Ten Theology Books to Watch For – March 2021

Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Modern Politics

Joshua Mauldin

Oxford UP

Recent political events around the world have raised the spectre of an impending collapse of democratic institutions. Contemporary concerns about the decline of liberal democracy are reminicent to the tumult of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe. Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived in Germany during the rise of National Socialism, and each reflected on what the rise of totalitarianism meant for the aspirations of modern politics. Engaging the realities of totalitarian terror, they avoided despairing rejections of modern society. Beginning with Barth in the wake of the First World War, following Bonhoeffer through the 1930s and 1940s in Nazi Germany, and concluding with Barth’s post-war reflections in the 1950s, this study explores how these figures reflected on modern society during this turbulent time and how their work is relevant to the current crisis of modern democracy.

 

Theology, Music, and Modernity: Struggles for Freedom

Jeremy Begbie, Daniel Chua,
Markus Rathey, Eds.

Oxford UP

Theology, Music, and Modernity addresses the question: how can the study of music contribute to a theological reading of modernity? It has grown out of the conviction that music has often been ignored in narrations of modernity’s theological struggles. Featuring contributions from an international team of distinguished theologians, musicologists, and music theorists, the volume shows how music–and discourse about music–has remarkable powers to bring to light the theological currents that have shaped modern culture. It focuses on the concept of freedom, concentrating on the years 1740-1850, a period when freedom–especially religious and political freedom-became a burning matter of concern in virtually every stratum of Western society.

The collection is divided into four sections, each section focusing on a key phenomenon of this period–the rise of the concept of ‘revolutionary’ freedom; the move of music from church to concert hall; the cry for eschatological justice in the work of black hymn-writer and church leader Richard Allen; and the often fierce tensions between music and language. There is a particular concern to draw on a distinctively ‘Scriptural imagination’ (especially the theme of New Creation) in order to elicit the key issues at stake, and to suggest constructive ways forward for a contemporary Christian theological engagement with the legacies of modernity today.

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