Contemporary Worship
Essays

There are a number of pronounced differences that exist between the Lutheran Church and the Methodist Church, although these two Protestant denominations share some similarities as well. Both of these points, which are contrasted within this document, are found in John White's book Protestant Worship. Points of difference include the the right wing tendencies of the Lutherans, and the right-wing tendencies of the Methodists.

Sherwood Lingenfelter, the anthropolist and author of Transforming Culture, begins with his perspective on culture. He sees culture as "of the world," and therefore basically sinful.

Laurie Long, a contemporary American artist, has a style most uniquely her very own. What she does is to fuse together disparate elements of pop culture, humor, and more predominantly, feminism and feminist culture.

This paper focuses on the role of bhakti worship in Hindu society. Bhakti worship is a type of worship that focuses on the individual's relationship with the divine. This relationship is a loving one, but can be expressed in various ways, depending upon the individual in the relationship. The paper explores how bhakti is related to ritual and castes in Hinduism.

The most significant civilization to the present is the Roman Empire. It started in 500 BC, in the Rome nation, and continued surviving for the next two millenniums (Murphy, 2007). The Empire underwent various stages and peaked in the second century. Rome stopped being an Empire when the western Empire lost to the German invaders. Much of the implication of the Roman cultural conventions lived for an additional millennium within the Byzantine kingdom. Scholars and historians have conducted numerous studies to unravel the decline of the ancient Rome. The most common historical reference is in Gibbon Edward's publication, which themes around a frail military that spread its resources improperly.

Allen (1984), Brown (2007), and Kaiser (1994) are like three points on a unidirectional continuum. Allen (1984) is adamant that the Scripture is the Word is the Scripture, and argues that the Scripture is God preaching. Very little room for interpretation or for tacking toward relevance is indicated by Allen's position. Brown (2007) offers a rigorous cognitive framework for approaching the reading of Scripture, and calls on the reader to meet her exacting intellectual standards and respond in a rigorous manner—a position that seems wholly appropriate given that Brown views Scriptural reading as a conversation with God. Brown's communicative theory is considerably more open than Allen's and more flexible than a structuralistic approach, which would preclude attributing substantive importance to individual components of the Scripture. For Brown, and proponents of speech-act theory, the individual components of Scripture may be the hooks on which understanding rests. Kaiser takes a principled view with regard to understanding the Scriptures in the context of the modern world. To those who would object to his "going beyond the Bible," he has at the ready examples of how the Church does exactly that, at its convenience and unabashedly argues that adjustments are made according to "views it believes God to hold true" (Kaiser, 1994). In this regard, Kaiser's criticism points to the Church's willingness to apply a literary criticism approach to Scripture, citing relevance to contemporary society as the pivot point. The very theological paradigms to which Allen (1984) objects are to Kaiser (1994) a natural outcome of a literary criticism approach to Biblical interpretation. The theological paradigms are needed to make assertions about what is Biblical, that is, what God requires in a given situation. Brown posits a more personal and rigorous approach to Scriptural interpretation—demanding that multiple perspectives be considered, to the degree that the essence of a communicative theory of Biblical interpretation contains aspects of literary criticism, structural criticism, and reader-response criticism.

Christianity has a complex history in which it has both aspired to and rejected certain Jewish principles. The essay here discusses the Christian concept of the Kingdom of God while also connecting the origins of Christianity to the Jewish faith. The discussion includes consideration of the roles of Jesus and John the Baptist in defining the connection between these major world religions.

The focus of this brief research report is to examine the issue of finding values in the contemporary world. Values, in the context of this research study relates to principles, standards, ethics, deeply-held beliefs and guides for living however, values also is akin to ‘meaning'. Therefore, this research study examines how values and meaning is constructed in the life of a contemporary individual. There has been much written in recent years concerning cognition and emotional intelligence. Studies in these two areas have yielded positive constructs, which individuals and social groups have successfully developed individually or in terms of the group upon the bases of cognitive and emotional intelligence behaviors and functional processes. Little explored however, is the area relating to what is known as ‘Spiritual Intelligence".

There are two age groups in the present population with specific needs required to fulfill and direct them at a pivotal moment in their life's development when paired together represent reciprocal provision of care during a critical stage in the lives of each of these two representative groups of contemporary society. The two age groups at focus in this study are today's youth and the present aged population in the community. Youth are disproportionately characterized as having behavioral problems and the community elders are a reservoir of guidance for these youth who in return have much to offer the aged as well.

A civilization in simple terms is the development of human potential in all dimensions including physical, intellectual, spiritual, moral and psychological. In order for the potential to be developed, civilizations have to work to utilize the resources that are available to them, benefits of which should reach the entire society and bring a positive effect on to the whole world. It is a manifestation of beliefs that are present in every aspect of human life. A civilization is a collective effort which is undertaken by a whole society and benefits are not only restricted to a particular group or people or individuals, even if those individuals are not directly a part of the civilization. Civilizations have to maintain duration and continuation. They do not emerge simply to disappear. They can spread to other societies and spread throughout the world.