Tagged: pluralism

Unity without sameness?

In my past several blog posts, I’ve been examining various possible sources of unity for The United Methodist Church.  One assumption behind these posts so far has been that it may be possible to find something(s) that ties together all United Methodists and that unity in the denomination depends upon finding such thing(s).  I’ve certainly […]

Bind Us Together, Lord

In the old hymn, Christians petition God to “bind us together with cords that cannot be broken”.  The song then goes on to ask God to “bind us together with love”.  It is a worthwhile question for Christians to ask ourselves what the nature is of the cords that bind us together.  This question is […]

The Problem of Pluralism

Last post, I examined two different definitions of pluralism: one which describes a state of society characterized by cultural, religious, ethnic, and other forms of diversity and one which embraces such a state of society.  I then tried to distinguish the second definition from relativism.  This post, I’d like to return to that first definition […]

Pluralism vs. Relativism

I read an article earlier this week (“Theorizing Religion in the Global Age: A Typological Analysis” by Martin Geoffrey, who, like me, has two first names) in which the author laid out a typology between four different types of religion in our modern, global world.  Among these four were pluralist and relativist.  I found Geoffrey’s […]

Global Christianity and (post)modernity

Last week, I wrote a post discussing the southward shift in Christianity, also referred to as the rise of Global Christianity.  Since I talk a lot about modernity, postmodernity, and whatnot in this blog, an obvious question might be how the rise of Global Christianity relates to these historical eras.  The class I’ve been TAing […]

Periodizing the History of Christianity and Methodological Pluralism

I’m a historian of Christianity.  One of the things historians like to do is divide history into periods.  If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ve probably gotten a sense of the periodization of history I’ve been using, but I thought I’d summarize it here and then share some reflections on the process of periodizing church […]