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On the first day at a Magdalene Laundry, women and girls who had been sent there had their hair cut off, their names replaced, and their possessions taken. In the days and weeks that followed, everything else was stripped from them. How do we make sense of this carceral regime? The new conceived wisdom is to describe Magdalene Laundries as places of containment and confinement, as tantamount to prisons. This paper suggests that Magdalene Laundries were far worse than the prison. I argue that rather than discuss Magdalene Laundries as sites of confinement, we should instead understand them as sites of erasure. That is because the pains of this form of detention were drawn not from the loss of liberty, but the loss of self. The article is based on 33 oral history interviews with women who survived Magdalene Laundries and archival research regarding the nuns and religious, who ran these institutions. We also learn that Magdalene Laundries were important social institutions that open a window onto Irish life in the twentieth century. Magdalene Laundries operated with an undiluted formula that all Irish citizens were expected to subscribe to: a culture of conformity that prided obedience, self-denial and moral purity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious visions are personal experiences in which individuals have a sensory experience that is in some way supernatural or divine. In the context of medieval Christianity, true visionaries were understood to have received revelations directly from God, without mediation from priests. In the tradition of the medieval Church and society, women were relegated to a subordinate role; thus, when the mystic who experienced a vision from God was a woman, the situation required careful interpretation, for in bypassing the intermediary authority of the priest, the woman was potentially subverting a hierarchy which itself was considered to have been established by God. This paper will analyze one of the most important medieval mystics, Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), and examine her writings and her images produced in Scivias. It is hypothesized that the medieval ideas of optics and biblical exegesis worked in harmony to structure Hildegard's experiences and to legitimize those experiences to others at the time. In this paper, key images created by Hildegard were analyzed to interpret the descriptions of her experiences and their rendering in visual form in relation to the medieval theories of vision and theology itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narrator in 2 Sam. 17.14b does not clarify Absalom's sin. To demonstrate Absalom's sin, this paper surveys the episode regarding Absalom's rebellion (2 Sam. 15.1–12) through related texts in the book of Samuel. Then it considers the stories about the two counselors, Hushai and Ahithophel (16.15–17.14). This examination reveals that Ahithophel's two counsels aim to promote the unity Absalom pursues in 15.1–12 and that this will of Absalom is frustrated by Hushai and actually by YHWH. YHWH defeats Absalom's will, just as Absalom's rebellion opposes YHWH's will; YHWH punishes Absalom measure for measure. Therefore, 2 Sam. 17.14b proves that YHWH upholds the measure for measure theological principle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I came to the formal study of theology after years as an activist both in the USA and in Perú, and from that work of activism, in which I am still involved, I have learned that one of the best approximations we can have to reality comes if we see life, if we see reality, as a process. So I entered and have stayed with the elaboration of Mujerista Theology in this sense of engaging in a process. Processes have to be mindful of both content and method and that is what I have tried to do in my work. I have seen my work as providing a platform for the voices of grassroots Latinas who are admirably capable of reflecting on their faith and its meaning in their daily lives — in lo cotidiano — and they are perfectly capable of explaining that faith. I entered this process of doing theology with certain intuitions that I think are still operative today though their meanings have evolved and others have been added. I do not think it is of value to spend my time and energy answering ad hominem critiques. I am not willing to allow others to define my agenda and take up my time when their goal is not dialogue but rather criticism for the sake of criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the problem of a theology of religions without the Trinity and the problem of overemphasizing interreligious dialogue without taking the inner communion identity of the church seriously. This paper argues that central to an authentic Trinitarian theology of religions is the question of how the church is rightly to be understood in relation to the Trinity as the doctrinal ground and guide for its inner communion of first theology (a trinitarian theology of the Christian religion) and in its external communion of second theology with the religious world as the realm of the trinitarian reign (a trinitarian theology of religions). Building on this framework, this paper explores the right hermeneutics of the triple identity of the Trinity, Christian faith and other faiths as the ground and guide for Christian right approaches to other faiths for the right goals of mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on how Philip Melanchthon organized his theology of preaching in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, the very first defense of the early church reformers' approach to doctrine against formal papal criticism as drafted in the Confutation of the Augsburg Confession by Johann Eck, who had been commissioned by emperor Charles V to provide a papal romanist refutation of the reformist Augsburg Confession. The article is going to demonstrate that Melanchthon's theology of preaching insists on the proclamation of God's Word as Christ, Gospel, and repentance, an indication that his homiletical theory encompasses key dogmas like christology, revelation, and soteriology, all fundamental tenets which not only define the core of Protestant theology and practice but also provide listeners with the possibility of a changed life experience based on Christ's work as savior. The main contribution of this paper resides in the fact that on the one hand, it attempts to clarify Melanchthon's theological position not as a Protestant writing against Catholics but rather as reformist challenging his papal peers within the Catholic church, while on the other hand, it identifies various aspects of his early thought as presented in the Apology -- Christ, Gospel, repentance -- and places them together systematically into a building block which constitutes his early theology of preaching as dogmatically founded on as well as anchored in christology, revelation, and soteriology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relevance of the study is due to the fact that it attempts to analyze the artistic features, genre identity and the issues addressed in one of the most significant and monumental works of Clive Staples Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia written in the late period of the writer's work (1950–1956). In this regard, the purpose of this article is to consider the fantasy world of C. S. Lewis and the traditions of the English literary fairy tale, the genre of fantasy as a semantics-forming genre, as well as the moral issues through the prism of the Gospel values, which are fundamental in understanding the characters of the heroes. The leading approaches to the study of this problem are the comparative method, the method of philological and philosophical analysis, the dialectical and deduction method, which allow to analyze in detail The Chronicles of Narnia as a work of art in all its genre, ideological and philosophical diversity. The article presents a detailed analysis of Clive Staples Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia. It is revealed that this work represents a special synthesis of a number of genre structures, such as a parable, a fairy tale, and the genre of fantasy. It is substantiated in the paper that fantasy acts as the main genre structure, since it 'generalizes' the parable and the fairy tale, the reality and the fantasy world. The article shows that it is fantasy, as a synthesis of various genre elements, that ensures the unity of the 'world's dual nature': the writer's world, the country where he and his characters live, and the fictional country. The spiritual evolution of Lewis' characters is accomplished through overcoming temptations, fear, indifference, and betrayal. The humaneness of Lewis' moral position is manifested in the fact that he believes that God and his life-giving power is present in the life of every person, and the Joy of man is to meet with God. The materials of the article are of practical value for philologists, philosophers and theologists, and can also be used in lecture courses of "History of Foreign Literature of the XX Century" as well as "History of English Literature of the XX Century", in lecture courses in cultural studies, history of philosophy of science, history of philosophy of religion, and in the teaching of theology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The religious beliefs and experiences of others have long been grist to the anthropological mill. In much anthropological scholarship however there is a resolute silence on the anthropologists' own relationship to the domain of the 'spirit'. Recent scholarship in the anthropology of religion has been highly critical of the Christian underpinnings of much of what is ostensibly secular anthropology (as in the works of Evans-Pritchard, Mary Douglas and Victor Turner among others). The commitment to a religious belief, if not simply a religious upbringing, was seen to be a 'polluting' influence to the proper study of the religion of others in their own terms. In turn scholars adopting a genealogical approach have shown how the very discipline of a secular anthropology of religion is itself the product of a highly Christian intellectual legacy. In his later years, anthropologist, friend and mentor Joel Kahn turned his attention precisely to the study of the pursuit of the sacred in a secular age. Starting from what he describes as his own 'ontological crisis' as a secular American Jew Kahn looks to the Western encounter with Asian religion to set out the domain of what he calls 'gnostic scholarship' that looks to the religion of others not as a cultural artefact but as, ultimately, a source of radical subjective displacement. In the spirit and memory of Joel Kahn this paper discusses the anthropological encounter with the sacred not as an object of knowledge about 'cultures' but as a source of gnosis. Expanding on the implications of Joel's work for an anthropology of religion this work draws upon the author's fieldwork among Catholic devotees of Padre Pio to propose a form of embodied surrender as a pre-requisite for an intersubjective engagement with the ontologically other worlds of our informants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text 1 Samuel 3 has been oft studied from the perspective of the call. A deeper analysis reveals that an important theme is the discernment. The paper focuses on the theme of discernment and the answer to the divine call. The topic of discernment is a particularly current theme, especially in the context of the wide access to information and globalization. First, the study clarifies some concepts and terms. Who is Samuel? Why is he proposed as a model? What is the meaning of discernment? Secondly, I make an exegetical analysis of the text in 1 Samuel 3, in order to identify some characteristics of vocation: the call, the discernment of the divine will, and the mission. The final part sets out the implications. It will highlight the elements that render Samuel a symbol of discernment, with an emphasis on the theological and spiritual aspects and the application of the same to the existence of today man. As Samuel, the human being needs to listen, to discern and to act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Definition of Heterology’ illuminates sacred, heterogeneous experiences Bataille never stopped interrogating, in their throbbing movement of emergence. Furthering orthodox disciplines in the sciences of man, Bataille accounts for the ambivalent feelings of ‘attraction and repulsion’ at the heart of inner experiences that constitute the heart of his thought. In this paper, I further a mimetic line of inquiry in Bataille studies and argue that the laws of attraction and repulsion that animate heterology find their polarized foundations in the laws of the socius, which are also the laws of imitation understood in its heterogeneous – anthropological, ontological and psychological – manifestations. Paradoxically, heterology, while being the ‘science’ (logos) of the ‘totally other’ (hetero), may point toward an abyssal experience of a communicative homology that has the power to transform impure matters into pure spirits, angelic souls into material bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jesus's use of the bridegroom imagery is usually connected to the divine bridegroom in the OT through systematic or biblical theological categories. This article argues that Matthew's use of Hosea 6:6 in Matt 9:13 is an indicator that readers should understand Jesus's bridegroom metaphor in Matt 9:15 as a claim to occupying the same role as the divine bridegroom of Hos 2:16. By following two lines of reasoning--the unity of Matt 9:9-17 and the literary and textual connections between Hos 6:6 and Hos 2:16--this paper will seek to demonstrate this high Christological claim was intentional in Matthew's account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2008, the letters between Charlotte von Kirschbaum and Karl Barth from 1925–1935 were published in German. They reveal the love between them, but also the conflicts between Barth, von Kirschbaum, and Barth’s wife Nelly Barth and how much all three suffered from this constellation. The paper first discusses if and how we are allowed to read these letters and then describes their love relation as well as the conflicts and the importance this experience had for Barth’s theology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article Gilbert Meilaender responds to nine scholars whose papers (collected in this issue) analyze and interact with a variety of theological and ethical themes that emerge in his writing. Among those themes are the moral limits grounded in our embodied nature, the freedom to transcend those limits, the perfection of that nature by divine grace, the relation between political progress toward a common good and the kingdom of God, the place of religious beliefs in public discourse within a liberal democratic society, the meaning and scope of our responsibility to care for human persons at the beginning and end of life, and the meaning of our creaturely longing to rest in God. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the problematic interface between evolutionary scientists’ talk about ethics and current work in philosophy and theology. The paper proceeds by taking four main figures from four different disciplines. The four disciplines are neurophysiology, cognitive psychology, primatology and game theory, and the four figures are Joshua Greene, Mark Hauser, Frans de Waal and Ken Binmore. The paper relates the views of each of these figures to recent work in philosophical and theological ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I ask whether either theology or religious practice actually contribute to ethical theory or ethical practice. I rehearse well-known Humean arguments that they do not. I then reflect on the idea from Professor O’Donovan’s paper that it is virtuous for us to entertain hopes for redemption or for fulfilment and suggest that a careful weighing of these words may indicate otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Herbert McCabe uses football (soccer) as an analogy for Christian ethics, the sports game being an illuminating abstraction from the concreteness of moral life. This paper explores three authorities in the life-abstraction that is sport: the referee, the coach, and the exemplary player. (1) The referee bears practical epistemic authority: he declares what counts as a play within the rules, and what shall be excluded as an invalid (non-rule-following) play. There are interesting authority-problems that arise when referees err. In ethics, epistemic authority is found in casuistry. (2) The coach bears social authority: she works to make her team function as a team, and at the same time to draw each player to her own excellence. Christian ethics values social authority in every truly human dimension. (3) The exemplary player is a personal authority. He demonstrates excellence of play, which goes beyond conformance to the rules and also goes beyond coaching. A complexification here is the relation of deliberate rule-breaking to excellence of performance. In Christian ethics, exemplary authority is held by the saint living in koinonia. The paper closes with the disanalogy that Christian ethics hopes for excellence in every person. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses the Victorian idea that sport builds character, which was one of the inspirations for the modern Olympic movement and remains central to policy debates on sport. The argument is that sport, even in the highly moralised context of ‘muscular Christianity’, failed in this character-forming role, and should not be seen as a source of moral regeneration. The paper argues that the tendency to over-moralise sport, like the commercialisation of sport, has the effect of diminishing the ‘play element’. Recovering sport as play, it is argued, is essential to unlocking its potential to lift the spirit—if not to build character, as the muscular Christians believed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this paper is to suggest that sport can be understood as a form of engagement with the fundamental contingency and vulnerability of the human condition, and as such that it expresses a yearning for meaning in a modern society that offers only the illusion of meaning. Sport, at its most profound, is argued to be a negative liturgy, in the sense that it highlights an absence of meaning, rather than offering a positive alternative. The paper draws on an analysis of contemporary society, and resultant defence of the potential role that liturgy might play in restoring meaning and a sense of transcendence to society, that is offered by the Radical Orthodoxy theologian Catherine Pickstock. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1 Cor. 9:25 Paul exhorts the Corinthian believers to strive like athletes for an eternal prize. This paper elucidates the communal horizon of the self-disciplining he enjoins, which overturns popular modern conceptions of individual fitness and performance training. Paul likewise defines the rewards of spiritual labour as aspects of participation in the communion of saints gathered by the gospel, disallowing a wholly post-temporal construal of the eternal reward which motivates Christian discipline. The paper concludes by raising questions about the theological status of modern sport, of theologies of sport, and of competition as a form of social organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper has two parts: in the first an analytical reading is offered of the various definitions of ‘euthanasia’ as used by the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church concluding that they lack precision; in the second a moral theological reading is offered of the claim that because life is a gift of God, humans are not having the right to dispose of life themselves. As a result, the paper tries to show that the language of ‘ownership’ is unfitting for the ethical questions at hand. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines some of the metaphysical concepts that are present within Goddess feminism at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is asserted from the outset that Goddess feminism is not as incoherent as many of its critics claim; and it is also highly problematic for feminist thealogians to view conceptual precision and philosophical analysis as inevitably masculinist and invidious preoccupations. Three contemporary feminist thealogical concepts of deity are introduced: the Goddess as a personal, loving and panentheistic deity, the Goddess as the impersonal, female and generative pantheistic body of nature, and the Goddess as a maternal space or receptacle of becoming. By reflecting on some of the different ways in which the Goddess may be understood to originate, organize and relate to the whole of nature, this paper identifies areas of coherence, contention and originality in Goddess feminism that are arguably in need of further philosophical study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to explore the possible connections between the Virgin Mary, Myra Hindley and Rosemary West. The paper is divided into five sections. In the first, I explore the role of Mary in Christian theology and provide a Christian feminist response to this. In the second, I address some of the theoretical issues involved in studying female serial killers; this includes outlining the role of the media in responding to news stories involving female killers. In the third, I separately address media responses to Myra Hindley and Rosemary West. In the fourth, I explore psychoanalytic perspectives on mothers and mothering. In the conclusion I attempt to bring together and synthesize the significant threads of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biblical theology's bridge-building capacities are studied in this paper by mapping out a historical trajectory of the discipline, and by addressing the possible novel directions the field might take in the future. An epistemological parameter and a structural parameter were set by Gabler that continue to inform the contemporary discussion. In order to open up the discussion to hermeneutical, philosophical and systematic theological questions, the paper offers a proposal for a text theory, and addresses its implications for some concrete questions posed recently in biblical theology. A final section sketches various currents in biblical studies and theology that are having an impact on the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although most of the theological anthropologies that have been developed in modern times purport to apply to all human beings, recent theologians representing the causes of feminism, the liberation of the poor and oppressed, or those with disabilities, to name just a few examples, have repeatedly complained that mainstream theologies exclude or at least fail to include these causes amongst their concerns. In this paper, I will draw on the work of Thomas Aquinas to outline a possible framework for incorporating into mainstream systematic theology these theologians’ critiques as well as their constructive efforts to account for the image of God in the aforementioned parties. The key to accomplishing this task, I will argue, involves the development of a more differentiated account of sin, which addresses the way that both those included and seemingly excluded from traditional accounts experience and commit sin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A noticeable shift has been recently observed in Western-based Pentecostal mission agencies’ activities in mainland Southeast Asia. Where once these organizations avoided a visible priority on social justice as being at odds with their understanding of mission, the funding for and implementation of such programs has increased dramatically for the last two decades. This shift in focus is best understood by considering the motivations for this work and the perceived differences between evangelism and development work. This paper explores the motivations of these agencies for engaging in international development, and in particular the extent to which development programs are seen by these agencies as a strategy for proselytization and the extent to which they are conducted out of other humanitarian motivations. The research is based on a phenomenological literature survey and new interview data exploring development operations of western-based Pentecostal mission organizations in mainland Southeast Asia. Analysis of these data challenges preconceived notions of a distinction between motives of evangelism and humanitarian concern. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Consumer economies of late capitalist societies have come to be dominated by a powerful cultural narrative of the successful life. Success has increasingly been defined in terms of material attainment, the achievement of status and what might be described, in popular language, as the pursuit of the ‘snazzy life’. This model of what constitutes ‘the good life’ avoids recognizing the shadow that haunts such narratives; namely the possibility that one may not succeed and as a result be deemed a failure. This paper suggests that engaging with the often neglected theme of failure enables a contemporary feminist theology of loss to emerge; a theology that helps, moreover, to shape richer understandings of what it might mean to live a ‘good’ life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas F. Torrance (born 1913) is chiefly remembered for his work on the early dialogue between theology and natural science. Out of tune with the liberal theology of the 1960s which he labeled as ‘dualist’, the dialogue with science was just one way whereby Torrance steered towards realism in an attempt to recover the classic structures, doctrines and forms of the Christian tradition. This short paper looks at the neglected topic of his theology of ministry. During the wary and fenced ecumenism of the 50s and 60s, Torrance systematically reconnected church order with the servant ministry of Jesus Christ. He recognised the temptations of ministry either to seek worldly credibility and prestige or to become otherworldly and merely pious. He eschewed both, but refused to over-specify ministry, insisting that the actual form it took is ambiguous, provisional and unfettered. That conception of ministry is tested against Torrance’s criticism of what he saw as a ‘detached’ understanding of the episcopate in the Church of England of the 1960s and in his support for the ordination of women. He maintained that those who obstructed the ordination of women argued as though the Incarnation had made no change in the order of fallen humanity. In his lifetime, Torrance never engaged with the issue of the ordination of gay persons, but the structures within which he understood ministry would be hospitable to any who committed to the servant ministry of Jesus. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This introduction describes the origins and rationale behind the papers that comprise this special issue of Studies in Christian Ethics. These papers represent several recent contributions to scholarship on the theology of character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses attempts to think historicity in the work of the theologian Rudolf Bultmann and the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg. It then draws on the work of the Jesuit theologian Robert Doran in order to suggest how an historical pragmatics without historicism might be relevant to a future theology with social import. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The bifurcation of theological scholarship from pastoral ministry has led to a twofold problem in contemporary church/academy relations: the theological anemia of the church, and the ecclesial anemia of theology. This essay explores these twin problems and suggests that the way forward in bridging the gap between academy and church is to reunite the pastoral vocation with the vocation of the theologian. Toward this end, the essay offers a taxonomy of three contemporary models of the pastor-theologian, examining the strengths and limitations of each. Ultimately, the paper calls for a resurrection of an all but extinct, yet historically rooted model of the pastorate—the pastor as ecclesial theologian, and challenges the emerging generations of theologians to consider the pastorate as a viable context for their future theological scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A “recent consensus” has emerged in Locke studies that has sought to place theology at the center of Locke's political philosophy, insisting that the validity and cogency of Locke's political conclusions cannot be substantiated independently of the theology that resides at their foundation. This paper argues for the need to distance Locke from God, claiming that not only can we “bracket” the normative conclusions of Locke's political philosophy from their theological foundations, but that this was in fact Locke's own intention, intent as he was to justify these conclusions to a diverse political audience often divided by faith. In other words, this “recent consensus” in Locke studies is premised on an erroneous understanding of Locke's political philosophy, even as advanced by Locke himself. Locke's own philosophical discourse bears witness to the very “bracketing” of his political conclusions from their theological foundations that these Locke scholars claim is impossible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the way some contemporary feminist Pagan practitioners talk about nature and goddess. I see these feminist Pagans as providing an example of a religion of nature, much like that of Donald Crosby’s (2002) that focuses on nature as the ultimate. However, unlike Crosby’s religion of nature, which could be perceived as isolationist, these feminist Witches’ willingness to maintain theistic language through religious fictionalism, even though non-realist, supports their community participation in an increasingly realist Pagan context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Hare’s paper successfully exposes philosophical naïvéties and reductive pretensions in the evolutionary research he surveys. But he fails to clarify how ‘God’, on a view such as Dominic Johnson’s, could not be seen merely as a dispensable projection of ‘primitive’ societies, and thus how his own continuing commitment to a Kantian ethic might need to be bolstered by a concomitant form of ‘natural theology’ attentive to evolutionary dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that Aquinas and other scholastic theologians offer unexpected resources for a moral theology that is fully engaged with today’s pluralistic societies. In order to do so, it is necessary to bring Aquinas into a conversation with these diverse perspectives, rather than treating his thought as a closed system, and to extend his insights through original, constructive analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that the theological ethics of the future will be both more authentically Christian and more public, and briefly illustrates that claim in relation to the polity and to the academy. It argues, first, that Christian political reasoning should not be preoccupied with liberal anxieties about epistemic criteria for public reasoning, but rather turn its attention to the institutional telos of the polity, the political common good; and be prepared to speak in an openly Christian voice where appropriate. It argues, second, that scholarly reasoning offered by theological ethicists to the academy will be more effective the better it understands the complementary roles fulfilled by theology and other academic disciplines, such as the social sciences. Theological ethicists should not view theology as queen of the sciences but instead critically appropriate the findings of the social sciences and also work to offer it healthier, theologically-informed concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The long standing debate over how to interpret Galatians 3:28 gets bogged down in two main ways. The first is disagreement over whether it only applies to our justification with God, or if it also has implications for our relationships with each other. In other words, is this passage just about our vertical relationship with God – soteriology - or does it also include the horizontal relationship we have with others – ecclesiology? The second problem hovers around an associated question: the nature of ‘equality in being’ but ‘difference in function’. Can a person be inherently equal if they are disqualified from certain roles they are capable of doing, and that disqualification is entirely based on their gender? This paper argues that the full context of Galatians demonstrates that Galatians 3:28 is in fact relevant for egalitarian social interaction as well as equality with God through justification. It then demonstrates how ‘equality in being’ but a ‘different function imposed on some people because of their essential being’, is self-contradictory and unsustainable. This discussion is critical for a more confident acceptance of the egalitarian position in church life today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Historians and archaeologists, noting the catastrophic loss of continuity with previous generations, talk of the "death of the past". Over the last two decades letters, autobiographies, diaries and family chronicles have attracted increasing attention as a window to the emotional life of the past. Clearly this is of particular interest for theology. What actually happens when thoughts, events, emotions are distilled into writing and when scratchings of quill on paper are transmogrified into print? Is it helpful to describe such fragments from the past as "Ego-documents" or "Self-representations"? What did early modem believers, and religious writers such as Erasmus, Cardinal Centanni, Martin Luther, Thomas Miintzer or Argula von Grumbach think about genre, identity, processes of communication? What are we to make of their writings, how steer a way between naive replication and impenetrable theory? Are there rituals we should be deploying to sharpen our focus and clean up our interpretive grid? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Paul II proposes that 1 Cor. 9:24-27 includes sport among the human values and offers a paradigm to recognise ‘the fundamental validity of sport, considering it not just as a term of comparison to illustrate higher ethical and aesthetic ideal, but also in its intrinsic reality as a factor in the formation of man as a part of his culture and his civilization’. In this paper, I intend to follow John Paul II’s interpretation and moral reasoning in order to demonstrate how 1 Cor. 9:24-27 can be used in Christian ethics as a paradigm for theological reflection on sport. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the theological work of Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s Mujerista Theology, with an emphasis on the role of hybridity, daily life, and autobiography in her corpus. It also offers suggestions for future developments in this theology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers a critical overview of the more recent Orthodox theology of personhood. This theology is put into perspective in terms of overviewing its development and transmission between four notable exponents: Lossky, Yannaras, Zizioulas and Horuzhy. The model of personhood they share is shown to be re-received and specifically reworked by each, not without sparks of mutual critique. Still, the general tendency is to make the conception of personhood more ecclesially and anthropologically relevant. Critical consequences of this of theological tought are not to be understood narrowly. For they ramify to bear upon epistemology, ontology, philosophy, theology proper and ethics. Apart from fruitful solutions to the questions raised by thematizing the challenge of personhood (as immanent to our being image-bearers of God), we display entry points for critical problematization of this Orthodox current of thought. Hence critical consequences of the theology of personhood are not articulated without reference to the meta-critique of it, as offered by a third generation of Orthodox theologians. We propose to view this process in general as a birth of a ‘theological age’ of sorts: the nascent of ecclesial understanding of our personhood in God. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years a number of new approaches to theology have emerged. In 2009 a major international symposium was published by Oxford University Press entitled Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology. In it, the editors and contributors set out the prospect of analytic theology — very roughly, a method of doing theology utilising the tools of analytic philosophy. In one sense, this is not new. Analytic philosophers have been doing philosophical theology for at least twenty years. But theologians have been slow to draw on the potential benefits an analytic approach to theology promises. The book is an attempt to stimulate theologians to consider this approach as a theological, rather than philosophical, project. This paper sets out some of the potential benefits of analytic theology. My aim is to give the reader a sense of what analytic theology entails; and to commend analytic theology as a theological method. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although it is well known that Aquinas holds that infused versions of prudence and the other acquired virtues are bestowed on man along with habitual grace, there is no uniform and widely accepted account of how the infused and acquired virtues are related: some scholars interpret Aquinas to mean that the acquired virtues are ‘taken up’ into the infused virtues, while others credit him with the view that the infused and acquired virtues somehow coexist. This paper explores one common way of maintaining that the Christian’s infused and acquired virtues ‘coexist’. I argue that while such an interpretation is able to accommodate some of Aquinas’s most fundamental claims about the infused and acquired virtues, it is also problematic in important respects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the influences which shape the tone and character of Sallie McFague's ecotheology, while also suggesting that her theology holds immense socially transformative potential even while departing from many of the basic assumptions of traditional Christian theism. Contrary to the beliefs of majority Christianity, which most often assume the adequacy of supernatural and interventionist images of God, McFague contends that these outdated images seriously debilitate Christian agency and place our planet in peril. Changing Christian habits of thought about God, therefore, may yet prove to be a necessary, though not sufficient, prerequisite to resolve our environmental plight. Ultimately, I suggest that McFague's reconstructive theology is a significant part of a larger blossoming of immanentalist sensibilities within North American religious culture at large, and in relation to which Christian churches will have to adjust in order to survive. This theological sea change may yet have the effect of moving McFague's reconstructive proposals from the margins into the mainstream of Christian discourse and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Jewish tradition there are those who simply identify divine justice with the specific divine commands, which is a theological version of legal positivism. This paper argues for another view in the Jewish tradition, viz., divine justice or divine wisdom is the rationale of the specific divine commands, thus making them more than arbitrary decrees. As the rationale of the specific divine commands, divine justice functions as a criterion of judgment that prevents irrational interpretations and unjust applications of the specific divine commands. This approach is a theological version of natural law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People today live within the context of a globalized world with people of many cultures and religions living together. This intermixing of peoples, cultures, societies and religions creates the opportunity for different religions and thoughts to combine into new perspectives and develop a more relevant Christianity. The basic tenets of Asian culture, religion and thought can instruct and develop theology so that theology can remain relevant to our modern world. In particular, the Asian understanding of Chi can nurture a stronger theological perspective of the Holy Spirit. This paper will examine Chi and illustrate the similarities it shares with the Holy Spirit to work towards a pneumatology which will encourage people to live harmoniously and peacefully with one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]