An insightful and fresh perspective of the Ten Commandments reveals how this ancient text is the underpinning for social justice, equality, and the foundation of society.

Each commandment is expanded beyond interpersonal morality to encompass the global economy and our hyper-connected age. Stealing, for example, is recast as the difference between the fair trade price of a commodity and what we pay. Keeping the Sabbath is recast as resistance to consumer culture, having enough.

The Ten Commandments are a resource for everyone, from the spiritual-but-not-religious to the deeply observant, who wants to resist injustice, heal our earth, and find personal dignity amid the free-for-alls of modern life.

We don't have to invent a bunch of new practices to meaningfully integrate our spirituality and politics. There is already a perfectly good set of ten of them, with as much progressive firepower as any of us can handle, that has existed for some 3000 years.

Introduction: The Ten Commandments Are Practices of Liberation

The First Commandment: You Shall Have No Other Gods Besides Me Dethrone the Modern Deities of Political, Social, and Corporate Power

The Second Commandment: Do Not Make for Yourself a Sculpted Image; Do Not Bow to Them, Do Not Serve Them Accept No Substitutes for God's Power of Liberation

The Third Commandment: Do Not Take the Name of God in Vain Defend the Goodness of God; Take Responsibility for Resistance and Change

The Fourth Commandment: Observe the Sabbath Day and Keep it Holy Squander One Day Every Week

The Fifth Commandment: Honor Your Father and Your Mother Stay Accountable to Where You Came From

The Sixth Commandment: Do Not Kill Renounce Human and Ecological Violence

The Seventh Commandment: Do Not Commit Adultery Stay In for the Long Run, Reject Throw-Away Culture

The Eighth Commandment: Do Not Steal Pay What Stuff Really Costs in Fair Wages and the Planet's Resources

The Ninth Commandment: Do Not Testify Against Your Neighbor As a Lying Witness Speak and Demand Truth in Every Sphere - Home, Corporations, Government

The Tenth Commandment: Do Not Covet Practice Your Liberation--You Have Enough, You Are Enough

In public debates over biotechnology, theologians, philosophers, and political theorists have proposed that biotechnology could have significant implications for human nature. They argue that ethical evaluations of biotechnologies that might affect human nature must take these implications into account. In this book, Gerald McKenny examines these important yet controversial arguments, which have in turn been criticized by many moral philosophers and professional bioethicists. He argues that Christian ethics is, in principle, committed to some version of the claim that human nature has normative status in relation to biotechnology. Showing how both criticisms and defences of this claim have often been facile, he identifies, develops, and critically evaluates three versions of the claim, and contributes a fourth, distinctively Christian version to the debate. Focusing on Christian ethics in conversation with secular ethics, McKenny's book is the first thorough analysis of a controversial contemporary issue.

This book explores the diversity and dynamism of Islam in Southeast Asia through the concept of adab, or beautiful behavior. Amid the complexity of Islamic civilization, adab provides Muslims with a shared sense of sacred history, identity, and morality. In the context of Islamic ethics, adab defines the rules of personal and public etiquette: good manners, proper conduct, civility and humaneness. Featuring the interdisciplinary research of nine prominent scholars of Islam, the book offers new perspectives on adab's multiple meanings and myriad applications for Muslim communities in Malaysia and Indonesia. The chapters examine a wide range of texts, spotlighting the writings of prominent Muslim thinkers, and contexts, focusing on the everyday experiences of lay Muslims. Drawing on a variety of theoretical and methodological lenses, the essays reveal how beautiful behavior impacts local institutions, cultural practices, and religious imaginations via politics and law, spirituality and piety, ethics and experience. With its careful textual analysis, detailed case studies, and attention to historical continuities and disjunctures, Piety, Politics and Everyday Ethics in Southeast Asian Islam is essential reading for students and scholars interested in global Islam and the lived, local dynamics of Muslim Southeast Asia.

Enter the packed courtroom and take your seat as a juror on the Cain v. Abel trial. Soon, the prosecution and defense attorneys (angels from Jewish legend) will call Cain, Abel, Sin, Adam, Eve, and God to the witness stand to present their perspectives on the world's first murder. Great Jewish commentators throughout the ages will also offer contradictory testimony on Cain's emotional, societal, and spiritual influences. As jurors, when we mete out Cain's punishment, must we factor in his family history, psychological makeup, and the human impulse to sin? In this highly eclectic and gripping compilation of insights by Jewish commentators on the Cain and Abel story, courtroom scenes are juxtaposed with the author's commentary, advancing novel insights and introspection. As each of us grapples with Cain's actions, we confront our own darkest traits. If Cain is a symbol for all humanity, what can we do to avoid becoming like him? Furthering this conversation, Rabbi Dan Ornstein includes a discussion and activity guide to promote open dialogue about human brokenness and healing, personal impulses, and societal responsibility.

The threat of ecological collapse is increasingly becoming a reality for the world's populations, both human and nonhuman; addressing this global challenge requires enormous cultural creativity and demands a diversity of perspectives, especially from the humanities. Theology and Ecology Across the Disciplines draws from a variety of academic disciplines and positions in order to explore the role and nature of environmental responsibility, especially where such themes intersect with religious or theological viewpoints. Covering disciplines such as history, philosophy, literature, politics, peace studies, economics, women's studies, and the ecological sciences as well as systematic and moral theology, the contributors emphasize how these positions have begun to develop distinct perspectives on urgent ecological issues, as well as pointing toward specific practices at the local and international level. This volume provides a multidisciplinary point of departure for urgent conversations on environmental responsibility that resist simplistic solutions. Rather, the contributors highlight the complex nature of modern ecology, and suggest creative ways forward in the situation of an apparently intractable global problem.

Conceived at the same conference that produced the Student NonviolentCoordinating Committee (SNCC), the Student Interracial Ministry (SIM)was a national organisation devoted to dismantling Jim Crow while simultaneouslyadvancing American churches' approach to race. In this book, DavidP. Cline details how, between the founding of SIM in 1960 and its dissolutionat the end of the decade, the seminary students who created and ranthe organisation influenced hundreds of thousands of community membersthrough its various racial reconciliation and economic justice projects. Frominner-city ministry in Oakland to voter registration drives in southwesternGeorgia, participants modeled peaceful inter racialism nationwide. By tellingthe history of SIM-its theology, influences, and failures-Cline situates SIMwithin two larger frameworks: the long civil rights movement and the evenlonger tradition of liberal Christianity's activism for social reform. Pulling SIM from the shadow of its more famous twin, SNCC, Clinesheds light on an understudied facet of the movement's history. In doing so,he provokes an appreciation of the struggle of churches to remain relevantin swiftly changing times and shows how seminarians responded to institutionalconservatism by challenging the establishment to turn toward politicalactivism.

Christianity's demographics, vitality, and influence have tipped markedly toward the global South and East. Addressing this seismic shift, one of today's leading Christian scholars reflects on what he has learned about justice through his encounters with world Christianity.
Philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff's experiences in South Africa, the Middle East, and Honduras have shaped his views on justice through the years. In this book he offers readers an autobiographical tour, distilling the essence of his thoughts on the topic. After describing how he came to think about justice as he does and reviewing the theory of justice he developed in earlier writings, Wolterstorff shows how deeply embedded justice is in Christian Scripture. He reflects on the difficult struggle to right injustice and examines the necessity of just punishment. Finally, he explores the relationship between justice and beauty and between justice and hope.
This book is the first in the Turning South series, which offers reflections by eminent Christian scholars who have turned their attention and commitments toward the global South and East.

Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. In keeping with this dictum, taking ethics seriously means engaging with the real world where the human sense of right and wrong is daily tested. At their best, all faith traditions are challenged by such testing; and if faith-inspired ethics are thought to goven the whole of life, their guiding values need constantly to be interpreted by the believer to achieve a practical result. In the Muslim tradition, this is what the Qur'an really amounts to: a call to strive for belief with a social conscience. For fourteen centuries Muslim scholars have grappled with the implications of that call in matters of law, social practice and theology. And in our own time, the quests for civil society and the rule of law have much to do with the response given to these ethical questions. 'A Companion to Muslim Ethics' explores Islam's core conception of the good, shared with other great traditions. Leading experts examine issues such as gender equality, nonviolence, dispute resolution, the environment, health and finance. The volume will appeal to all those interested in how reason, faith and circumstance shape difficult moral choices in an increasingly globalised world.

Through an absorbing investigation into recent, high-profile scandals involving one of the largest kosher slaughterhouses in the world, located unexpectedly in Postville, Iowa, Aaron S. Gross makes a powerful case for elevating the category of the animal in the study of religion. Major theorists have almost without exception approached religion as a phenomenon that radically marks humans off from other animals, but Gross rejects this paradigm, instead matching religion more closely with the life sciences to better theorize human nature. Gross begins with a detailed account of the scandals at Agriprocessors and their significance for the American and international Jewish community. He argues that without a proper theorization of "animals and religion," we cannot fully understand religiously and ethically motivated diets and how and why the events at Agriprocessors took place. Subsequent chapters recognize the significance of animals to the study of religion in the work of Ernst Cassirer, Emile Durkheim, Mircea Eliade, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Jacques Derrida and the value of indigenous peoples' understanding of animals to the study of religion in our daily lives. Gross concludes by extending the Agribusiness scandal to the activities at slaughterhouses of all kinds, calling attention to the religiosity informing the regulation of "secular" slaughterhouses and its implications for our relationship with and self-imagination through animals.

Few issues are as complex and controversial as immigration in the United States. The only thing anyone seems to agree on is that the system is broken. Mark Amstutz offers a succinct overview and assessment of current immigration policy and argues for an approach to the complex immigration debate that is solidly grounded in Christian political thought. After analyzing key laws and institutions in the US immigration system, Amstutz examines how Catholics, evangelicals, and main-line Protestants have used Scripture to address social and political issues, including immigration. He critiques the ways in which many Christians have approached immigration reform and offers concrete suggestions on how Christian groups can offer a more credible political engagement with this urgent policy issue.

Where is the voice of theology in the public discourse around anthropogenic climate change? How do we understand the human relationship to Earth and the ecology of which we are a part? How can we account for the human attempt to dominate nature and the devastation we have caused to our own home? Dianne Rayson addresses these questions. She uses the creation theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer to examine what it means to be human in the post-Holocene age. Employing a range of Bonhoeffer's texts, Rayson posits that Bonhoeffer's Christological theology and this-worldly ethical orientation provide the tools for an Earthly Christianity. She responds to Bonhoeffer's question, "who actually is Jesus Christ, for us, today?" and proposes a Bonhoefferian ecoethic.

When King looked over into the promised land and tried to discern how we would get there, he called the poor to lead the way. The Poor People's Campaign was part of a political strategy for building a movement expansive enough to tackle the enmeshed evils of racism, poverty, and war. In Freedom Church of the Poor: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign, Colleen Wessel-McCoy roots King's political vision solidly in his theological ethics and traces the spirit of the campaign in the community and religious leaders who are responding to the devastating crises of inequality today.

Faiths in Green addresses the complex and fraught relationship between religious identity and environmental concern in the United States, particularly how that relationship has changed over time. Examining the effects of religious upbringing, belonging, and disaffiliation on environmental concern across multiple religious groups over several decades, the author shows where, when, how, and why religious groups and their memberships have responded constructively to environmental change over time. The author also visits the effects of gender, social class, race, and politics on both religion and environmental concern in the U.S. Faiths in Green offers an in-depth and accessible guide to understanding the at-times incongruous relationship between religious beliefs and motivations, as well as ways to follow cultural shifts that both drive and are driven by religious persons and institutions. In examining how religious and cultural factors are linked to environmental concern over time, Faiths in Green demonstrates the importance of morality and worldviews in confronting global hazards of unprecedented scale.

The Trauma of Doctrine is a theological investigation into the effects of abuse trauma upon the experience of Christian faith, the psychological mechanics of these effects, their resonances with Christian Scripture, and neglected research-informed strategies for cultivating post-traumatic resilience. Paul Maxwell examines the effect that the Calvinist belief can have upon the traumatized Christian who negatively internalizes its superlative doctrines of divine control and human moral corruption, and charts a way toward meaningful spiritual recovery.

The Other Black Church: Alternative Christian Movements and the Struggle for Black Freedom examines the movements led by Father Divine, Charles Mason, and Albert Cleage (later known as Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman) as alternative Christian movements in the middle of the twentieth century that radically re-envisioned the limits and possibilities of Black citizenship. These movements not only rethink the value and import of Christian texts and reimagined the role of the Black Christian prophetic tradition, but they also outlined a new model of protest that challenged the language and logic of Black essentialism, economic development, and the role of the state. By placing these movements in conversation with the long history of Black theology and Black religious studies, this book suggests that alternative Christian movements are essential for thinking about African American critiques of and responses to the failures of U.S.-based democracy. These prophets of Black theological thought and their attention to the limits of the state and traditional Black religious formations are most fully appreciated when studied in light of their conversations and interactions with other key Black prophetic and theological figures of the mid-twentieth century. Ultimately, The Other Black Church will use those conversations and archives from these movements to highlight their protest of the racial state, to explore the limits of the Black church, and to argue for their continued significance for thinking about the variety and vibrancy of Black protest, specifically Black religious protest, during the twentieth century.

The Holy Spirit and Moral Action in Thomas Aquinas is a detailed study of how, according to one of Christianity's greatest visionary thinkers, God's Holy Spirit is continuously at work in and through humanity's moral activity. Jack Mahoney, SJ, documents, notably from Aquinas's commentaries on scripture, how "the grace of the Holy Spirit" prompts and influences people's minds, as well as their decisions to act, occasionally in unexpected ways. Through the gift of connatural wisdom, the Spirit empowers humans to appreciate God's own wise and loving design for the whole of creation, and enables them to cooperate freely in fulfilling their unique part in it.

In Indigenous and Christian Perspectives in Dialogue, Allen G. Jorgenson asks what Christian theologians might learn from Indigenous spiritualties and worldviews. Jorgenson argues that theology in North America has been captive to colonial conceits and has lost sight of key resources in a post-Christendom context. The volume is especially concerned with the loss of a sense of place, evident in theologies written without attention to context. Using a comparative theology methodology, wherein more than one faith tradition is engaged in dialogical exploration, Jorgenson uses insights from Indigenous understandings of place to illumine forgotten or obstructed themes in Christianity. In this constructive theological project, "kairotic" places are named as those that are kenotic, harmonic, poetic and especially enlightening at the margins, where we meet the religious other.

Necropolitics: The Religious Crisis of Mass Incarceration in America explores the pernicious and persistent presence of mass incarceration in American public life. Christophe D. Ringer argues that mass incarceration persists largely because the othering and criminalization of Black people in times of crisis is a significant part of the religious meaning of America. This book traces representations from the Puritan era to the beginning of the War on Drugs in the 1980s to demonstrate their centrality in this issue, revealing how these images have become accepted as fact and used by various aspects of governance to wield the power to punish indiscriminately. Ringer demonstrates how these vilifying images contribute to racism and political economy, creating a politics of death that uses jails and prisons to conceal social inequalities and political exclusion.

This book explores the different types of compromises Indian people were forced to make and must continue to do so in order to be included in the colonizer's religion and culture. The contributors in this collection are in conversation with the contributions made by Tink Tinker, an American Indian scholar who is known for his work on Native American liberation theology. The contributors engage with the following questions in this book: How much of one's identity must be sacrificed in order to belong in the world of the colonizer? How much of one's culture requires silencing? And more importantly, how can the colonized survive when constantly asked and forced to compromise? Specifically, what is uniquely Indian and gets completely lost in this interaction? Scholars of religious studies, American studies, American Indian studies, theology, sociology, and anthropology will find this book particularly useful.

Critically surveying various approaches to Christian ecological ethics alongside the vexing moral ambiguities of the Anthropocene, Ecology of Vocation offers an integrative approach to responsible living vis a vis one of Protestantism's key theological resources- the doctrine of vocation. Drawing on H. Richard Niebuhr's germinal ethical framework with a decidedly ecofeminist perspective, Kiara A. Jorgenson demonstrates how vocation's emphasis on right relationship practically speaks to the embodied realities of planetary interrelatedness. By excavating the ecological promise of the early Reformers' democratized renderings of calling and linking their concerns to the contemporary context, she argues that vocation cannot be reduced to the particular aim of monetized work, nor to an elitist escape from it. Rather, vocation must be recast as the dynamic and vibrant space among the myriad roles any of us inhabits at any given time in a particular place. When understood in this light, vocation signals much more than a job, a passion, or a quest for self-discovery. An alternative understanding of vocation's very ecology can extend Christian conceptions of the neighbor beyond the human and lead the church to more faithfully pursue lives characterized by humility, restraint, wisdom, justice, and love.

In 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer-a theologian and pastor-was executed by the Nazis for his resistance to their unspeakable crimes against humanity. He was only 39 years old when he died, but Bonhoeffer left behind volumes of work exploring theological and ethical themes that have now inspired multiple generations of scholars, students, pastors, and activists. This book highlights the ways Dietrich Bonhoeffer's work informs political theology and examines Bonhoeffer's contributions in three ways: historical-critical interpretation, critical-constructive engagement, and constructive-practical application. With contributions from a broad array of scholars from around the world, chapters range from historical analysis of Bonhoeffer's early political resistance language to accounts of Bonhoeffer-inspired, front-line resistance to white supremacists in Charlottesville, VA. This volume speaks to the ongoing relevance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's work and life in and out of the academy.