Month: June 2014

Bruce Barber is a Uniting Church minister and selfconfessed preacher. The title of this book is a reference to Nietzsche’s Parable of the Madman from The Gay Science of 1887 in which  a madman lit a lantern at noon and ran to the marketplace crying that he was looking for God. The parable announces the death of God under the auspices of the Modern age.

Bruce’s  analysis is genealogical in that he traces the changes that have occurred in Christian theology from the early church to the Medieval  to the Modern and, for the lack of a better term, the post-Modern. This does not mean that there are no people who now understand theology in the mode of the preceding eras, but it does point to a succession in which theologies outlast their usefulness. This genealogy of ideas goes some way towards explaining why, in our day of the Modern-post- Modern cusp, preaching has become largely unintelligible and  alienated from general discourse.

William Emilsen is deeply committed to collecting observations about, and recording the history of, the Uniting Church in Australia (UCA). He was a founder of Uniting Church Studies, and earlier edited the collections Marking Twenty Years (1997) and The Uniting Church in Australia: The first 25 years (2003).

An Informed Faith has chapters on spirituality, ministry,  scholarship, The Basis of Union, management, politics, Uniting Church schools, ecology, the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress, living cross-culturally, other faiths and  evangelical and progressive Christianity. Authors include Ian Breward, Chris Budden, Tony Floyd, Katharine Massam, Marion Maddox, Michael Owen, Geoff Thompson and Val Webb.