April 7, 2006

MINNEAPOLIS – No other movement or insight has challenged Christian theology so steeply in the modern period as historicism. The 200-year-old notion that concepts, ideas, and theories are all influenced by, or occasioned by, historical circumstances is today a commonplace in all fields, and lays bare the historical character of our most cherished convictions, honored traditions, and dogmatic formulations. Historicism: The Once and Future Challenge for Theology by Sheila Greeve Davaney, the latest in the Guides to Theological Inquiry series from Fortress Press, helps theology come to terms with historicism and its imperatives.

With clarity and skill, Davaney's authoritative text traces the history of historicism and its various meanings from the German Enlightenment through its Continental and distinctly American developments to its contemporary postmodern incarnations. She demonstrates how it has forced theology to pioneer methods that specifically acknowledge social locatedness, particularity, and pragmatic intent, effectively replacing theology's metaphysical and dogmatic basis with a largely historical one. Her final chapter charts a possible future course.

"Sheila Davaney lays out, with all the clarity, cogency, and thorough-going intellectual honesty she is so well known for, the challenges that historicism poses to theology. . . . Undaunted by these challenges, she offers a powerful account of how theology can meet them and in the process brings together, in a marvelously irenic spirit, some of the best insights of contemporary theological trends in the United States." – Kathryn Tanner, University of Chicago

Sheila Greeve Davaney is Professor of Theology at Iliff School of Theology. She recently authored Pragmatic Historicism: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (2000); and among her edited publications are Converging on Culture: Theologians in Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and Criticism by Kathryn Tanner and Delwin Brown (2001) and Horizons in Feminist Theology with Rebecca Chopp (Fortress Press, 1997).

Historicism: The Once and Future Challenge for Theology, By Sheila Greeve Davaney, Format: 5.5" x 8.5," paperback, 216 pages, Item No: 0-8006-3219-2, Price: $18.00, Publisher: Fortress Press.

To order Historicism call Fortress Press at 1-800-328-4648 or visit the web site at http://www.fortresspress.com/.

Fortress Press