Theology Today

“The oddity of hot print theology in a cool electronic age does not stem simply from the strange world of new media. The oddity also comes from the abstract character of printed theology itself. TV is creating a new cool perspective from which the high definition of Scripture is seen as fragmentation. Is it any wonder that a church member thinks theological truths are bits of information? The form of the theology which has been dominant in the west has been the form of hot print. Could it be that Christian theology's problem has been less with the content of ‘the book,’ and more with the fact that it is formed by the peculiar sequential, uniform, abstractness of print?”

“It is in the mode of thought known as process theology where I find the most significant movement toward a social theology. … I do not propose to try to prove that this mode of thought has the answers to all theological questions. I believe it is on the right track, but my concern is to try to identify the problem which this theology must solve. What we need to do is to carry through to a new theological construction on the conviction that the relation between God and his creatures is through and through social. All the traditional doctrines must be reconsidered.”

“As one seeks to explain what moves these young people today, one is often perplexed by apparently contradictory tendencies. The movement is strongly characterized by the desire not to be understood. Another source of perplexity is the fact that the political activity, which receives so much attention, is at its heart non-political. Except for a very few, those who engage in political activity do so on the basis of an orientation to personal life, not political life. It is a personal moral quest, not a political vision, which is really characteristic of those who are politically involved.”

“When the church, in its liturgy, announces the redemption of the world and the new creation, it seems to be insisting that what it does cultically with words and actions corresponds to ‘what God is doing’ in the whole of creation. Can that claim be made cognitively meaningful …? Let us assume that the Christian liturgical community intends to be doing and representing in a cultic way what is happening in the whole culture and cosmos, and then let us inquire if there are ways of grounding those liturgical acts in, or linking them with, the non-liturgical or ‘ordinary’ structures of human experience so that the liturgy is rendered meaningful.”

“Because simultaneous attention to words and music allows the music to organize the text and reveal the point which its words are being used to make, we are proposing that what we call a hymn is the resultant meaning of the sounds-as-words and the sounds-as-music. The musical-verbal phenomenon that performs a function in the church's worship is not the verbal meaning and the musical structure as two parallel or added quantities. It is the meaning that results from the fact that the same sounds articulate both; both are heard simultaneously, and the one reveals the meaning of the other.”

“Integration in the past has been understood as assimilation into a white society on white terms; a condition that implies the superiority of the white society. School integration is integration of Negro children into white schools and not integration of white children into Negro schools. Today, racial protest seeks a goal more complex than integration into a white society; it seeks a goal in terms of a pluralist society in which the Negro may retain his identity as a Negro. … Those whites who wish to assist should do so by working in their own community and not by attempting to influence the decision-making process of the black community.”