A Scottish Millennial Mission to Jews

This paper investigates how the missionaries of the Church of Scotland sought to convert the Jews in Hungary. The research studies carefully Adolph Saphir's change of faith, his theological views, and his work. His family was the first “fruit” of Scottish missionary activity among the Hungarian Jews in 1843. After scrutinizing his conversion, the study proceeds to map his sphere of work as a missionary. In particular, it examines his millennial views, which gave the impetus to his missionary activity. Finally, the paper demonstrates that he became an ardent supporter of mission to the Jews not only in Britain but also in Central Europe.     

Cosplay in the pulpit and ponies at prayer: Christian faith and lived religion in wider fan culture

ABSTRACT

This article examines the way in which Christian fans of popular media franchises have incorporated their fan identity into a lived religious experience, producing religious fan works such as fan fiction, art, and fan-themed church services. Based around a series of interviews with fans in the United States and the UK, both lay and clergy, it suggests the powerful affective connections forged through fandom, and examines the way in which fandom operates as a shared language to engage the wider fan community with theological ideas. Fans viewed their fandom as an arena through which God communicated and developed personal faith, working through fan texts and fan works to encourage and develop their connection to the divine. This article, therefore, challenges academic positions that see fandom as a secular replacement for religion, or as a form of blasphemous excess.     

Markan Faith

According to many accounts of faith—where faith is thought of as something psychological, e.g., an attitude, state, or trait—one cannot have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. According to other accounts of faith, one can have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. Call the first sort of account doxasticism since it insists that faith requires belief; call the second nondoxasticism since it allows faith without belief. The New Testament (NT) may seem to favor doxasticism over nondoxasticism. For it may seem that, according to the NT authors, one can have faith in God, as providential, or faith that Jesus is the Messiah, or be a person of Christian faith, and the like only if one believes the relevant propositions. In this essay, I propose to assess this tension, as it pertains to the Gospel of Mark. The upshot of my assessment is that, while it may well appear that, according to Mark, one can have faith only if one believes the relevant propositions, appearances are deceiving. Mark said no such thing. Rather, what Mark said—by way of story—about faith fits nondoxasticism at least as well as doxasticism, arguably better. More importantly, the account of faith that emerges from Mark is that faith consists in resilience in the face of challenges to living in light of the overall positive stance to the object of faith, where that stance consists in certain conative, cognitive, and behavioral-dispositional elements.     

Performances of Faith: A Relation Between Conscious and Unconscious Organizations of Faith

Performances of faith are found in ordinary and extraordinary stories, behavior, and rituals, and they are inextricably yoked to unconscious and conscious processes and organizations of faith experience. This article explores the relation between unconscious and conscious processes and organizations of faith. The claim is that the unconscious system represents unformulated experiences of faith that are affectively and relationally organized. In human development these unconscious organizations of faith experience are partially transformed by a person's conscious and self-reflective use of symbols and language. At the same time, conscious and self-reflective organizations of faith, manifested in narratives, rituals, and use of other symbolic media, continue to be shaped by unconscious processes and unconscious configurations of faith. An appreciation of the dynamic interaction between unconscious and conscious processes and organizations of faith focuses one's attention to the complexity of human performances of faith in ministry.     

The Impact of the Inner-child on Adult Believing

This article describes a recent research project that has examined the influence of childhood faith on adult faith. It traces both the historic formulation of faith in the original child and the reworking of that faith through subsequent reflection and the reworking of memory. The key interest is to identify how the inner-child is resourceful to faith development, whilst noting that it can lead faith into a dysfunctional stage. The article describes how the data was collected using two separate study groups. It then considers four themes arising from the data, namely memory, nurture, the god-object and institutional religion.     

Faith and steadfastness in the face of counter-evidence

It is sometimes said that faith is recalcitrant in the face of new evidence, but it is puzzling how such recalcitrance could be rational or laudable. I explain this aspect of faith and why faith is not only rational, but in addition serves an important purpose in human life. Because faith requires maintaining a commitment to act on the claim one has faith in, even in the face of counter-evidence, faith allows us to carry out long-term, risky projects that we might otherwise abandon. Thus, faith allows us to maintain integrity over time.     

@Preacher_Bot: an experiment in evangelical speech making

This article is an experiment in digital methodology. It applies tools associated with the digital humanities to the study of Protestant evangelicalism in order to ask what digital research methods can offer the study of religion. Beginning with the development of a social media computer program called a Twitter bot designed to mimic evangelical ministers on twitter, the article considers how digital scholarship allows the work scholars produce to mirror more closely the religious worlds they study. Next, the article analyzes the results of the program using text analysis software. In documenting trends in the bot's output, the article highlights how digital research methods can help answer long-standing questions in the field as well as potentially ask new ones. It concludes, The article, then, is both an exploration of contemporary religious cultures and a consideration of new media methods for analyzing them.     

Entwicklung religiöser Glaubensfähigkeit

Faith in a broad sense is viewed as trustingly turning to a (personal) object located in the immanent as well as in the (relativ or absolute) transcendental field. The author describes on grounds of the object relational theory how the ability for faith is developing already in early childhood. In case of a beneficial development a firstly archaic faith is replaced later on by a faithful certainty (basic confidence) and, finally, by personal faith. Other forms of faith (faithful longing, magic or irrational faith culminating in fanatism) is viewed by the author as a consequence of unresolved archaic anxiety from the absolute evil. The development of the ability for religious faith is explained on the basis of the model of intersubjective narcissism.     

God as First Truth,the Will's Good and Faith's Cause: The Theology of Faith and Newman's University Sermons

In the theology of faith, the nature of faith as a human cognitional state is sometimes treated as a foundational topic, to be analysed prior to theological claims about the God who in fact elicits this faith. The article suggests why this is an inadequate account of the act of belief, likely to lead to distortions in the content of belief, and then uses the example of Newman's argument with Lockean notions of faith to propose a renewal of the theology of faith in attention to divine agency.     

Attachment and women’s faith development

This article explores the relationship between human attachment and God attachment, particularly in Christian women’s experiences of faith. It is based on the attachment perspective as a conceptual framework. The main aim was to evolve an attachment‐theoretical approach to women’s faith development and to offer a complementary path to interpret women’s faith development. The method was qualitative, as the data were collected via biographical narrative depth interviews. The findings suggest that an early attachment experience is a significant factor in the women’s faith development; three patterns of women’s faith are presented in which the differences in their images of self and God are represented accordingly.     

Faith and the developmental cycle

According to Paul Tillich, faith as a human response is an act of the total personality in which all the elements of man's personal life participate. This paper explores one aspect of this assertion that has been neglected by both psychologists and theologians-the heuristic idea that faith is a developmental phenomenon. Specifically, the paper contends that the dominant form of an individual's faith at any one time is determined in part by the particular developmental stage in which that individual is immersed. This contention is developed using the epigenetic approach of Erik Erikson. Eight developmental forms of faith are explored: among them, faith as trust, faith as obedience, and faith as self-surrender.     

The role of faith in the psychotherapeutic context

The focus of this article is the role of faith in psychotherapy. It is suggested that the psychotherapeutic endeavor may be fruitfully informed by insights from other disciplines. The theologian Paul Tillich's view of faith is discussed as it applies to the psychotherapeutic endeavor. The relation between faith and anxiety is explored in the context of the problem of resistance and change in psychotherapy. The work of theorists from various perspectives (existential, analytic) is discussed in the light of Tillich's view of faith.     

Of Prophets and Propaganda: An Exploration of Modern Christian Dispensationalism Using the Work of Martin Riesebrodt

Modern dispensationalism in the United States has been a thorny sociological problem. The sociodiscursive mechanism(s) by which dispensationalist preachers are able to propagate their message has yet to be determined. The theoretical work of Martin Riesebrodt, specifically his discussion of salvific demand, legitimation, and discursive and behavior‐regulating practices, sheds light on Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's best‐selling Left Behind series and the equally popular dispensationalist writings of John Hagee. Dispensationalists create a demand for their message through the interpretation of current events using the apocalyptic lens of the dispensational scenario, which points to the imminence of the rapture and the global doom that will follow. As part of the propagandizing discourse (discursive practices) that promises escape from this cataclysm, dispensationalists preach a set of behavior‐regulating practices that seek to constrain and control the actions of their adherents.     

Two Approaches to Reading the Historical Descartes

In this article I introduce a new reading of Jean-Paul Sartre's account of bad faith. The reading contrasts with previous accounts by denying that states of bad faith are exhausted by attitudes towards transcendence and facticity. Instead, I argue that bad faith can involve attitudes to many other aspects of the human being. I also respond to an argument which claims that affirmations of freedom are inconsistent with the motivations behind bad faith. The inconsistency is here resolved by demonstrating how in bad faith we can still affirm a restricted version of freedom which avoids us acknowledging the unpleasant aspects of our full freedom.     

FAITH AND DOUBT IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Abstract One of the contexts in which religion and science come into conflict is with regard to faith and doubt. Generally speaking, we associate faith with religion, which is opposed to doubt, and doubt with science, which is opposed to faith. Some critics of science have argued that science is also based on faith; others have shown that there is doubt in the religious context also. In this essay I clarify these positions by defining different types of faith and different types of doubt.     

Faith and disbelief

Is faith that p compatible with disbelief that p? I argue that it is. After surveying some recent literature on the compatibility of propositional (so-called faith-that) and non-propositional (faith-in) forms of faith with the lack of belief, I take the next step and offer several arguments for the thesis that both these forms of faith are also compatible, in certain cases, with outright disbelief. This is contrary to the views of some significant recent commentators on propositional faith, including Robert Audi and Daniel Howard-Snyder. The primary argument revolves around the possibility of maintaining a single faith through drastic changes in cognitive attitude. I argue that once we allow that propositional faith is compatible with weaker cognitive attitudes than belief, such as acceptance or assent, there is prima facie reason to consider propositional faith as sometimes compatible with disbelief. I then consider objections and offer some final reflections on the significance of the thesis.

     

Faith,Belief and Fictionalism

Is propositional religious faith constituted by belief? Recent debate has focussed on whether faith may be constituted by a positive non‐doxastic cognitive state, which can stand in place of belief. This article sets out and defends the doxastic theory. We consider and reject three arguments commonly used in favour of non‐doxastic theories of faith: (1) the argument from religious doubt; (2) the use of ‘faith’ in linguistic utterances; and (3) the possibility of pragmatic faith. We argue that belief is required to maintain a distinction between genuine faith, pretend faith, and fictionalist faith.     

“Can One Put Faith and Work in the Same Sentence?” Faith Development and Vocation of a Female Leader in the Engineering Profession

Faith has been pointed out as a possible resource in strengthening individuals’ health and well-being at work. The aim of this article is to gain in-depth knowledge of the faith development and vocation of a selected female leader in a male-dominated work context. The article contributes to research on faith development in women leaders, based on Fowler’s faith development theory. This is a single case study grounded in a qualitative research design. In-depth qualitative data were gathered through observation and interviews over 18 months. Findings showed the development of faith across a women leader’s life span and highlight that faith and vocation are important resources that provide strength, meaningfulness and a vision.