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Best Theological Memoir from Byron Borger, Hearts and Minds Bookstore
How did one of the twentieth century's most celebrated liberals have such a dramatic change of heart?
After growing up in the heart of rural Methodism in Oklahoma, Thomas Oden found Marx, Nietzsche and Freud storming into his imagination. He joined the post-World War II pacifist movement and became enamored with every aspect of the 1950s' ecumenical Student Christian Movement. Ten years before America's entry into the Vietnam war he admired Ho Chi Min as an agrarian patriot. For Oden, every turn was a left turn.
At Yale he earned his Ph D under H. Richard Niebuhr and later met with some of the most formidable minds of the era—enjoying conversations with Gadamer, Bultmann and Pannenberg as well as a lengthy discussion with Karl Barth at a makeshift office in his hospital room. While traveling with his family through Turkey, Syria and Israel, he attended Vatican II as an observer and got his first taste of ancient Christianity. And slowly, he stopped making left turns.
Oden's enthusiasms for pacifism, ecumenism and the interface between theology and psychotherapy were ambushed by varied shapes of reality. Yet it was a challenge from a Jewish scholar, his friend and mentor Will Herberg, that precipitated his most dramatic turn—back to the great minds of ancient Christianity. Later a meeting with then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) planted the seeds for what became Oden's highly influential Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. This fascinating memoir walks us through not only his personal history but some of the most memorable chapters in twentieth-century theology.
Table of Content
Preface
Part 1: Early Years
1. The 1930s: Prairie Dawn
2. The 1940s: A World at War
3. The 1950s: Love and Learning
4. The 1960s: The Church of What’s Happening Now
Part 2: Change Of Heart
5. The 1970s: The U-Turn
6. The 1980s: Charting the Course
Part 3: Homeward Bound
7. The 1990s: The Outpouring of Grace
8. The 2000s: A Time of Harvest
9. The 2010s: After Eight Decades
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
Name Index
Subject Index
About the author
Thomas C. Oden (1931–2016) was the general editor of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture and the Ancient Christian Doctrine series as well as the author of Classic Christianity, a revision of his three-volume systematic theology. His books also include The African Memory of Mark, Early Libyan Christianity, and How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind. He wasthe director of the Center for Early African Christianity at Eastern University in Pennsylvania and he also served as the Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology at the Graduate School and The Theological School of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey.
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