Search results for ""Author Ryan Andrew Newson""

I have come not to bring peace, but a sword." These words of Christ echo in our current times. In recent years, a growing number of commentators have decried a lack of civility in public discourse. Considered in isolation this concern is innocent enough, but no call for civility happens in a vacuum, and there is good reason to be suspicious of civility in our current political context. Calls for civility can encourage passivity and blunt prophetic action against injustice; further, truly heinous policies can be pursued under the guise of civility. And yet civility should not be dismissed outright, especially as presented by its more nuanced defenders--when it is presented as a limited good in a pluralist society.In The End of Civility, Ryan Andrew Newson analyzes the development of the concept of "civility" as we know it in modern discourse and names some of the criteria Christians can use to judge between healthy and toxic appeals to civility. The challenge, Newson contends, is discerning when civility is called for and when its pursuit becomes vicious. Pleas for civility cannot be assessed without considering the context in which they are made. Some appeals to civility merely seek to lessen conflict, even conflict necessary in the struggle for a more just world. But when issued by people struggling for justice on the margins of society, calls for civility can name the types of conflict that might lead to liberation.One must be attentive to what counts as "civil" in the first place and who gets to make that determination. Which bodies are considered civil and "ordered," and which people are under suspicion of being "uncivil" before they ever say a word? For Christians, civility can never be an ultimate good but remains subordinate to the call to follow Christ--in particular, the Christ who is not always "civil" but who calls people to an ethic of resistance to injustice and solidarity with people who are suffering.

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James Wm. McClendon, Jr. was the most important ""baptist"" theologian of the twentieth century. McClendon crafted a systematic theology that refused to succumb to the pressures of individualism, grew out of the immediacy of preaching the text, and lamented the stunted public witness of a fractured Protestant ecclesiology.This two-volume set mixes previously unpublished and published lectures and essays with rare and little known works to form a representative collection of the essential themes of McClendon's work. The first volume focuses on the philosophical and theological shifts leading to McClendon's articulation of the baptist vision. The second volume specifically elucidates the more philosophical themes that informed McClendon's work, including ways in which these themes had immediate theological import. Taken together, the set provides the most comprehensive presentation of McClendon's work now available, revealing the sustained and systematic character of his vision over the course of his life. These two volumes will provide scholars, preachers, and students with McClendon's radical, narrative, and connective theology.

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