper is known as the energetic Dutch Protestant social activist and public theologian of the 1898 Princeton Stone Lectures, the Lectures on Calvinism. In fact, the church was the point from which Kuyper's concerns for society and public theology radiated. In his own words, ''The problem of the church is none other than the problem of Christianity itself.'' The loss of state support for the church, religious pluralism, rising nationalism, and the populist religious revivals sweeping Europe in the nineteenth century all eroded the church's traditional supports. Dutch Protestantism faced the unprecedented prospect of ''going Dutch''; from now on it would have to pay its own way. John Wood examines how Abraham Kuyper adapted the Dutch church to its modern social context through a new account of the nature of the church and its social position.^ The central concern of Kuyper's ecclesiology was to re-conceive the relationship between the inner aspects of the church--the faith and commitment of the members--and the external forms of the church, such as doctrinal confessions, sacraments, and the relationship of the church to the Dutch people and state. Kuyper's solution was to make the church less dependent on public entities such as nation and state and more dependent on private support, especially the good will of its members. This ecclesiology de-legitimated the national church and helped Kuyper justify his break with the church, but it had wider effects as well. It precipitated a change in his theology of baptism from a view of the instrumental efficacy of the sacrament to his later doctrine of presumptive regeneration wherein the external sacrament followed, rather than preceded and prepared for, the intenral work grace.^ This new ecclesiology also gave rise to his well-known public theology; once he achieved the private church he wanted, as the Netherlands' foremost public figure, he had to figure out how to make Christianity public again." -- Publisher's description.

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David Ingram

In his magnum opus, *Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns*, the distinguished philosopher Jurgen Habermas presented his ideas as a whole, providing the first major defense of his philosophy. David Ingram here summarizes the themes of Habermas's masterwork, placing them in the context of the philosopher's other work, relating them to poststructuralism, hermeneutics, and Neo-Aristotelianism, and surveying what other critics have said about Habermas. (Source: Yale University Press)