Joerg Rieger | |
---|---|
Born | August 3, 1963 |
Nationality | German and American |
Spouse | Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger [1] |
Ecclesiastical career | |
Religion | Christianity (Methodist) |
Church | United Methodist Church |
Ordained |
|
Academic background | |
Alma mater | |
Thesis | Approaches to the Real [3] (1994) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Theology |
Sub-discipline | Constructive theology |
School or tradition | |
Institutions | |
Website | joergrieger |
Joerg Michael Rieger (born 1963) is a German and American [5] professor of Christian theology whose work emphasizes economic justice and political movements. Rieger is also an ordained minister of the United Methodist Church. [2]
Born on August 3,1963, [6] Rieger is Cal Turner Chancellor's Chair in Wesleyan Studies and Distinguished Professor of Theology at the Divinity School and the Graduate Program of Religion at Vanderbilt University. Previously he was the Wendland-Cook Endowed Professor of Constructive Theology at Perkins School of Theology,Southern Methodist University. He received a Master of Divinity degree from the Theologische Hochschule Reutlingen ,Germany,a Master of Theology degree from Duke Divinity School,and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in religion and ethics from Duke University. [7]
Rieger is the author and editor of more than 20 books and over 135 academic articles,which have been translated into Portuguese,Spanish,Italian,German,Korean,and Chinese. [8]
Rieger is editor of the academic book series New Approaches to Religion and Power with Palgrave Macmillan Publishers and,together with Kwok Pui-lan,he edits the academic book series Religion in the Modern World (Rowman and Littlefield). [8] [ failed verification ]
Rieger has lectured throughout the United States as well as internationally,including presentations in Argentina,Brazil,Costa Rica,Mexico,Canada,South Africa,Zimbabwe,Germany,Switzerland,Austria,Slovakia,the Netherlands,Belgium,England,Russia,Thailand,and China. [9]
Rieger is an activist constructive theologian [10] in the tradition of liberation theology. [11] Robert Wafawanaka has referred to Rieger as an "Occupy theologian" because he endorses the views of the Occupy movement and shares its ethos. [12] Rieger understands theology as functioning to support or transform reality,especially historical and contemporary economic systems. [13] His work focuses on economic class [14] and empire. [15] In politics,Rieger argues that religion and politics cannot easily be separated. [16]
Rieger describes his work as an effort to bring theology and contemporary liberation movements together. [17] His work addresses the relation of theology and public life,reflecting on the misuse of power in religion,politics,and economics. [lower-alpha 1] His main interest is in developments and movements that bring about change and in the positive contributions of religion and theology. His work in theology draws on a wide range of historical and contemporary traditions,with a concern for manifestations of the divine in the pressures of everyday life. [9] [18] [19]
Rieger advocates for a materialistic spirituality centered on working to improve the material conditions of the marginalized. [20] He believes current economic systems are incompatible with the biblical conception of God. [21] Rieger has described economic ideologies as religions,and asserts that people typically assent to them as a matter of blind faith,not empirical evidence. He renounces the perceived hegemony of free market ideology offering Christian theology as an alternative. [22]
Rieger's criticizes the currently dominant economic system especially for increasing global economic inequality, [23] and also for poverty,distorting of the way people and their work are valued,and limiting control people have over their lives. [24] As a response to economic injustice,Rieger promotes solidarity with those negatively impacted by current economic processes [25] and encourages Christians to modify economic systems to promote the wellbeing of everyone. [26]
Rieger and Kwok Pui-lan coined the notion of deep solidarity, [27] which is a recognition that the community as a whole is harmed by the unjust system,not just a particular group to be paternalistically supported from a place of superiority or distance. [28] Within this framework,the presence of college-educated individuals participating in the Occupy movement is not lack of authenticity in their appeal for economic justice,but rather an achievement in helping a broader portion of the public identify themselves as oppressed and able to see inequality as a threat to society as whole. [29]
Year 383 (CCCLXXXIII) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Merobaudes and Saturninus. The denomination 383 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years.
Dorothee Steffensky-Sölle, known as Dorothee Sölle, was a German liberation theologian who coined the term "Christofascism". She was born in Cologne and died at a conference in Göppingen from cardiac arrest.
Walter Brueggemann is an American Protestant Old Testament scholar and theologian who is widely considered one of the most influential Old Testament scholars of the last several decades. His work often focuses on the Hebrew prophetic tradition and sociopolitical imagination of the Church. He argues that the Church must provide a counter-narrative to the dominant forces of consumerism, militarism, and nationalism.
Constructive theology is the redefinition or reconceptualization of what historically has been known as systematic theology. The reason for this reevaluation stems from the idea that, in systematic theology, the theologian attempts to develop a coherent theory running through the various doctrines within the tradition. A potential problem underlying such study is that in constructing a system of theology, certain elements may be "forced" into a presupposed structure, or left out altogether, in order to maintain the coherence of the overall system.
Don H. Compier became Dean of the Bishop Kemper School for Ministry in Topeka, KS, in July 2014. BKSM is a joint project of the Episcopal Dioceses of Nebraska, Western Kansas, Kansas, and West Missouri. It uniquely seeks to educate candidates for ordained ministry, both priests and deacons, together with lay ministers. The school is strongly committed to making quality theological education affordable and accessible to all. Compier was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church in January 2015.
Rosemary Radford Ruether was an American feminist scholar and Roman Catholic theologian known for her significant contributions to the fields of feminist theology and ecofeminist theology. Her teaching and her writings helped establish these areas of theology as distinct fields of study; she is recognized as one of the first scholars to bring women's perspectives on Christian theology into mainstream academic discourse. She was active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and her own work was influenced by liberation and black theologies. She taught at Howard University for ten years, and later at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Over the course of her career, she wrote on a wide range of topics, including antisemitism, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the intersection of feminism and Christianity, and the climate crisis.
Political theology is a term which has been used in discussion of the ways in which theological concepts or ways of thinking relate to politics. The term is often used to denote religious thought about political principled questions. Scholars such as Carl Schmitt, a prominent Nazi jurist and political theorist, who wrote extensively on how to effectively wield political power, used it to denote religious concepts that were secularized and thus became key political concepts. It has often been affiliated with Christianity, but since the 21st century, it has more recently been discussed with relation to other religions.
Frederick Ludwig Herzog (1925–1995) was an American systematic theologian at Duke University and minister of the United Church of Christ. An impassioned champion of civil rights, his academic focus was liberation theology.
Jung Mo Sung is a Roman Catholic lay theologian, writer and lecturer trained in theology, ethics, and education. He was born in South Korea, and raised in Brazil where he lives today.
In feminist theory, kyriarchy is a social system or set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission. The word was coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in 1992 to describe her theory of interconnected, interacting, and self-extending systems of domination and submission, in which a single individual might be oppressed in some relationships and privileged in others. It is an intersectional extension of the idea of patriarchy beyond gender. Kyriarchy encompasses sexism, racism, ableism, ageism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Catholicism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, xenophobia, economic injustice, the prison-industrial complex, colonialism, militarism, ethnocentrism, speciesism, linguicism and other forms of dominating hierarchies in which the subordination of one person or group to another is internalized and institutionalized.
Miguel A. De La Torre is a professor of Social Ethics and Latino Studies at Iliff School of Theology, author, and an ordained Southern Baptist minister.
Katie Geneva Cannon was an American Christian theologian and ethicist associated with womanist theology and black theology. In 1974 she became the first African-American woman ordained in the United Presbyterian Church (USA).
Mark Allan Powell is an American New Testament scholar and professional music critic.
Hendrik Kraemer was a lay missiologist and figure in the ecumenical movement from Dutch Reformed Church in the Netherlands. He encouraged the Dutch to allow the spread missionary activities outside of the Dutch East India Company-restricted area in eastern Indonesia to the rest of the archipelago.
Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics is a 1932 book by Reinhold Niebuhr, an American Protestant theologian at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York City. The thesis of the book is that people are more likely to sin as members of groups than as individuals. Niebuhr wrote the book in a single summer. He drew the book's contents from his experiences as a pastor in Detroit, Michigan prior to his professorship at UTS. The book attacks liberalism, both secular and religious, and is particularly critical of John Dewey and the Social Gospel. Moral Man and Immoral Society generated much controversy and raised Niebuhr's public profile significantly. Initial reception of the book by liberal Christian critics was negative, but its reputation soon improved as the rise of fascism throughout the 1930s was seen as having been predicted in the book. Soon after the book's publication, Paul Lehmann gave a copy to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who read it and was impressed by the book's thesis but disliked the book's critique of pacifism. The book eventually gained significant readership among American Jews because, after a period of considerable anti-theological sentiment among Jews in the United States, many Jews began to return to the study of theology and, having no Jewish works of theology to read, turned to Protestant theological works.
Asian feminist theology is a Christian feminist theology developed to be especially relevant to women in Asia and women of Asian descent. Inspired by both liberation theology and Christian feminism, it aims to contextualize them to the conditions and experiences of women and religion in Asia.
Kwok Pui-lan is a Hong Kong-born feminist theologian known for her work on Asian feminist theology and postcolonial theology.
Postcolonial theology is the application of postcolonial criticism to Christian theology. As is in postcolonial discourse, the term postcolonial is used without a hyphen, denoting an intellectual reaction against the colonial, instead of being merely sequential to it.
Occupy Faith is an ally of the Occupy movement that supports the movement due to its members religious and spiritual values. Groups are established by activists and religious leaders.
Asian American biblical hermeneutics or Asian American biblical interpretation is the study of the interpretation of the Christian Bible, informed by Asian American history and experiences.