Dale M. Coulter - Böcker

This book explores the role of emotions and affections in the Christian tradition from historical and theological perspectives, especially related to the work of the Holy Spirit. Although historians and scholars from a range of traditions—including Wesleyan, Pentecostal, and Pietist—have engaged these issues, there has yet to be a sustained examination of the role of emotions and affectivity across the Christian tradition. By retrieving the complex discussion about affectivity in Christian tradition and bringing its many voices into dialogue within a contemporary ecumenical context, the contributors also point toward a number of new research trajectories. The essays underscore the need to understand the shift in Western views of emotion that began in the late eighteenth century. They also explore in detail the vocabulary of affectivity as it has developed in the Christian tradition. As part of this development, the contributors reveal the importance of pneumatology in Western as well as Eastern Christianity, calling into question the idea of a pneumatological deficit advanced by some constructive theologians and addressing the relationship between affectivity and the pedagogical strategies that enable persons to cooperate with the work of grace in the soul. Finally, several essays explore the relationship between the erotic, the ecstatic, and affectivity in religious belief. This volume will interest scholars and students of historical theology, of emotions in theology, and of Christian renewal or charismatic movements.

Christian higher education (CHE) is increasingly a transnational and global endeavor, with over one-sixth of the almost two hundred institutional members of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) located in nineteen countries outside the United States. Much of this is related to the shift of the Christian center of gravity to the global South over the last half century, and in particular to the explosion of pentecostal and charismatic forms of churches across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, all of which also feeds back via migration to the so-called "browning" of the churches of North America.Networks like the CCCU have sought to bridge faith and learning through a certain form of Christ-centeredness and biblical orientation. While these theological priorities of the evangelical Protestant tradition have gained wide currency, the pneumatic spirituality of the pentecostal and charismatic movements is rarely considered when thinking about a distinctively Christian vision of higher education.When even God is showing up at secular universities, one wonders what difference considerations of the Holy Spirit might make to complement and perhaps revitalize the christocentrism renowned across CHE. The Holy Spirit and Higher Education responds along two interrelated lines: by reconsidering historic Christian education itself from this pentecostal perspective, and by formulating an approach to CHE around the charismatic, sanctifying, and missional dimensions of the Spirit's activity. Yong and Coulter show that CHE should be both Christ-centered and Pentecost-inspired, both biblically faithful and pneumatically empowered, both faith-committed and charismatically propelled.