Professor Tom O'Loughlin

Many thanks to Patricia Devlin who compiled these links about Professor Tom O'Loughlin:

To understand how historical theologians approach questions, probably the easiest route it to watch historical theologians at work. You can see historical theology being done in these videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlh6yirUcPo&list=PLFC4121E00BB41795&index=5&feature=plpp_video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvDKxtHI5bY&list=PLFC4121E00BB41795&index=6&feature=plpp_video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiEh1bPnJd0&list=PL52C4CE0B7593CFC8&index=38&feature=plpp_video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRbm3N4efrE&list=PL52C4CE0B7593CFC8&index=9&feature=plpp_video

To see my overall approach, look at my 2015 monograph The Eucharist: Origins and Contemporary Understandings (T. & T Clark / Bloomsbury) which examines how developments and discoveries over the last century in the fields of early Christian studies make it essential that the churches subject their inherited views on the Eucharist - inherited mainly from the scholastic Late Medieval and Reformation periods - to a profound reappraisal. Such reappraisals are always difficult as there is usually a great deal of emotional investment in the theologies we inherit from the past, but part of the service of theologians is to help people formulate new and more comprehensive visions of what they believe. Also, you might like to watch this video: Why study the Eucharist?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNSMbOCKoMY&list=PL52C4CE0B7593CFC8&index=68

To get a free download of an article of mine on Lk 1:1 and what it tell us about ministry and books in the early churches, go to:

http://gorgiaspress.com/bookshop/t-openaccess_repository.aspx

and you will find some excellent articles by other scholars besides

The Brepols Library of Christian Sources.

https://www.brepolsonline.net/series/stt-eb

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj-8Uy1BJIQ&list=PL52C4CE0B7593CFC8

Prof. Thomas O'Loughlin of the University of Nottingham explores the significance of how we communicate. We communicate both orally -- using voices and listening -- and in this mode belongs the human love of stories and narratives. We also communicate in words along -- writing -- and this tends to make our communication abstract and adhering to stricter rules of logic. Both have played important roles in the history of Christianity, but a failure to distinguish between then, and how writing in earlier times was more akin to a tape recorder than to a modern book, caused a great deal of misunderstanding. Christianity emerged in an oral culture, it then played a central role in created the culture of the word-on-paper, and now has to relearn orality for new world of communications.