Artists, Citizen, PhilosophersSeeking the Peace of the City by Duane K. Friesen |
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"Readers will appreciate the way a single work addresses so many dimensions of faithful Christians’ engagement with culture. Friesen gives thoughtful attention to questions of aesthetic experience and judgment, responsibilities in civic life, and interactions with scientific and religious knowledge.
"The author brings nuance and sensitivity to the complexity of these issues and interacts with a wide range of arguments, theorists, and theologians. Friesen helpfully draws from multiple traditions while his Mennonite background provides a substantial and winsome foundation."--Christine D. Pohl, Professor of Social Ethics, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky
Running through Artists, Citizens, Philosophers is Duane K. Friesen’s key concern to write a theology of culture from a believers church perspective. Friesen aims to provide an Anabaptist alternative to paradigms of culture offered by such influential thinkers as Ernst Troeltsch and H. Richard Niehbuhr.
Friesen’s innovative approach leads him to suggest that Christians engage the larger culture through the process of transcultural analogical imagination (translating the gospel into our time and place). Christians are called to engage the culture as artists (to seek aesthetic excellence), as citizens (to shape the common good), and as philosophers (to search for wisdom).
"A major accomplishment! Friesen is indeed a third way in addition to Gustafson and Hauerwas." —Glen Stassen, in the Foreword
About the Author . . .
Duane K. Friesen, North Newton, Kansas, is Professor of Bible and Religion at Bethel College, North Newton. Among his many other books and writings, Friesen is author of Christian Peacemaking and International Conflict: A Realistic Pacifist Perspective (Herald Press, 1989).