Rethinking the Beloved Community: Ecclesiology, Hermeneutics, Social Theory

This book, drawing for its title upon Josiah Royce's well-known turn of phrase, presents twelve essays, written over forty years of the author's life, which together see ecclesiology as a form of hermeneutical social theory intelligible both to theologians and scholars in the human sciences. This perspective is presented as one in which members of Christian communions, and others of good will, can wrestle in common with contemporary issues of human life in a context open to transcendence. The book is arranged in five parts: Social Reality, Hermeneutics, Ecclesiogenesis, Civil Society, and Householding. An analytical introduction by the author links the essays situationally and conceptually. The principal interlocutors, in addition to Royce, are Paul Ricoeur, Alfred Schutz, Ernst Troeltsch, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, G.W.F. Hegel, Robert Bellah, John Rawls, and JŸrgen Habermas.

Author Biography: Lewis S. Mudge is a member of the Core Doctoral Faculty of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California and the Robert Leighton Stuart Professor of Theology, Emeritus, at the San Francisco Theological Seminary.