Over the past 30 years, the effects of globalization, climate change and multiple military coups have reshaped the Fijian landscape. The “lines in the sand” around issues of land ownership, rising tides and Fijian identity have complicated the relationship between the Fijian Methodist Church and the land which grounds its culture. The historical fissures between the majority Methodist indigenous church and Fiji’s large Hindu population continue to place the rights of first peoples in tension with rights of ethnic and religious minorities, even as the country’s secular government stresses the possibility of harmony. In recent years, the church’s primary responses to these demographic, political and environmental changes have been homiletic and hermeneutic. In spite of declining membership and reduced political influence, the church’s present experience has been re-read as a “New Exodus” journey toward a promised land. This theme of “New Exodus” has become a dominant trope in sermons, church education events and Fijian Methodist self-understanding. A more complicated hermeneutic, however, mines the biblical theme of exile to describe the current situation. In iTaukei (indigenous Fijian) understanding, the ‘vanua,’ or land, connotes the traditional culture of those who live on that land. As change impacts the culture of indigenous village life, the land itself is understood to change. Though 80% of Fijian land is tribally held, many Fijian Methodists experience the land on which they have lived for generations as suddenly unfamiliar. My paper will explore these disparate biblical readings of the Fijian Methodist experience through a homiletic analysis of four Fijian sermons, pointing to the importance of pulpit rhetoric in creating new conceptions of place and direction in a world where familiar markers are washing away.

In recent decades historians have demonstrated that women were preaching in the U.S.A. long before the ordination of women to ministry. Many Quaker, evangelical, and Holiness women were itinerant preachers who traversed the country throughout the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, encountering numerous hardships and obstacles as they went. In this essay I identify and examine three types of transitions in which the Spirit appears to have been “on the loose” so that women were able to claim their preaching vocations: ecclesial and theological transitions, political and geographical transitions, and personal transitions in the lives of the women themselves. I conclude by reflecting on what we might learn from this history for opening the pulpit to preachers on the margins today.

This article suggests that topical preaching can be revisited with integrity in postmodernity. The topical sermon in postmodernity should seek to place texts in conversation with one another in such a way that each text is valued and respected. Instead of allowing only one text to be heard at the exclusion of all others, appropriate topical preaching should model the embrace of otherness and conversation.

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Toward the end of 2015, 65.3 million people were seeking refuge or were otherwise forcibly displaced globally. This is the largest number since the recordings began around World War II. In Europe more than 1 million people arrived by sea in 2015 – more than four times as many as the previous year.1 The crisis situation stirred public debate as well as church-based initiatives trying to deal with the situation. In order to understand the interaction between public discourse and local preaching a group of homileticians from seven European countries collaborated on an empirical study of how the refugee crisis impacted preaching. In what follows we present the initial results from the Scandinavian countries.

In October 2016 homileticians from seven European countries met in Leipzig in order to reflect on political preaching in the context of the so called European ‘refugee crisis’. This article shows the background of this conference, gives a very brief overview of the perspectives from different countries, and suggests ways to continue European homiletical research on this theme.

Preaching is in transition, so is homiletics as the theory of preaching. In this article the development of homiletics in the Low Countries is explored as a case-study within the dynamics of international homiletical thought. The material for this case-study consists of the doctoral theses that have been published since the turn of the century. The amount of doctoral work in homiletics, the variety of methodological approaches and theological perspectives, provide a viable entrance to homiletics as academic discipline. It will be concluded that homiletics has developed into an international, empirically oriented, culturally sensitive, and theological diverse field. Preaching is in transition, so is homiletics. The transition, as seen through the lens of recent Dutch contributions to scholarly discourse in preaching, has three focal points: pneumatology, language, and empirical research.

Quisiera comenzar con algunas observaciones preliminares con respecto al tema de nuestro coloquio y autor. La primera se refiere a que en un mundo altamente laico y en relación con un autor que según mi interpretación se encuentra en la tradición de Nietzsche, Heidegger y en estrecha relación con un tipo de epistemología, por ejemplo, de Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard o Deleuze/Guattari, de la cual el mismo Borges es uno de los primeros en asentar en el siglo veinte después de Heidegger. Una segunda observación: quisiera además dejar en claro que no me referiré a continuación a lo que Borges piensa o no piensa, cree o no cree, ya que no sé qué es lo que Borges como individuo pensaba o creía; tengo sólo sus textos a disposición. Una tercera observación principal tiene que ver con nuestro tema: ¿cómo podemos osar hablar de fe en la obra de Borges sin aclarar el concepto de "fe" tan ligado a la religión? y ¿cómo podemos hablar de "religión"sin poner una base mínima al respecto? Lo que no podemos hacer es suponer que disponemos de un significado en común de lo que significa religión, término que tiene una historia desde la Antigüedad griega y que al menos tiene dos acepciones, la de "relegare" y la de "religare", ligadas particularmente al cristianismo y que atraviesan toda la cultura occidental. A continuación quisiera comenzar con algunas observaciones generales sobre los conceptos fe y religión, para luego pasar a ciertos pensamientos de Borges que se encuentran dispersos por toda su obra y en contextos específicos o generales sobre la religión y fe, también dentro de un contexto de la filosofía postmoderna, reflexiones a Creencia reflexiva las cuales les atribuimos un estatus sistémico.:Observaciones generales. - Borges. - Resumen

Die Entstehung des Geldes weist in ihrem Verlauf Parallelen zu den Stufen der erweiterten maslowschen Bedürfnishierarchie auf. Es wird eine von Maslow selbst postulierte Flexibilität seines Konzept der Erfüllung von Bedürfnissen angenommen, bei der einzelne Stufen nicht vollständig erfüllt werden müssen, um die nächste zu erreichen oder als wichtig zu erkennen. Bedürfnisse eines höheren Abschnittes existieren unter Umständen bereits vor noch nicht vollständig befriedigten Wünschen eines vorausgehenden Abschnittes. Dieser Annahme wird die Entstehung des Geldes mit dem Zweck der Befriedigung spezieller, aus Maslows Hierarchie übernommener, Bedürfnisse entgegengestellt.:Vorwort.... 1 1 Bedürfnispyramide nach Maslow.... 1 2 Geldformen und deren Entsprechung in der Bedürfnispyramide nach Maslow.... 3 2.1 Geldentstehung.... 3 2.2 Warenhandel und physiologische Bedürfnisse.... 5 2.3 Gesellschaftliche Zwänge und Sicherheitsbedürfnisse/Bedürfnisse nach Zugehörigkeit und Liebe.... 6 2.4 Religion und Transzendenz.... 6 3 Grundlagen der Geldtheorie.... 8 4 Erscheinungsformen des Geldes.... 9 4.1 Hortgeld und Tauschgeld.... 9 4.2 Sachgeld und Symbolgeld.... 10 4.3 Gold.... 11 4.4 Papiergeld.... 12 5 Geldwirtschaft heute.... 12 6 Zusammenfassung.... 13 Literatur.... 15