Category: <span>Online Resources</span>

Category: Online Resources

Online Resources

A life-enhancing encounter with Jesus Christ?: Teaching RE/Christianity in Church Schools (Ford, 2013)

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The first point to make about RE is that it should be the most exciting and important subject in the curriculum. Just think. Four to five billion of the world’s population are directly involved with the major religions and most of the rest are affected by them in various ways. Lives, communities and civilisations – past, present and future – are shaped by them. Yet the other side of their importance
is that many of the major conflicts in our world are linked to them. If we want a peaceful world we have to get the religions right, because they are here to stay. In a world where there is much ignorant faith, foolish faith and dangerous faith, can faith become more educated and intelligent, wiser and reconciling?

Online Resources

New Theology and Religious Studies: Shaping, Teaching and Funding a Field (Ford)

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There is an emergent paradigm in which theology, which seeks to answer questions of meaning, truth, goodness and beauty that
arise within and between specific religious traditions, is taught and researched in an interactive, collegial relationship with religious studies, which seeks to answer questions about specific religious traditions through a range of disciplines, but not normally with a view to producing constructive or normative religious positions. The institutional integration of the two has so far in the twenty-first century lacked clear articulation and advocacy. (A version of this paper was published as Chapter 8 in David F. Ford, The Future of Christian Theology, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford 2011).

Online Resources

Knowledge, Meaning and the World’s Great Challenges: Reinventing Cambridge University in the Twenty-first Century (Ford, 2003)

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Our long term history therefore should encourage us to be sensitive to transformations in knowledge and in society and to be willing to respond to them by further reinvention. What about our present situation? I see a strong case for fresh reinvention. The core factors are intrinsic to the dynamism of knowledge and its use, and especially its relation to the people who discover it, teach it, learn it, interpret it, and apply it. I would suggest that this university, along with others, is being asked to meet four interconnected challenges simultaneously.

Online Resources

The Practical Theology of David Ford: Interview with David Cunningham (Ford, 2003)

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Scripture has been very important in your theological work, but your approach is different from those who treat the Bible as a rule book or a guidepost. You encourage people to enter its world and allow their imaginations to be fired by its structures, as they would in reading a novel. Is that a fair description?
I think that’s a partly adequate parallel. I wrote my dissertation on Karl Barth and biblical narrative, and I was very much influenced by Hans Frei and the Yale tradition of understanding scripture in terms of narrative. My own engagement with scripture began when I was a teenager. I read the New English Bible translation, and found there a freshness and a gripping power. If the church is to remain true to its calling and to respond to new situations adequately, it has to be fed with scripture and to inhabit scripture. If the whole imagination of the church is to be able to resist the very powerful forces that try to co-opt it or subvert it, then it has to have a scriptural imagination.

Online Resources

Response to “A Common Word Between Us and You” (Ford, 2007)

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This historic statement gives the right keynote for relations between Muslims and Christians in the 21st century. It is what we have been missing since 9/11/2001. The most impressive list of signatories from all the main Muslim traditions and countries have made a clear and powerful proclamation of love for God and for all neighbours. The message is rich and deep, and it goes to the heart of Muslim faith as expressed in the Quran. It also goes to the heart of the teaching of Jesus in the New Testament.

Online Resources

Theological Wisdom, British Style (Ford, 2000)

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Some years ago when I encountered theologian George Lindbeck of Yale Divinity School, he asked me about the Gifford Lectures which had been written by my doctoral supervisor, Donald MacKinnon. At the time, Lindbeck was planning a course on MacKinnon. Within a year or so theologian David Tracy of Chicago gave a paper in which MacKinnon was one of the featured theologians. When asked what current theology he found most interesting, Tracy replied, “British.”

Online Resources

British Theology After a Trauma: Divisions & Conversations (Ford, 2000)

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If there was one intellectual development in living memory that separates the “grandparent” from the “parent” generation of British theology, it was the rise of logical positivism and analytical philosophy. A fairly homogeneous educated class, largely shaped through a few major universities, received a massive assault from within those universities not just on its philosophy but on its beliefs, ethics and worldview. “But how can you prove . . . ?” “But what do you really mean by. . .” were the reigning questions, and the conclusion of the inquiry was usually that your meaning had no empirical basis and did not make sense. The assault was made by a confident army of elite intellectuals, who appropriated the prestige of modern science and offered a rational rigor that might provide a place (however confined) to stand amidst world wars and huge changes in every area of life. The story is far more complicated than that, yet it is vital to understand how, in the middle two quarters of the 20th century, a drastically reductionist way of thinking became the bottom line against which everything was measured.