EXPERIENCING THE WORLD AS THE EVOLVED IMAGE OF GOD: RELIGION IN THE CONTEXT OF SCIENCE

Religion must be seen as the result of the learning processes of humanity, as they manifest themselves in human interaction with and experience of reality. Such interaction depends on knowledge that provides the basis for practices of orientation and transformation. Religion as part of human culture provides resources for identifying lasting significance of experience in light of what appears to be ultimate conditions for a good and flourishing life. Thus, it is also possible to understand human distinctiveness as manifest in the dynamic practices in which humans participate, and of which religious practices are part. Therefore, it is not specific attributes that make humans distinct from other species but how they engage these in relation to the various experiential dimensions and ascribe significance to some of these in light of what they understand as ultimate sources of orientation and transformation.     

Intimate Partner Violence: The Recovery Experience

This qualitative study explored the recovery experience of six women who have survived intimate partner violence. Interviews were used as an instrument to elicit the individual stories of each of these women. Qualitative analysis revealed two types of themes: process and supports. The process themes include (a) spirituality, (b) facing death, (c) future relationships and (d) hope and encouragement. The support themes include (a) professional help (effective and ineffective) and (b) informal supports (family/friends/other survivors). Implications for helping professionals include the call for increased understanding of the recovery process and the need to abandon preset agendas when working with survivors.     

Theology from many angles

This paper takes up the interplay between the “particularity” and “universality” of the Pauline letters, which was so influentially identified by Nils A. Dahl, and demonstrates that even after the canon had provided a implicitly universalizing hermeneutic for the corpus Paulinum, a late antique preacher such as John Chrysostom still felt the need to explain why the letters contain material of such an apparently situation-specific nature. Through a close reading of an untranslated homily on Romans 16:3 (“Greet Priscilla and Aquila”), we shall demonstrate how this rhetorically astute interpreter fashioned his homily precisely around this dynamic – in order to prove to his skeptical audience that it is in the particular that the universal is to be found.     

It's Personal—Or Not At All: On God as Love/r

Abstract : Henriksen discusses what it means that God is personal, with special regard to the claim that God is love. If God is love, God must be understood as personal. This approach is related to different elements concerning human life and human freedom, and how to engage in human life. Also the radical alternative is suggested: instead of understanding God as love, the alternative is considered that death is God (as the final and strongest power there is). This alternative shows that it is the most likely interpretation of actual human conduct to opt for the alternative that God is love. Hence, to understand God as love is part of what it means to relate humanely and with hope to what is taking place in human life.