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Charting the Theological Imagination
| Article
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17675 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1990 |
2,738 Words |
| Author
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M. Darrol Bryant
M. Darrol Bryant is chairman of the Department of Religious
Studies at the University of Waterloo and also teaches
religion and culture at Renison College. He is the author or
editor of more than a dozen volumes, including The Coming
Kingdom: Essays in American Millennialism and Eschatology, The
Many Faces of Religion and Society, Pluralism, Tolerance and
Dialogue: Six Studies, and Interreligious Dialogue: Voices
From a New Frontier. |
NEW RELIGIONS AND THE THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION IN AMERICA
Mary Farrell Bednarowski
Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1989
175 pp., $25.00
The vitality and creativity of the theological imagination are impressively demonstrated in Mary Farrel Bednarowski's New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America. Few scholars have had the courage to enter the theological territory of the "new religions," which have been so reviled in the religious establishments, scoffed at by academic theologians, and demeaned by the secular cultural elites. Bednarowski has discovered in a largely unknown terrain (despite media portraits of "cults") a theological conversation that reveals the primordial quest "to order the universe in theological rather than psychological, biological, sociological, or physical questions and concepts."
Earlier scholarly studies of new religions focused on particular groups and were undertaken either by sociologists of religion, for example, Roy Wallis, The Road to Total Freedom: A Sociological Analysis of Scientology, and Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie, or historians such as Stephen Gottshalk, The Emergency of Christian Science in American Religious Life, and Richard Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism. These studies have given us solid sociological and historical analyses but tend to pay less attention to theological aspects. However, Bednarowski, a professor of religious studies at the United Theological Seminary in Minneapolis, places the new religions in the context of ongoing theological traditions and of American culture. She also compares them with one another in terms of such questions as the nature of God, human nature, death and afterlife, and the kinds of lives we should live.
These are, of course, perennial questions asked by generation after generation, and there is no lack of answers to these questions. We can find answers within the established religious traditions, in the writings of philosophers, in the discussions of scholars, and within the lives of cultures. But those questions are also asked again in the new religious movements, and the answers generated are often at odds with those prevailing in more established institutions.
Are they thereby unworthy of attention? Bednarowski thinks not. She has undertaken an analysis and exposition of the theological ideas expressed may strike the reader as odd - for
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