The Crucible Of Life By Timothy Crutcher

Arthur Milller’s The Crucible and Katherine Howe’s Conversion follow teenage girls and how their individual actions and actions as a group affect colonial Salem Village and present day Danvers, Massachusetts. In Salem Village an outbreak of witch accusation by a group of young women tears apart the entire community and has everyone question what the truth is. Religion and honesty are large factors in peoples’ views on the situation taking place in Salem. In modern day Danvers an outbreak of a mystery disease, conversion disorder, similarly has the people of the town questioning what the truth is. This disorder is exclusively affecting the students of the all girls catholic high school, St. Joan’s. These girls exploit their disorder by talking to media and going on television. Both stories seem to reflect similar plot lines of rebellion, scandal, and sex. Both follow the lives of teenage girls who face similar problems. The time of adolescence in a woman’s life is an extremely influential period when one either stands out as a dominant leader, or falls in line as a follower. Though The Crucible and Conversion are based over three hundred years apart, both focus on similar motifs regarding female adolescence including rebellious lust, and the desire for attention and one’s individual identity.

Reading The Crucible of Life has provided me with an epistemological system to begin my journey into serious theological contemplation. I have thoroughly enjoyed thinking about the interrelationship of reason, experience, and scripture. Foremost, the relationship of reason and experience has proved highly. Understanding the ways in which reason and experience relate to each other is a tricky concept indeed and it is one that I look to in order to discern the process of learning in general. It is this process that allows learning to occur.

In this sense, just as the cognitive process began with our faith placed in revelation and authority, we reach the stability and fullness of truth by contemplating Christ as the uncreated or as the incarnate Word. Even in contemplation, the internal and incorporeal presence of Christ is necessarily joined by his external and corporeal presence. What is different now, is that in contemplation, be it on the inside or on the outside, what we meet and contemplate is in both cases the eternal Word – or, Christ according to his being eternal -, once being incarnated in human form, and once as we encounter it in our soul. This, is done with an act of direct appraisal, whereas in faith both revelation and authority both needed the other as their support and explanandum - thereby receiving a sort of indirect confirmation, insofar as revelation taught and explained authority, and authority confirmed and taught

Experience, through the personal revelation of God, is a philosophical theological source. Emil Brunner when building on the “I Thou” “I It” concept introduced by Buber derived that “revelation […] is the establishment of a mutual relationship between the revealing God and responding humanity”.1 Philosophical concepts around our experience of God all attempt to capture an explanation of the unexplainable. Scripture describes multiple occasions of experience of God in our world, from Moses and the Israelites in Exodus to Saul on the road the Damascus. Our ability to communicate experience of God is essential if we are to bring the Gospel to life. Our ministry and mission within church today must seek tirelessly to draw attention to the historical

I was both inspired and challenged by this past week’s readings. Inspired as to the humanness of our condition and yet, God’s persistent loving response to us. Then in as such, challenged by our lack of response to God. Maddox fine tunes Wesley’s approach to God’s accumulative, yet, fluid ‘types’ of grace towards humanity, while Heitzenratzer covers Wesley’s birthing of Methodist doctrine, discipline and practice within a modern lexicon and ‘good ole’ Outler continues to share Wesley’s meticulous day to day faith conundrums and conversions.

Chapter 4 of the Fee and Stuart text is written for us to gain a better understanding of how biblical text can be applicable to our lives. Hermeneutics is our interpretation of texts, specifically biblical text. We use common sense hermeneutics frequently through life to determine our interpretation of text and events (Fee, Stuart, 2003). However, when we use common sense hermeneutics we are swayed by our own experiences and impacts made by our own cultural, societal and faith

Nicholas Hytner 's adaption of Arthur Miller 's The Crucible provides an interesting look into the life of the Puritans. The Crucible follows the small town of Salem as they are engulfed in the mass hysteria of witchcraft. A group of young girls are caught dancing in the woods, and thus fearing punishment claim that they were possessed by the devil. Soon the accusations run wild which resulted in the arrest of two-hundred peoples, and the execution of twenty. Today the film is regarded as an allegory for the McCarthy hearings though it also provides an intimate look into the closed societies of colonial America. The film displays some of the themes presented in Scupins book Anthropology of Religion. It has become the perfect contemporary depiction of the leviathan-like power the Puritan Church had over the community, and their ability to rule through fear. Furthermore, Salam was a small isolated town and was not exposed to outside ideas, this coupled with the Church 's power demonized any outside forces. The film also depicts women 's relationship with witchcraft, and how accusations were used by the patriarchy to maintain their power over women, and how the young girls were able to gain power and influence through the act of accusation.

Like all humans, I come with baggage. In my exegetical, biases may emerge from my preunderstanding that impact my interpretation of scripture. To help navigate this exegetical with clarity and truthfulness, I have included

However, Weiss (1991) appeared to give little credence to Gadamer’s contributions based on the fact that Gadamer failed to note the nuance that seperated Dilthey’s thoughts from those of his predecessors. Considering, the ‘shared lived experience’, Dilthey does not infer the a priori structure of universal experience featured in the Hegelian model. He also does not give any precedence to communal experience over individual, when forming his version of shared history, this emphasises that Dilthey’s objectivity is one that is made up of all persons’s lived experiences and not just those of a singled out individual. Dilthey appears to be too much under the influence of the scientific ideology, that everything is reducible to scientific

Reason can be thought of as less of a source and more of a tool through which we bring together our understanding scripture, tradition, and experience using it to confirm our understanding of God and our theological task. In using reason, “we seek nothing

To fully evaluate the role of the sacraments in the journey of the Scripture way of salvation according to John Wesley’s sermons, we must achieve a few important understandings. We must examine and work to understand Wesley’s Scripture way of salvation. We must also work to understand Wesley’s views on the sacraments of baptism and communion. Finally, after completing both of these crucial steps, we can then move on to finally understanding the relationship that Wesley has established between these two through his preaching.

Martin Luther, a professor of theology, priest, and an influential figure in the Protestant Reformation, once said “Every week I preach justification by faith to my people because every week they forget it” when talking about justification. For a long time now, most of society have forgotten about the true meaning of justification and must constantly be reminded about it in order not to derail. Justification is a method of moral law and motivation that which Christians use to be righteous through Christ again. This is explained through the historical origins, characteristic, process and finally an example of justification in the Bible.

The writer, Roger Nicole addresses the issues of proper interpretation of the scriptures in hermeneutic and culture perspective. He implies,” that one must avoid reading meaning into the text that are not inherent in the text.” He go on future to say,” We must allow the text to speak for itself without imposing on it a predetermined interpretation.” Study shows axiom (rule of interpretation) of biblical hermeneutics is that the interpreter must take into count the literary genre of the passage being interpreted along with the question of text grammars, philology, background and history (Nicole.p.356-57).The writer discusses the different between “prescriptive or descriptive texts. It is important in the hermeneutics process to distinguish what in Scripture is prescriptive, embodying God’s commandment to us, and what is descriptive, relating events or attitudes that may or may not be desirable (Nicole.p.357). Even though we Know that” God is the primary author of Scripture.” it is imperative that certain practices in both New and Old Testament are merely describe, or serve as a culture background of the activity even of some who were God’s children, without implying that we shall conform to these practices (Nicole. P.357)

William James, a famous philosopher, doctor, journalist (what wasn’t this guy?), was fascinated by the human psyche. James thrived as a professor, giving countless lectures in Scotland based upon religion’s nature and how science could be applied to religious studies. As one does, James then comprised his lectures into a very thick book entitled The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. I had the privilege of reading this book over the course of this semester. Though at times I found this book pretentious and purposefully incomprehensible, by the end of it I truly gained some philosophical insight that allowed me to explore one of my favorite, if not my absolute favorite, topic of discussion: religion. But it did not just focus broadly on religion; it delved into how a human’s actions, behaviors, and feelings can all somehow be

To comprehend the contours of perennial philosophy and to better understand how to interpret reality properly, it would be necessary to look into what Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger would suggest in order to establish a proper hermeneutics of interpreting the Scriptures. This paper will briefly discuss the areas of natural epistemology followed by analogy and participation and finally, Divine and human agency and the life of virtue. It will conclude by incorporating a summarization of the three areas into what Cardinal Ratzinger’s “Erasmus Lecture” hoped in hearing reality in light of modern views. The challenge for Ratzinger in understanding the proper interpretation of the Bible would derive from a “new freedom of thought which the Enlightenment had advanced” being encountered in today’s modern era.