Audios & videos
Once & Future Faith Conference

Spring 2002

Elaine Pagels
Let There Be Light
Does divine light shine through Jesus alone or in everyone?
Who is Jesus, and what is the "good news" about him? Elaine Pagels suggests that the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas articulate a first-century controversy over these questions. Both claim to offer teaching Jesus gave intimately to his disciples, and both interpret Jesus as the "light of the world" that came into being before creation. According to Thomas, Jesus, who speaks as "the light that is before all things" (Thomas 77), invites his disciples to recognize that "you are from the light" (Thomas 50 as well). John, on the other hand, characterizes Jesus as the sole source of that light (cf. John 8:12).

1 DVD, 90 minutes, $20.00 Add to cart
1 CD, 80 minutes, $12.50 Add to cart

Anne Primavesi
From Copernicus to Lovelock
A Once and Future Theology
Copernicus raised a fundamental question about the earth and its place in the universe when he asserted that the earth rotates around the sun. The new position of the earth implied a question about the place of humankind in the scheme of things.  Now James Lovelock's Gaia theory has posed that same question in a new and acute form. It focuses attention on our place within the whole community of life on earth, and by so doing, expands our theological horizons.

 1 DVD, 90 minutes, $20.00 Add to cart
1 CD, 80 minutes, $12.50 Add to cart
 

Richard Holloway
The Wound of Religion
Just before he died of cancer, the British playwright Dennis Potter was asked whether his imminent death had restored his commitment to religion. He replied: "For me religion has always been the wound, never the bandage. V. V. Rozanov says of the future of religion: "All religions will pass but this will endure: simply sitting in a chair looking in the distance."

Beginning with these two insights, Bishop Holloway will explore the wound of religion as humanity's struggle with its own meaning and not as a kind of salvation system or bandage distribution center. The human passion for looking in the distance is the wound of religion. It is exhilarating to know that there is no cure for the passion. We must live with the wound.

1 DVD, 90 minutes, $20.00 Add to cart
1 CD, 80 minutes, $12.50 Add to cart

Robert W. Funk
Facets of a Future Faith
Forming an Agenda
Agenda formation is our immediate and urgent task in the Jesus Seminar. We must identify and exorcise residual demons of the old faith. We must assemble a litany of our abiding or emerging deep convictions, our strong affirmations.  We must revisit our profile of Jesus for insights into our own future. We must reexamine the role of the Bible in a viable faith. We must carefully forge the contours of the new community of faith. And we must go in quest of new metaphors, new symbols, a new architecture, and resilient stories to live by, without which we are sure to fail.

1 DVD, 90 minutes, $20.00 Add to cart
1 CD, 80 minutes, $12.50 Add to cart

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