An Eschatological Imagination

by John M. Shields

2008 · Peter Lang

In the twentieth century, Christian eschatology, the doctrine about the final reality, became a storm center for Christian systematic theologians because of the rediscovery of the eschatological character of Jesus Christ. In the twenty-first century, Christian theologians continue to wrestle with the claims of Christian eschatology because of a postmodern suspicion of eschatological certainty claims about a future that is, after all, objectively unavailable, yet still of great human concern. Human beings live on hope for the future. An Eschatological Imagination recognizes the problem of the future for Christian eschatology. Building on the major theological writings of David Tracy, it offers a revised way of thinking and living eschatologically in the form of an eschatological imagination as a rhetoric of virtue, an exhortation to live in Christian hope in a postmodern world and into an objectively unavailable and uncertain future. Within such a rhetoric, hope becomes action - not mere sentiment - that seeks to create a Christian eschatological future.

Crusader in the Cold War

by John T. Donovan

2005 · Peter Lang

Father John F. Cronin was a member of the Sulpician order of Roman Catholic priests. Cronin joined in a struggle to keep Communists out of organized labor in Baltimore, Maryland, during the Second World War, and in doing so established connections with the FBI. Afterward, the American bishops asked him to write a report on the Communist Party. In February 1947, Cronin met Representative Richard M. Nixon and became an unofficial adviser and one of his chief speechwriters. In the 1950s and 1960s, Cronin helped the American bishops respond to rising racial tensions.

Harold E. Stassen

by Alec Kirby, John F. Rothmann

2013 · McFarland

In 1938 Harold E. Stassen was elected governor of Minnesota at age 31, an office he resigned in 1943 to enter the United States Navy at the height of World War II. In the postwar years he helped write the charter of the United Nations and, serving in the Eisenhower administration, very nearly achieved a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union. He is famously known as a perennial candidate for the Republican Party nomination for president, seeking it 10 times between 1944 and 1992.