HDS Scholarly Articles

Explores inter-religious dialogue in Christian ecumenical concerns. Discussion of mission and evangelism by the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism; Theological, developmental and peace-making work of the Church and Church bodies; Dialogue and women in Church and Society.

The monumental Rotunda in Thessaloniki was originally part of the palace complex of the emperor Galerius, who so famously persecuted Christians in the early fourth century. It was converted to a Christian church by the late fourth or early fifth century, a conversion which included the addition of a magnificent mosaic program within the dome of the Rotunda. This article both addresses the question of what this conversion meant and seeks to articulate a method for interpreting the Rotunda’s archaeological remains within a local context, broadly construed. Texts produced in Thessaloniki or which were known to be objects of civic pride, such as 1 Thessalonians, an account of local fourth-century martyrdoms, and the triumphal Arch of Galerius, are used to interpret the Rotunda’s conversion. This article concludes that the production and early interpretations and use of the early Christian Rotunda are revolutionary in that Christians reused monumental space built by a Roman emperor who persecuted Christians. Even more, a revolution in meaning occurred because the early Christian Rotunda can be interpreted as having borrowed from an apocalyptic rhetoric that formerly subverted empire, turning this around in order to articulate a Christian Roman identity continuous with and supportive of the Roman Empire.

Theologians call the supreme otherness of God “divine transcendence”. Eroticism suggests a link between human otherness and divine transcendence. In its most common versions, however, divine transcendence seems not to enhance the awareness of interhuman otherness, but rather to so relativize difference as to absorb effectively otherness into itself. Bringing transcendence to bear on the ethical encounter between human beings, Emmanuel Levinas's work has influenced philosophies and theologies of liberation as well as post-structuralist thought. However, Levinas sets apart the sexual encounter and ultimately opposes ethics to eroticism. Luce Irigaray's reading of Levinas's Totality and Infinity not only exposes the problem but also opens his proposal toward the possibility of an “ethics of sexual difference”. In exploring the debate of Irigaray with Levinas, this chapter highlights intersections of the erotic, the feminine, and the cosmological. The chapter reaches for a fresh conceptualization of the transcendence encountered in the (divine) Other in which eros is no longer opposed to an explicitly desexualized and implicitly anti-feminine love.

This paper addresses religious pluralism as an academic, civic, and theological challenge. Looking at religious communities in their connections and interrelations is a critical academic challenge for students of religion who would gain insight into the dynamics of religious life and identities today. The encounter of people from different religious traditions in hometown America has reshaped the context of religious life, calling for attention and serious study. In short, the study of a complex city like Fremont, CA, might well be the study of today's Silk Road, today's convivencia. Religious pluralism is also a critical civic issue for citizens of increasingly diverse societies, raising fundamental questions about the nature of civic polity, the "we" of our civic life. And, to be sure, religious pluralism is a critical theological issue for people of faith, raising fundamental questions about one's own faith in relation to the religious other. Scholarly, civic, and theological issues have their own distinctive realms of discourse and require us to think carefully about the meaning of "voice" in our work. We cannot evade the question of voice in thinking theoretically about pluralism, for diversity is not only the characteristic of the worlds we study but of our own identities, our multiply-situated selves.

Mechthild von Magdeburg’s Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit is a text that celebrates the female body and imbues it with narrative, semiotic, and spiritual signifi cance. In contrast to arguments that the narrative goal of Mechthild’s book is to overcome physicality in order to allow a full embrace of spirituality, the article posits that the body is itself a narrative device that exposes a pleasant tension between the physical and the spiritual without prioritizing one over the other. Mechthild’s visions of the Virgin Mary as exuding a sensual and multidirectional femininity that also represents a powerful spiritual force, particularly with respect to the breast and breast-feeding, evidences this positive valuation of the body as well as subverts contemporary perceptions of female flesh and perviousness. The article also explores the complex relationship between the allegorized Body and Soul in book I, as well as the Kristevan processes of abjection, jouissance, and sublimation as they apply to the text, ultimately considering the rewards to be gained through the very process of reading encouraged by Mechthild’s coded text and her sublimation of language itself.