Introduction to ‘New Developments in the Theology of Character’

Recent years have witnessed much new work on character. An exciting aspect of this work has been the publication of a number of important monographs and edited collections specifically devoted to the theology of character. ¹

This special issue is a contribution to this work on the theology of character. It engages with some of the most recent work being produced, and advances the discussion even further on a number of fronts.

We want to briefly note how these papers came about. For five years, we were involved with the Character Project at Wake Forest University (www.thecharacterproject.com). Christian was the director of the project, and Angela was the project leader for the theology portion of the project. One of our main activities was to organize three funding competitions in the areas of philosophy, theology and psychology. The end result was that we funded 28 projects by mostly early career researchers so that they could conduct new empirical studies, write a book manuscript, or prepare several new papers.

By now these projects have been completed and have generated an enormous amount of new research on character in these three disciplines. Results from all of these projects can be found in an edited volume. ²

One of the foundational aims of the Character Project was to encourage and advance the work of younger scholars. Each of our funded scholars in theology produced original work which we believe will greatly contribute to the study of the theology of character. The idea for this symposium arose as a way of further highlighting the contributions of some of these grant recipients. We also wanted to encourage dialogue with more senior scholars. So we asked four such scholars to engage with some of the newly produced work of our grant recipients on the central topics of liturgy, forgiveness, humility, and reformed theology.

We are excited by the papers our scholars produced and grateful to them for their hard work in preparing these papers. We are especially grateful to Susan Parsons for her help and encouragement in putting this issue together. Finally, we want to thank the John Templeton Foundation and the Templeton World Charity Foundation for their support for this project. The opinions expressed are our own and those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of these Foundations.