Modern Christian Research Articles

A Political Necrology of God

For early modern Christian subjects, Christ’s crucifixion and death fixes at the heart of things a momentary submission to decreation and destruction, replenished by the Resurrection and the promise of the Second Coming, but present all the same as a kind of absolute eclipse in ontotheology. With reference to the reworked “Nicene Creed” that closes Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, this essay asks: what happens to political ecologies of vibrant matter when they confront the corpse of God? How might Renaissance political ecologies speak to contemporary political dynamics, and what stands to occupy the vacant place of suicide, then and now, within this communal nexus? This essay pursues answers to these questions by placing an early modern text on suicide, John Donne’s Biathanatos, into conversation with a contemporary theorization of community—Roberto Esposito’s Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Donne’s scandalous, even blasphemous, presentation of Christ as a “self-killer” in Biathanatos raises the possibility that Christian community is founded in the shadow of an originary yet occulted moment of self-destructive will, at once inferred yet unrepresentable. The socially binding consequences of this sacrificial dynamic are further explored in relation to contemporary politics, with reference to the focalizing effect of the suicide of Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose self-immolation catalyzed the “Arab Spring” of widespread popular revolt.

Money Matters: The Neglect of Finance in the Historiography of Modern Christianity

The subject of religion and finance is seriously neglected within the historiography of the church during the modern period. This essay explores the pioneering ‘Financing of American Religion’ project and suggests possible fruitful avenues of research into the financing of British religion. By way of a case study, it analyses the size of the religious voluntary sector as a whole and then, within that, the individual finances of a range of Anglican voluntary organizations, all home missionary organizations within the diocese of London. Historians of religion have shown a certain reluctance to grapple with the columns of figures and minutiae of detail contained in cash books, general ledgers and annual reports. This essay serves as a brief taster of the wealth of material contained in such sources.

A Generous Peace and Boundless Love: Expanding Thomas Berry's Cosmology of Peace

A Generous Peace and Boundless Love: Expanding Thomas Berry's Cosmology of Peace Matthew Eaton Introduction The New Cosmology and eco‐spirituality seen in the work of Thomas Berry outline a relatively new way to view reality. In this perspective, humans are no longer understood as a special creation transcending the natural world. For Berry, and others following this school of thought, the human is understood as one aspect of a unified, though ever‐changing, creation event, inseparably tied to the same processes that brought about the rest of the cosmos. This “New Story,” as Berry calls it, is needed because it provides revelatory insight into the nature and identity of both humanity and divinity and the ethical demands that accompany our participation in the cosmic drama. The ethic Berry derives from the New Story can be described as a “cosmology of peace”—a way of being that allows the cosmos to flourish and function according to its own nature, with as little human interference as possible. In a cosmology of peace, humans recognize their kinship with nature and allow the biosphere to flourish. Yet, as Berry points out, we cannot understand cosmic peace as the absence of violence as this would betray the nature of the cosmos itself. Life does not arise out of a purely peaceful matrix, but one of wondrous cooperation and shocking violence. While not downplaying the role of cooperation, it is difficult—if not impossible—to imagine how the cosmos and life on Earth could have arisen apart from death, violence, and the suffering of sentient creatures. For Berry, both the cooperative and the violent sides of nature are a key to creating a “Peace of Earth.” Thus, cosmic peace does not aim at overcoming all violence but at maintaining creative tension in the natural system that allows nature to function properly. For Berry, “unnatural” violence (i.e., anthropogenic acts that disrupt nature's inherited functionality) needs to be overcome, while “natural” forms of violence (i.e., that which arises naturally and promotes further creativity) is welcomed. Yet, the Christian tradition refuses to accept all forms of natural violence. Central to the Christian faith is belief in a deity of boundless love who shows concern for the suffering of all creatures whether or not their suffering leads to further creativity. Suffering is seen as something to be overcome, as the divine wishes all to flourish and all violence to come to an end. Modern Christianity must now embrace but also make sense of the tension arising from holding simultaneously to the necessity of violence for cosmogenesis and the conviction that divinity cares for each individual member of creation and desires that all things thrive according to their nature. In this essay, I offer a peace theology that embraces the tension existing between scientific cosmologies and the Christian faith. I suggest that while Berry's view of cosmic peace ought to be our top priority, the Christian faith encourages a more inclusive, generous vision of peace that embraces non‐violence in situations where natural violence may still be acceptable in certain circumstances. Below, I outline Berry's understanding of natural and unnatural violence, as well as his vision for a cosmology of peace. Next, I summarize John Duns Scotus's notion of haecceitas as a model for boundless divine love. Following this, I survey the work of Denis Edwards, who suggests eschatological redemption as a way to deal with the tension between cosmic violence and the love of God for individual creatures. Finally, I expand on Edwards's suggestion that eschatological redemption begins on Earth by constructing a new cosmology of peace that begins to eschew “natural” forms of violence, without upsetting the larger environmental ethic of Berry nor the inner spontaneity of the cosmos itself. Violence in nature and a cosmology of peace Throughout his work, Thomas Berry continually describes cosmogenesis arising out of a matrix of communion and relationship. “Cosmogenesis is organized by communion. To be is to be related, for relationship is the essence of existence.” Yet, relationships take multiple forms and occur in non‐violent as well as violent processes. While Berry does not ignore the cooperative aspects of cosmogenesis, he emphasizes...

Editorial: The Paradoxes of Revival

The five articles in this issue all relate in some way to the theme of revival movements in modern world Christianity. They form a selection of the papers given at the twenty-second meeting of the Yale–Edinburgh Group on the History of the Missionary Movement and World Christianity, held at New College, University of Edinburgh, from 28 to 30 June 2012. The theme of the meeting was ‘Religious movements of renewal, revival, and revitalization in the history of missions and world Christianity’. Movements of renewal, revival and revitalisation have formed part of the ebb and flow of the history of the Christian church from its early centuries. As a religion of the Spirit, Christianity invites periodic internal critique from those of its adherents who feel that the dynamism of spiritual zeal has been suppressed by the defenders of good order, structure and time-honoured tradition. As an institution with a vision of the one people of God stretching down the centuries and across the continents, however, the church has often felt itself bound to channel, moderate and even defuse the headstrong and sometimes disruptive impulses of revivalists. Even revival leaders themselves cannot escape the demands of structure and tradition as they seek to conserve the fruits of their movement for the generations to come. Revival movements often present a paradoxical blend of the conservative and the radical. Preoccupied with the life of the Spirit and the pre-eminent demands of obedience to the gospel, they can often appear narrowly pietistic, indifferent to the wider social and political implications of the Christian message and wholly unimpressed by the agendas of Christian nationalists or anti-colonial radicals. And yet they have repeatedly proved to be the source of challenge to the established order. The Spirit falls on all flesh, without distinction of age, gender,

Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War, and the Trials of the Protestant Left

For an older generation of mainline Protestant clergy, the word ecumenical had an aura of hope and glory that is largely lost today. As Jill K. Gill explains, in the years after World War II, ecumenical meant more than “Methodists and Baptists [getting] together for tea” (p. 147). To ecumenists, the term meant a modern Christian consensus, a coalition speaking with one powerful voice on theological, social, and political issues, engaged with society yet standing apart from it. Gill's book recovers the story of the ecumenical movement in the history of Vietnam War–era America, focusing on the National Council of Churches (ncc) as the primary institutional expression of that movement. Gill makes detailed use of the ncc archives, Methodist and Presbyterian records, and interchurch periodicals. Her interviews with movement leaders add illuminating new material. The book comprises an introduction, five broad sections, an epilogue, and an appendix. The introduction and part 1 provide a useful survey of the Protestant ecumenical movement. The remaining four sections are a straightforward chronological account of the ncc's work on the war from 1964 through 1973. This is an effective and often-dramatic approach. The author keeps in view many different events, processes, interests, and decisions in a rapidly changing situation. She traces the council's shift in strategy from persuasion to protest—and the consequences of this shift for Christian unity. The epilogue surveys the ncc's history since 1973, notably its declining size, internal tensions, and recent refocusing. The appendix, which adopts a stance of advocacy, is an odd fit with the rest of the book.

SUSAN C. KARANT-NUNN. The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany.

Although the subdiscipline of the history of emotions is a fairly recent development, judgments about the ways in which religion enlisted, spoke to, and exploited the human emotions have long played a role in the questions scholars have asked about late medieval and early modern Christianity. Much of this work has often come to distinctly negative conclusions. In Jacques Toussaert's Le sentiment religieux en Flandres à la fin du Moyen Age (1963), the late medieval church was a lax taskmaster that failed to stir much emotional commitment; an arid ritualistic formalism thus bred indifference and ignorance. Those that followed Toussaert debated his judgments, but few saw much positive about the emotional climate of the late medieval church or the successor churches produced by the Protestant and Catholic reformations. For Lawrence Stone, the English Protestant world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a grim place where parents failed to invest their children with love. In Jean Delumeau's works treating the continent, by contrast, both late medieval and early modern Christians were victims of clerics obsessed with inculcating excessive guilt. And although Eamon Duffy concluded that the late medieval church in England had a sunnier disposition—its rich liturgical tradition channeled human feelings and granted expression to a lush variety of emotions—he saw that idyll destroyed by the juggernaut of Tudor politics and harsh Protestant reforms.

Multiple modernities and mass communications in Muslim countries

The concept of multiple modernities is increasingly influential in mainly Western academic circles. Although the multiple modernities thesis challenges established West-centric understandings of the modern world, it also risks praising ‘the modern’ as the end of history and our preordained destiny. Multiple modernities’ global history cannot be separated from the colonialism, slavery, wars and exploitation that have formed our modern world and its inequalities. The multiple modernities thesis also illuminates a cultural and religious battlefield in which a Western concept of linear modernity, with a ‘developmental path’ that should be followed by all countries, is highly contested. The division of societies into the dichotomous categories of modern versus traditional – a legacy of the ‘grand narratives’ of classical social theory – also creates the foundation for other divisions, including the dichotomy of the modern Christian ‘Us’ versus the traditional Muslim ‘Them’. Such West-centric history-telling is part of a field of cultural authority in which the battle over the right to shape the past and present of various societies is taking place. There is no singular model of modernity; global modernization programs and processes have taken place in a variety of cultural and political environments, creating multiple models of modernity. This article critically explores the shortcomings of the West-centric theory of singular modernity. By focusing on the modern transformation of mass communication in Muslim countries, it argues that both traditional means of mass communication, such as manbars, and modern media, such as newspapers and tape recorders, have been used effectively for mobilization of masses by revolutionary Muslim groups. It also argues that Islam is not incompatible with modernity or democracy, and that Islamic groups have been an integral part of modern democratic developments in Muslim countries.

The Religion of Patrick Brontë

Patrick Brontë’s strong religious faith was firmly based on the King James Bible, quotations from which are freely found in his correspondence and fictional works. Doubts about the reliability of this version or the veracity of some of its statements do not seem to have troubled him. Unlike his daughters he seems to have had no difficulty with the Old Testament doctrine that the wicked will be punished in this world or the New Testament doctrine of eternal punishment hereafter, but he did reject predestination to damnation and was no mean bigot in dealing with Catholics or Nonconformists. Nor would he have approved of the facile optimism of some modern Christian thinking which he would have dismissed as unscriptural.

On Being Theologically Educated: Ten Key Characteristics

Formal Christian theological training/education is unsurprisingly diverse. This diversity in theological training encompasses: providers and beneficieries from different denominations of modern Christianity, curricula and contents, and aims. If one supposes that theological training is imparted within or in direct/indirect relations with communities of faith (which likely possess different notions of theology and theological training/education) one is compelled to ask: What is ‘theological education’? Is this quest worth the effort?

Another Genealogy: Art philosophy, politics and personalism. The case of Edgar De Bruyne

To understand the complex nature of 20th century Belgian personalism, historians and political scientist have mainly focused on the political context in which it developed. They defined personalism as a decisive step in the challenging political process Catholics were part and parcel of. In their eyes, interwar personalism incarnated a harsch criticism of the ‘liberal democracy’ and, at the same time, it formed the preperation of a political formula gaining currency after World war Two: modern Christian democracy. In this paper, I will develop another understanding of the formation and dissemation of Belgian interwar personalism. I will do this by focussing on one of the founding fathers of the postwar Christian democracy: the art philosopher and politican Edgard De Bruyne. During the twenties and thirties he was a pioneering thinker who tried to combine a neo-thomistic thinking and new phenomenological theories within the field of art philosophy. I will argue that a better understanding of this innovative aesthetical theory can help to uncover a forgotten dimension of interwar personalism: art philosophical thinking which did function as a science pilote because it helped to define the role of creative individuals and creativity in a rapidly changing world.

Sacred Symbols with a Secular Beat?: A Content Analysis of Religious and Sexual Imagery in Modern Rock, Hip Hop, Christian, and Country Music Videos

A content analysis of music videos for the 2008 top-rated songs in four musical genres was conducted in order to gauge change in the presence of religious and sexual symbols since the mid-1990s and to determine if sexual and religious images were prevalent in the increasingly popular hip hop genre. Religious images appeared in about one-third of videos across genres, and sexual images appeared in more than half the videos and in all of the hip hop videos. Hip hop and country videos had the highest co-occurrences of religious and sexual imagery, although there was co-occurrence in each genre. The significance and possible interpretations of the symbols and their co-occurrence are discussed.

Baptism and Cosmic Allegiance: A Brief Observation

For most of the Christians of the earliest centuries, as Ferguson's book exhaustively illustrates, baptism was understood as nothing less than a personal rebellion against the cosmic, political, and spiritual order of ancient paganism. As pagan culture slowly disappeared and was replaced by a Christian culture, the baptismal rite's explicit transfer of a new Christian's allegiance from the old gods to the risen Lord became less necessary and, ultimately, largely unintelligible. The gradual introduction of infant baptism reflected the transformation of the ancient religious milieu, as the understanding of baptism as renunciation of evil gods and demons gave way to a concern to nurture souls from birth until death within the Christian community. Changes in baptismal meaning and practice in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages suggest that further developments lie ahead, as late modern Christianity confronts a post-Christian future in the developed world.

The Tell-Tale Heart: Conversion and Emotion in Nias

In this article, I use historical and ethnographic data to analyse the Great Repentance, a violently emotional conversion movement that swept through the Indonesian island of Nias from colonial conquest around 1915, with recurrences until the 1960s. Against rationalist and materialist explanations, I argue for a constitutive role for emotion in the conversion process. I show how the techniques and idioms of Protestant missionaries suppressed indigenous meanings and encouraged a native emphasis on ‘the speaking heart’. The existential dilemmas of modern Christians in Nias, their sense of exclusion, can be accounted for by the paradoxical ethical and affective legacy of the repentance movement. The article is a contribution to both the study of emotion in historical perspective and to the analysis of conversion.

Mediating Jewish Knowledge: Menasseh ben Israel and the Christian Respublica litteraria

Cooperation between Christian and Jewish scholars was common in the world of Early Modern Christian Hebraica. Ever since Christians decided to study the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, the Kabbala and the commentaries and treaties of the Medieval Jewish philosophers there were rabbis to teach them or to help them edit the Hebrew books they needed. Still, outside of grammars, only a few rabbis went as far as authoring books for Christian audiences. Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657), the famous Amsterdam rabbi known above all for his negotiations with Oliver Cromwell and the London parliament about the renaturalization of the Jews to England, was one of the first systematically to publish Latin books for a Christian audience and to “translate” Judaism into Christian contexts. In my essay I explain how Menasseh proceeded, how he merged Jewish knowledge into the knowledge of the Christian Respublica litteraria, and how he finally interconnected his scholarly and his political activities. Of special interest is Menasseh’s idea of an Abramite theology, a common subset of shared Jewish and Christian teachings which could be used as something like a “third space” in intercultural translation processes. Finally, I discuss some aspects of the failure of Menasseh’s project, reflected in the ambivalent reactions of the Christian world, and reconsidered with regard to the conditions early modern cultural mediators generally had to meet, but which Menasseh didn’t.

Grief and Consolation in Early Modern Lutheran Devotion: The Case of Johannes Christoph Oelhafen'sPious Meditations on the Most Sorrowful Bereavement (1619)

This article seeks to make an original contribution to the study of early modern Christian devotion by examining a source that has received no scholarly attention of any kind: Johannes Christoph Oelhafen'sPious Meditations on the Most Sorrowful Bereavement(1619). Oelhafen, a prominent Nuremberg lawyer, composed thePious Meditationsshortly after his wife, Anna Maria, died. He did so in order to console himself and his eight children in the midst of their considerable grief. Drawing on well-known rhetorical devices and consolatory remedies, Oelhafen produced a work of private devotion that is remarkable in terms of its rich affectivity and considerable artistic skill. ThePious Meditationswas never published, rather Oelhafen intended it for a private circle of intimates, especially his children and their posterity. The work illustrates especially well the theme of spiritual self-care that was so prominent in early modern Lutheran devotion. ThePious Meditationsalso demonstrates how creative and resourceful early modern Christians could be as they sought to contend with mortality, loss, despair, the obligations of parenthood, and the frequently mysterious workings of providence.

Creatio ex nihiloin Palestinian Judaism and Early Christianity

AbstractRecent decades have witnessed a near-consensus of critical opinion (1) that the idea of God's creation of matter ‘out of nothing’ is not affirmed in scripture, but instead (2) originated in a second-century Christian reaction against Gnosticism's convictions about matter as evil and creation as the work of an inferior Demiurge. (3) Judaism's interest, by contrast, was generally deemed late and philosophically derivative or epiphenomenal upon Christian ideas. This essay re-examines all three convictions with particular reference to the biblical creation accounts in Palestinian Jewish reception. After highlighting certain interpretative features in the ancient versions of Genesis 1, this study explores the reception of such ideas in texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls and early rabbinic literature. It is clear that the typically cited proof texts from biblical or deutero-canonical books indeed do not yield clear confirmation of the doctrine they have sometimes been said to prove. Genesis was understood even in antiquity to be somewhat ambiguous on this point, and merely to say that creation gave shape to formlessness need not entail anycreatio ex nihilo. This much seems uncontroversial. Nevertheless, closer examination also shows that the Scrolls and the rabbis do consistently affirm Israel's God as the creator ofallthings, explicitly including matter itself. Graeco-Roman antiquity axiomatically accepted that ‘nothing comes from nothing’, which also meant the pre-existence of matter. To be sure, the conceptual terminology of ‘nothingness’ came relatively late to Christians, and even later to Jews. Yet the substantive concern for God's free creation of the world without recourse to pre-existing matter is repeatedly affirmed in pre-Christian Jewish texts, and constitutes perhaps the single most important building block for the emergence of an explicit doctrine of ‘creation out of nothing’. In its Jewish and Christian origins, therefore, the idea ofcreatio ex nihiloaffirms creation's comprehensive contingency on the Creator's sovereignty and freedom. This in fact is a point which has been rightly and repeatedly accented in both historic and modern Christian theology on this subject (e.g. by K. Barth and E. Brunner, J. Moltmann and C. Gunton). Well before its explicit articulation in dialogue with Hellenistic philosophy, the doctrine of God's creation of all matter was rooted in biblical texts and their Jewish interpretation, which in turn came to be refined and enriched through Christian–Jewish dialogue and controversy.

Transforming Relations: Essays on Jews and Christians Throughout History in Honor of Michael A. Signer (review)

Reviewed by: Transforming Relations: Essays on Jews and Christians Throughout History in Honor of Michael A. Signer Zev Garber Transforming Relations: Essays on Jews and Christians Throughout History in Honor of Michael A. Signer, edited by Franklin T. Harkins. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. 476 pp. $50.00. Transforming Relations is a collection of insightful essays that speak on the interaction between Jews and Christians in antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern era. It honors the important work of Michael A. Signer, the Adams Professor of Jewish Thought and Culture at the University of Notre Dame from 1992 until his death in 2009. The chapters treat various aspects of the Jewish-Christian relationship through the centuries, including the centrality of and departure from scriptural law in antiquity, reflections on Christianity in the Talmud and Midrashim, medieval Christian hermeneutics and Hebraism, and the appreciation of Judaism in modern Christianity. The essays focus on issues that permeate Signer's own scholarly work, namely, that shared scriptural texts and commentary serve simultaneously as a point of convergence and divergence for Jews and Christians, and that meaningful contemporary interfaith Jewish-Christian dialogue recognizes similarity and difference by participants who draw from separate but equal streams of monotheistic traditions. To honor the memory and work of Michael Signer, editor Franklin T. Harkins has assembled a cadre of friends and colleagues, admirers all of the honoree and his contribution to scholarship. The book's front matter contains [End Page 162] a dedicatory poem in memory of Michael by Cyril O'Regan, a foreword by John van Engen, and an introduction by Franklin T. Harkins on Signer's study of historical Jewish-Christian exegesis. The volume is divided in two parts. Essays in Part One ("Ancient and Medieval Perspectives: Exegesis, Polemic, and Cultural Exchange") begin with Arnold Band's personal reminiscence of the professor-student relationship and the seeds of textual methodology planted at UCLA in the early 1960s. David Novak focuses on the centrality of Torah from Sinai and its historical role in the parting of the ways and dialogical healing between Pharasaic Judaism and Pauline Christianity; and Israel Jacob Yuval speaks of the merits of "parallelmania," not polemics and apologetics, when early Christian texts mix with rabbinic literature. The next essays deal with personalities and schools of Jewish and Christian exegetes and teaching in twelfth-century northern France. Grover A. Zinn discusses the multiple ways that Psalms affected the spiritual life and theological education affecting the canons of the Parisian Abbey of St. Peter. By dissecting the theoretical framework of Hugh of St. Victor, Dale Coulter shows interpretive similarities (plain meaning, history connected to narratives affixed to events, word and syntax interpretation) between Victorines and their Jewish counterparts. Likewise, Boyd Taylor Coolman and Franklin T. Harkins engage in similar activity in researching Hugh's students, Richard of St. Victor and Andrew of St. Victor, respectively. All three chapters reflect pivotal texts that exemplify borrowing, polemics, and advancement. Deborah L. Goodwin contrasts the literal and allegorical approaches of Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam) and Peter Comestor in reading the narrative of Rebekah's children, Esau and Jacob (Gen 25-27) Rashbam's commentaries on Lamentations and the Song of Songs is the focus of Sara Yapet's chapter. E. Ann Matte elaborates on the overlapping eschatological layers of the Wandering Jew in medieval Christianity (killers of the Lord, testifiers to his Second Coming and fulfilled in ecclesiastical conversion). Leslie Smith concludes that the Postilla in totem bibliam (commentary on the whole Bible) is the collaborate scholarship of the Dominican master and administrator Hugh of St. Cher's and Mendicant scholars. Arjo Vanderjagt posits that the mastery of Hebrew by Wessel Gansfort (1419-1489) was not for dialogue but for the conversion of Jews and to enhance piety and devotion by Christians to Jesus. Finally, Jeremy Cohen probes a story narrated by Solomon ibn Verga in his Shevet Yehudah that speaks of the nefarious charge of blood libel in sixteenth-century Spain and Portugal; the price to overcome was separation in body, space, and Jewish-Chritian scholarly encounter. Part Two presents a variety of ways that Jews and Christians encounter and entangle in...

Isaac Casaubon, Hebraist

A review essay of Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinbegr’s remarkable ‘I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue’. The essay seeks to pay homage to their exemplary contribution to our understanding of Early Modern Christian Hebraism – and of erudition more generally – by expanding on their pioneering study through reflection on three themes: Casaubon’s early Hebrew studies; the motivation and scope of his learning; and his posthumous reputation as a Hebraist.

Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews and the Idea of the Promised Land (review)

Reviewed by: Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews and the Idea of the Promised Land Dan Cohn-Sherbok Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews and the Idea of the Promised Land, by Shalom Goldman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 367 pp. $35.00. Zionism is normally viewed as a Jewish political cause. This is the picture presented by such works as Arthur Hertzberg’s 1959 anthology, The Zionist Idea, which makes no mention of Christian precursors of the Zionist idea. Recently, however, a number of works have focused on Christian Zionism, such as Stephen Sizer’s Christian Zionism: Road Map to Armageddon. Goldman’s informative and lucidly written volume supplements such studies by providing an illuminating account of Christian engagement with Zionism through six narratives set in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first three chapters, dealing with the period before the creation of the Jewish state, relate the stories of three personal and political relationships: the poet Naphtali Herz Imber and the British diplomat and journalist Laurence Oliphant; the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl and the Anglican cleric William Hechler; and the Hebrew University professor Joseph Klausner and the Hebraist Herbert Danby. The next three chapters, set in the twentieth century, focus on organizational issues. Chapter Four tells the story of the Vatican’s engagement with the State of Israel. Chapter Five deals with three modern literary figures: Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Graves, and Vladimir Nabokov and their support for the State of Israel. The final chapter focuses on modern Christian Zionism. These six chapters are preceded by an extensive discussion of Zionism as a political movement which treats such themes as the notion of the promised land, the Anglican communion, and the Protestant churches’ view of the return to Zion, the United States and the restoration of the Jews, early scholarship on Christians and Zionism, Zionism and the Jewish-Christian relationship, and evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Israel. This material serves as a helpful background to the studies which follow. Yet it would have been better to have a sweeping survey of the history of Jewish and Christian Zionism from its early origins to the establishment of the Jewish state. This would have enabled the reader to place the figures mentioned in subsequent chapters into a coherent chronological context. [End Page 164] Yet despite the diffuse nature of Goldman’s narrative, the detailed accounts of diplomats, thinkers, poets, and scholars are illuminating. The discussion of Laurence and Alice Oliphant’s encounter with Naphtali Herz Imber, for example, gives a fascinating insight into the thought-world of early supporters of a Jewish homeland. Similarly, the chapter dealing with Theodor Herzl and his Christian associates fills in the gaps of most historical accounts of Herzl’s involvement with William Hechler and others. Again, the final chapter which deals with Jewish settlers and Christian Zionists from 1967 to 2007 affords an insightful overview of the growing Christian Zionist movement and its involvement with Israeli politics. Although Goldman does not seek to provide an historical overview of the Christian involvement with Zionism, his book nonetheless adds an important dimension to the understanding of Christian-Jewish encounter in the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Dan Cohn-Sherbok University of Wales Copyright © 2012 Purdue University

That Your Education May Be Complete: Implementing the Bishops’ Curriculum Framework in Continuity with the Christian Teaching Tradition

While the U.S. Bishops’ Doctrinal Elements of a Curriculum Framework provides robust content guidelines for a national high school Religion curriculum, its successful implementation will depend largely on concurrent development of, and training in, pedagogy suited to Christian education. This paper directs educators to existing catechetical documents that provide some general methodological guidance as well as to several time-tested pedagogical insights gleaned from the writings of ancient and modern Christian educators. The final section applies these insights from the tradition to current efforts to implement the bishops’ Framework in order to provide educators with a starting point for the elaboration of pedagogical methods called for by the bishops.