Theology
Essays

Cultural issues usually surface in a multicultural society like that of America's because co-existence of people from various different ethnic backgrounds can lead to undesired and unexpected conflicts.

This essay examines the Emerging Church movement within Christianity in today's world. Specifically this work argues that this perspective is not acceptable to the traditional interpretations of doctrine and theology. This essay also argues that these new approaches to Christian life are splintering and essentially weakening the movement and religion.

Santeria is a syncretic religion. It started as a Yoruba and West African set of rituals and saints, and the slaves took their religion to the New World in captivity. The religion flourished and fused with Catholicism. Currently, Santeria is a vibrant religion that is practiced in South Florida. This is a ten page research paper that builds on field research as well as library research.

This paper discusses Shirley Guthrie's work pertaining to systematic theology for the new millenium. It is a six page research paper focusing on what benefits systematic theology have for present day study of the church. People like Guthrie, paved the way for systematic theology as a main theological discipline. Systematic theology benefits the modern world versus biblical theology because of its reach and sources of information.

¶ … life of Martin Luder (Luther) and how he discovered the truth behind the Church of Rome and its corruption. It also looks at the way he helped the German people during the revolt of 1525.

Servant Leadership Defining Servant Leadership The principles of Servant Leadership were laid out by founder Robert Greenleaf in his important 1970 book, The Servant as Leader. Greenleaf, to his great credit, wanted to stress the point that leaders should first serve, and later lead through service. The leaders who have power but have not led, and use the power to push his or her own viewpoints and agenda, are not the kind of leaders Greenleaf was referring to. In fact in the Center for Servant Leadership website, the theory and philosophy of Servant Leadership is clearly spelled out: "A servant-leader focuses primarily in the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong…the servant leader shares power, puts the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible" (www.greenleaf.org). In this paper the goal will be to define and explain servant leadership in a context involving both religion and philosophy.

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.

¶ … Free Will: Comparing Aquinas & the Holy Scriptures

"Knowing what you stand for limits what you fall for."

Orthodox Judaism considers itself the most authentic experience of Judaism dating itself back to the source of Judaism as stated in the Torah and keeping the Torah as it believes it was transmitted form Sinai. Orthodox Judaism is a hybrid of opinions and these will be described in the following essay. To better understand Orthodox Judaism, too, we have chosen the synagogue Congregation Shaare Zion as example and illustration of its form. Comparison too to Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism will be elaborated on and mentioned as contrast