RSS 1.0Theology and Religious Studies
The Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Chester is a community of scholars addressing cutting edge questions concerning theology and the nature and place of religions in the world from a wide range of perspectives. We are dedicated to excellence, both in our student-centred teaching and learning and in our research.
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Theodicy and Hope in Hans Frei's TheologySusan Neiman has argued that the problem of evil in modern European philosophy concerns the absence of intelligibility, meaning and justice that threatens the trust in the world we need to understand it and act in it. In light of Frei's reading of H. Richard Niebuhr's theology as theodicy in similar terms, we may read Frei’s own Christological understanding of providence as a kind of theodicy, at once sombre, hopeful and restrained, with a practical, political force.
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Book Review: George Hunsinger - The Legacy of Hans W. FreiHans W. Frei (1922-1988) was a widely influential historical and constructive theologian who was Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University. In this volume, George Hunsinger has gathered a range of pieces that make the case for different aspects of Frei’s theological achievements and clarify and interrogate his arguments. These are highly valuable expositions, assessments and it is helpful to highlight them in this volume. One wonders, however, what Frei’s legacy looks like to scholars from backgrounds further removed from his own kind of institutional and social setting.
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The Vatican's adaptation to new media: an exploration of the strategies, benefits and impacts on the local churchThis thesis investigates how the Catholic Church has adapted to the emergence of new media, its strategies, benefits, and impacts on the local church. Religious institutions such as the Catholic Church have entered the world of new media in an effort to achieve their aims and objectives, emphasizing the power of new media as ‘new spaces for evangelization’. This situation requires a reorganization that takes into account the historic development of the Holy See’s structures of communication, unified integration, and management. As a result, the Dictionary of Communications was created to respond to the current demands of communication by factors of convergence and interactivity. To assess how the new Dicastery of Communications has fared in the face of recent changes, the study traces the historical evolution of the Church’s attitude towards the media, from one of outright hostility in the early decades of the twentieth century to a much more open and progressive stance today. Generally, the study aims to explore how the Vatican has adapted to new media and the strategies, benefits, and impacts on the local church. Specifically, the study identifies how the Vatican uses new media strategies to engage existing audiences and to market to potential adherents; to explore how the new Dicastery for Communications is taking full advantage of the benefits and opportunities presented by the new media and engagement paradigms; to examine the barriers to and dangers of the Vatican's adoption of new media strategies to engage existing audiences and to market to potential adherents; and lastly, to consider how new media strategies from the center cascade and impact local churches. The study employed the use of qualitative research methods, with the elite interview used as the medium of data collection in the research. Interviews conducted with nine elites, including three each of the members of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communications, local Church officials in the developing world, particularly the Archdiocese of Ibadan, and independent experts with knowledge about the Vatican's media, serve as major data employed to discover how successful Pope Francis and the Catholic Church as a whole have been in this endeavor of strategic communications and synodality. The initial stage of the data analysis procedure involved transcribing the interviews, prioritizing the objectives of precision and ethical reporting in documenting the participants' remarks. The transcribed data were further analyzed using thematic data analysis techniques. The study finds that the new media strategies adopted by the Vatican have succeeded in terms of enabling a more coherent internal communications structure but have largely failed to attract new converts to Catholicism. Overall, the findings suggest the church is still finding its way in the new media sphere. Conceptually, the church is on the right track. Its challenge now lies in implementing the practical steps necessary if the digital sphere is truly to become a modern space for evangelisation.
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Missional Capital: Volunteering and Faith CommunicationIn this thesis, I identify missional capital, which is a form of social capital comprising theological capital, bridging capital, and linking capital, collectively underpinned by bonding capital to explain how volunteering provides lay Christians with confidence they can participate with God in mission. Based on qualitative interviews and participant observation, I find that the experience of volunteering can give lay Christians assurance about sharing their faith commitments in their workplaces and communities, despite their general anxiety about sharing their beliefs with non-Christian peers. My participants believe that stories of their volunteering experiences are welcomed by their friends and colleagues and tell these in order to initiate discussions about their Christian beliefs. My research arises from my professional practice as volunteer and leader at a Christian witness and service project I pseudonymously name “The Chapel”. The Church of England recognises the importance of witness and service projects, such as The Chapel, to help address its crisis of declining attendance (Church of England Research and Statistics, 2020; The Church of England, 2022, Oct 22). However, since existing volunteer studies typically focus on recruitment and retention (Wilson, 2012), there has been little research into how Christian witness and service projects might also help the Church of England to equip lay Christians to communicate their beliefs beyond their faith community. My research shows how practices of prayer, listening and storytelling employed by The Chapel leverage the liminality and communitas inherent in volunteer witness and service projects to facilitate theological play. This play strengthens volunteers’ conviction that they can identify and participate in God’s existing activity in visitors’ lives. The attitudes and practices arising from this integrate belief and action creating missional capital. The church is usually conceived as either gathered in worship or scattered in witness and service to the world (Van Gelder & Zscheile, 2011). This study illustrates the service-learning potential of witness and service projects, such as The Chapel, which combine elements of corporate worship with individual witness. I suggest similar practices could be tested in other Christian witness and service projects to teach other lay Christian volunteers to communicate their faith more effectively.
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Book Review: Theology and the Public: Reflections on Hans W. Frei on Hermeneutics, Christology, and Theological Method. By Daniel D. ShinReview of Daniel Shin's study of the theme of publicness in Hans Frei's theology.
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‘Meeting God in an ordinary place’. What can we learn from Coffee Shop Sunday about meeting God using the internet to encourage and develop fellowship?All are welcome at the ‘common table’ to enjoy the ‘table talk’. How does Coffee Shop Sunday (CSS) (Coventry and Nuneaton Methodist Circuit Project) reflect that alongside pointing people to Jesus? CSS began a worship service in a Coventry Costa Coffee Shop in December 2019, this was severely disrupted with covid-19 restrictions and their concept of ‘meeting God in an ordinary place’ moved online. The internet through Facebook and Zoom became the ordinary place they met God. Since March 2020, the online work has grown from initially meeting four days a week to daily activities with participants from five continents. Two of the principles of CSS are encouragement and fellowship. The paper will explore (1) How the internet became the ‘ordinary’ place to meet God for people from different denominations and cultures. (2) How fellowship is experienced, using Russell’s ‘round table ecclesiology’ model where those present participate in a way which reflects their own journey of ‘faith and struggle’. (3) How does CSS point other people to Jesus through its activities. Barth emphasises that churches or a Christian’s activities should not focus on themselves but ‘point to Jesus’. By reviewing CSS activities, I will demonstrate that they point others to Jesus.
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A Practical Theology of Religious Difference: the lived experience of Anglican Christians in a religiously plural UK contextThis project constructs a practical theology of religious difference from qualitative research into the everyday lived experience of Anglican Christians in one of the UK’s most religiously plural contexts in Leicester. All too often, and not only in Christian circles, ‘religious diversity is imagined as a problem, even when there is ample evidence of successes – of people working out difference on the ground, in everyday life’ (Beaman, 2017, 3). This project seeks to attend to precisely that negotiation of religious difference in everyday life. The theology of religions discourse, and in particular the exclusivist-inclusivist-pluralist typology, has dominated Christian approaches to religious difference for several decades. It has been robustly critiqued by feminists and postcolonial thinkers for its oversimplification, its treatment of religions as monolithic entities and its lack of attention to hybridity. While alternatives have been suggested, few foreground the practices and everyday lived experience of those living in a religiously plural context other than anecdotally. I used semi-structured interviews with seventeen participants from two of Leicester’s Church of England congregations to generate narratives and reflections concerning their everyday encounters with those of other faiths. Through close reading and coding of the data, I then drew out the practical wisdom of those living with religious difference, bringing it into conversation with existing literature on interfaith engagement, in particular from a feminist and postcolonial perspective. From this process emerge insights on intersectional and intrareligious difference, the polarization of difference and sameness with their outworking in attitudes to conflict and pluralism, and finally the possibility of living with contradiction and mystery, and the role of epistemic humility. These insights, rooted in lived experience, make a valuable, and previously undervalued, contribution to both the theology of religions debate as well as challenging the wider church’s practice in its handling of religious difference today.
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Does GOD not also speak through us? Developing a new pedagogy for the formation of women who preach in the Church of EnglandThis thesis explores the formation of women preachers in the Church of England. My research was carried out with a particular group of women preachers, lay and ordained, who attended a conference in 2018 called Women’s Voices. The data generated suggests that theological education and ministerial formation fail women in two ways. First, ministerial training excludes, minoritizes and silences those who are perceived as ‘other’ than a White, male norm. Among other minoritized voices, women’s voices are absent from classrooms, reading lists and theological critique. Second, I argue that for women, the absence of these voices results in them entering ministry ill-informed about preaching about Bible women or from their own experiences, and ill-prepared for the sexism and misogyny they will encounter. Based on my exploration of these failures, I make some specific proposals about how preachers might be taught, how women ordinands and trainees might be prepared for the ministry they are to embark on, and how Theological Education Institutions might facilitate the flourishing of marginalised groups. I propose that preaching classes should not only include information about developments in preaching, but also practical sessions in which students explore how to preach from their own experiences and understandings. In line with the women who took part in my research, I propose that spaces be made available where women can support each other. My participants perceived a cycle in which women received support and acceptance from each other, realised that they were being silenced and released each other to resist oppression. I suggest that such spaces be opened up in the classroom so that women are better prepared for ministries that will be marked by sexist reactions to their presence and their preaching. In making proposals that I see as life-giving and disruptive of the status quo, I draw on the Hebrew prophet Miriam who was a leader of Israel alongside her brother Moses. She both led women to freedom and challenged male domination. As a result of her challenge to Moses, “does God not also speak through us?” she is afflicted with leprosy and banished from the camp. I believe that Miriam’s experience echoes that of many women in the church who are silenced when they challenge male domination. My research opens up other areas of inquiry I have not had space to pursue, particularly how women’s intersectional experiences might impact their ministerial experiences. My findings among a particular group of women preachers contribute to curriculum development work and to the ways in which women ministers are formed.
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Postmodernism and evangelical theological methodology with particular reference to Stanley J. GrenzAbstract available in hard copy
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Contours of Biblical reception theory : studies in the rezeptionsgeschichte of Romans 13. 1-7Abstract available in hard copy.
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The theological hermeneutics of homiletical application and Ecclesiastes 7: 23-29Abstract available in hard copy
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Addiction Recovery at the Intersections of Religion, Gender and SexualityThis chapter charts the intersections between addiction recovery, which is increasingly expressed as an identity, , and relgiion, gender and sexuality, categories that are rarely examined together. It demonstrates, first. that recovery spiritulaities are normative in relation to gender and sexuality, and such narratives and language can disempower, obscure and oppress already stigmatized and marginalised actors. It argues that the labour of recovery lies heavy on gendered and sexual miniorities, but also that for many participants, recovery communities and spiritualities are sites of empowerment and autonomy.
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The wisdom of Torah: epistemology in Deuteronomy and the wisdom literatureAbstract available in hard copy
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The Sea of Faith 40 Years OnOn the fortieth anniversary of its first broadcast in 1984, this article will consider the main themes of the BBC TV series The Sea of Faith , written and presented by the Cambridge philosopher and theologian Don Cupitt. It will attempt to evaluate its significance, then and now. We argue that Cupitt’s ‘radical’ reputation for his advancement of a broadly ‘non-realist’ understanding of God may have overshadowed other equally significant features, not least his central argument that unless Christianity responded constructively to modern thought it would be doomed to irrelevance. The article will close with some reflections on what Cupitt’s manifesto for religion might mean for those who continue to identify with his critiques of traditional theology today.
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Book Review: The Artifice of Intelligence: Divine and Human Relationship in a Robotic age Noreen HerzfeldA book review outlining Herzfeld's book which addressing issues of ‘What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ and ‘What do we want AI to do’ are the two questions Herzfeld addresses in this book using the lens of Barth's four conditions for an authentic human relationship.
