Examines how digital media and the creation of digital immortals may affect religious understandings of death and the afterlife; Understands the impact of digital media on those living and those working with the bereaved; Explores the impact of digital memorialisation post death; Looks at the ways in which digital media may be changing conceptions and theologies of death

This book offers an academically rigorous examination of the biological, psychological, social and ecclesiastical processes that allowed sexual abuse in the Catholic Church to happen and then be covered up. The collected essays provide a means to better assess systemic wrongdoing in religious institutions, so that they can be more effectively held to account. An international team of contributors apply a necessarily multi-disciplinary approach to this difficult subject. Chapters look closely at the sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic clerics, explaining the complexity of this issue, which cannot be reduced to simple misconduct, sexual deviation, or a management failure alone. The book will help the reader to better understand the social, organizational, and cultural processes in the Church over recent decades, as well as the intricate world of beliefs, moral rules, and behaviours. It concludes with some strategies for change at the individual and corporate levels that will better ensure safeguarding within the Catholic Church and its affiliate institutions. This multifaceted study gives a nuanced analysis of this huge organizational failure and offers recommendations for effective ways of preventing it in the future. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Sociology of Religion, Psychology, Psychiatry, Legal Studies, Ethics, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, History, and Theology.

This book examines the connection between religion and violence in the Western traditions of the three Abrahamic faiths, from ancient to modern times. It addresses a gap in the scholarly debate on the nature of religious violence by bringing scholars that specialize in pre-modern religions and scriptural traditions into the same sphere of discussion as those specializing in contemporary manifestations of religious violence. Moving beyond the question of the "authenticity" of religious violence, this book brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines. Contributors explore the central role that religious texts have played in encouraging, as well as confronting, violence. The interdisciplinary conversation that takes place challenges assumptions that religious violence is a modern problem that can be fully understood without reference to religious scriptures, beliefs, or history. Each chapter focuses its analysis on a particular case study from a distinct historical period. Taken as a whole, these chapters attest to the persistent relationship between religion and violence that links the ancient and contemporary worlds. This is a dynamic collection of explorations into how religion and violence intersect. As such, it will be a key resource for any scholar of Religious Studies, Theology and Religion and Violence, as well as Christian, Jewish, and Islamic Studies.

This thought-provoking book explores the connections between health, ethics, and soul. It analyzes how and why the soul has been lost from scientific discourses, healthcare practices, and ethical discussions, presenting suggestions for change. Arguing that the dominant scientific worldview has eradicated talk about the soul and presents an objective and technical approach to human life and its vulnerabilities, Ten Have and Pegoraro look to rediscover identity, humanity, and meaning in healthcare and bioethics. Taking a mulitidisciplinary approach, they investigate philosophical, scientific, historical, cultural, social, religious, economic, and environmental perspectives as they journey toward a new, global bioethics, emphasizing the role of the moral imagination. Bioethics, Healthcare and the Soul is an important read for students, researchers, and practitioners interested in bioethics and person-centred healthcare.

This book breaks new ground in the field of public theology by constructing a public theology which is built on interwoven cultural and Christian values. Writing from the Oceanian context (Samoa), Ah Siu-Maliko unpacks the complementary Samoan and Christian core values of service, respect, dialogue, love, and justice as the foundation for a values-centered response to the social realities confronting Oceania. Drawing on the indigenous research paradigm known as talanoa, the author grounds the public theology that emerges in extensive interviews with 75 Samoans from all walks of life-the "public" who are the subjects of public theology. The resulting framework is then applied to a specific social problem-the crisis of violence against women in Samoa. This pioneering contribution to public theology discourse opens up possibilities for similar contextual approaches to public theology not only across Oceania but around the world.

This collection brings together legal scholars and Christian theologians for an interdisciplinary conversation responding to the challenges of global migration. Gathering 14 leading scholars from both law and Christian theology, the book covers legal perspectives, theological perspectives, and key concepts in migration studies. In Part 1, scholars of migration law and policy discuss the legal landscape of migration at both the domestic and international level. In Part 2, Christian theologians, ethicists, and biblical scholars draw on the resources of the Christian tradition to think about migration. In Part 3, each chapter is co-authored by a scholar of law and a scholar of Christian theology, who bring their respective resources and perspectives into conversation on key themes within migration studies. The work provides a truly interdisciplinary introduction to the topic of migration for those who are new to the subject; an opportunity for immigration lawyers and legal scholars to engage Christian theology; an opportunity for pastors and Christian theologians to engage law; and new insights on key frameworks for scholars who are already committed to the study of migration.

* Equips readers including criminal justice students and justice system agents, as well as clergy and lay people, with knowledge regarding sex crimes and sexual offenders so they can better recognize potential sexual exploitation in church settings. * Ideal as a primary or supplementary text in a criminal justice curriculum or in religious colleges and seminaries preparing clergy and church leaders. * Offers a unique in-depth review of the vulnerabilities associated with church environments and sexual crimes.

Against the background of the present political and cultural disarray, this book asks: What can be learned from past historical examples of such decay? How can political life be restored now to its original purpose: the promotion of the "good life" or the "common good?" Taking up these key questions, the volume performs a deep dive into the historical and literary record, tracing out the collision of institutions and society, and the development of philosophical and ethical accounts of what constitutes politics, the state, the public, and individuals. Throughout history, there have been a multiple trajectories for understanding the basic relationship between the state, power, society, and the ethical: the multivalent theories, unsurprisingly, have clashed and created rifts. At the same time, despite conflict and tumult, from ancient Athens and Tudor England, to the rise of fascism and authoritarianism in the previous and current centuries, a riptide of hope and praxes has endured that grounds the possibility of a society founded on solidarity. Towards this end, Fred Dallmayr pleads for the renewal of politics through the legacy of the "cardinal virtues" acting as chief remedy for the present disarray.

After the re-emergence of the tradition of virtue ethics in the early 1980s Reinhold Niebuhr has often served as a foil for authors who locate themselves in that tradition. However, this exercise has often proved controversial. This collection of essays continues this work, across a wide range of subjects, with the aim of avoiding some of the polemics that have previously accompanied it. The central thesis of this book is that putting the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian realism in dialogue with contemporary virtue theory is a profitable undertaking. An introductory essay argues against locating Niebuhr as a consequentialist and in favour of thinking of his work in terms of a dispositional ethics Contributors take different positions on whether Niebuhr's dispositional ethics should be considered a form of virtue ethics or an alternative to virtue ethics. Several of the articles relate Niebuhr and Christian realism to particular virtues. Throughout there is an appreciation of the ways in which any Niebuhrian approach to dispositional ethics or virtue must be shaped by a sense of tragedy, paradox, or irony. The most moral disposition will be one which includes doubts about its own virtue. This volume allows for a repositioning of Niebuhr in the context of contemporary moral theory as well as a rereading of the tradition of virtue ethics in the light of a distinctly Protestant, Christian realist and paradoxical view of virtue. As a result, it will be of great interest to scholars of Niebuhr and Christian Ethics and scholars working in Moral Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion more generally.

The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts analyzes a large corpus of early Christian texts and Pseudepigraphic materials to understand how the authors of these texts used, abused and silenced enslaved characters to articulate their own social, political, and theological visions. The focus is on excavating the texts "from below" or "against the grain" in order to notice the slaves, and in so doing, to problematize and (re)imagine the narratives. Noticing the slaves as literary iterations means paying attention to broader theological, ideological, and rhetorical aims of the texts within which enslaved bodies are constructed. The analysis demonstrates that by silencing slaves and using a rhetoric of violence, the authors of these texts contributed to the construction of myths in which slaves functioned as a useful trope to support the combined power of religion and empire. Thus was created not only the perfect template for the rise and development of a Christian discourse of slavery, but also a rationale for subsequent violence exercised against slave bodies within the Christian Empire. The study demonstrates the value of using the tools and applying the insights of subaltern studies to the study of the Pseudepigrapha and in early Christian texts. This volume will be of interest not only to scholars of early Christianity, but also to those working on the history of slavery and subaltern studies in antiquity.

Trusting Others, Trusting God is an investigation of the concepts of moral and religious trust. The question of why or how it is rational to trust anyone has been the typical focus of philosophers, with an underlying assumption that trust must be justified. In most cases, trust (even - or perhaps especially religious trust) is portrayed as irrational. Sheela Pawar argues that a grammatical investigation of the concept of trust can help rectify this mistreatment.

This volume examines biblical wisdom literature both in its historical context and as it relates to a host of contemporary themes, including overcoming social divisions, reading from a place of inclusion, healing from trauma, and challenging religious attitudes toward climate change and animals. This volume delivers fresh insights on biblical wisdom texts, exploring ways in which wisdom literature speaks perennially to the human condition despite the differences in societies then and now. Employing both biblical studies and theological approaches, the diverse group of authors in this collection examine biblical wisdom literature from a variety of perspectives and methodologies to illuminate the relevance of wisdom for ancient audiences such as exiles, scribes, and leaders, as well as for contemporary audiences concerned with challenges such as climate change, social division, and healing from trauma. Its eleven chapters utilize an accessible style that brings erudite scholarship on biblical wisdom to a broader audience. Biblical Wisdom, Then and Now will be an invaluable resource for undergraduates, graduates, and specialists in biblical studies, as well as the more general reader with an interest in biblical literature and its reception.

What global future would ensure hope, justice and peace to the human mankind? In view of a fast evolving post-Covid world order, this volume explores a novel Christian post-colonial approach to global affairs. It examines the existing 'sociology of the powers' theoretical scheme, the debate between Christian realism and Christian pacifism, the method and practice of prophetic witnessing, to elaborate a new Christian approach to statecraft and futurology in terms of theory, methodology and ontology. This book: * Uses the COVID-19 pandemic as the background to examine why and how the pandemic has accelerated the US's decline, and to identify the tacit game rules that contributed to the UK government's mishandling of the pandemic; * Compares the political systems between China and the West, and engages with selected theoretical narratives from the Global South to envision an alternative 'shared globalisation' project; * Argues why it is important for post-colonial Christian individuals and communities to get involved in this global discussion for a new world order of complex realist interdependencies grounded on hope, social justice and peace. A fresh take on global politics and international relations, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of political science, religious studies, peace studies, theology and future studies.

This book explores how the rising numbers of refugees entering Europe from 2015 onwards played into fears of cultural, religious, and ethnic differences across the continent. The migrant, or refugee crisis, prompted fierce debate about European norms and values, with some commentators questioning whether mostly Muslim refugees would be able to adhere to these values, and be able to integrate into a predominantly Christian European society. In this volume, philosophers, legal scholars, anthropologists and sociologists, analyze some of these debates and discuss practical strategies to reconcile the values that underpin the European project with multiculturalism and religious pluralism, whilst at the same time safeguarding the rights of refugees to seek asylum. Country case studies in the book are drawn from France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom; representing states with long histories of immigration, countries with a more recent refugee arrivals, and countries that want to keep refugees at bay and refuse to admit even the smallest number of asylum seekers. Contributors in the book explore the roles which national and local governments, civil society, and community leaders play in these debates and practices, and ask what strategies are being used to educate refugees about European values, and to facilitate their integration. At a time when debates on refugees and European norms continue to rage, this book provides an important interdisciplinary analysis which will be of interest to European policy makers, and researchers across the fields of migration, law, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and political science. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429279317, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

This book explores the normative implications for both general and sexual ethics of the methodological and anthropological developments in Catholic tradition. It also attempts to stimulate dialogue in the Church about ethics, particularly sexual ethics, a dialogue that must necessarily include all in the communion-Church, laity, theologians, and hierarchy.

Despite the command from Christ to love your neighbour, Western Christianity has continued to be afflicted by the evil of racism and the acts of violence that accompany it. Through a systems theoretical and deconstructive account of religion and the political theology of St. Paul, this book traces how the racism and violence of modern Western Christianity is a symptom of its failure to secure its own myth of sovereignty within a complex world of plurality. Divided into three sections, the book begins with a philosophical and critical account of what it calls the immune system of Christian identity. Focusing on Pauline political theology as reflective of an inherent religious "autoimmunity" built into Christian community, a theory of theological-political violence is located within Western Christianity. The second section traces major theoretical aspects of the historical "apparatus" of Christian Identity. It demonstrates that it is ultimately around the figure of the black slave that racialized Christian identity becomes a system of anti-blackness and white supremacy. The book concludes by offering strategies for thinking resistance against such racialised Christian identity. It does this by constructing a "pragmatics of faith" by engaging Deleuze's and Guattari's use of the term pragmatics, Moten's theory of black fugitivity, and Long's account of African American religious production. This wide-ranging and interdisciplinary view of Christianity's relationship to racism will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Theological Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Race Studies, American Studies, and Critical Theory.

The book combines intellectual, cultural and social history to address a major area of encounter between Christianity and British culture: the world of leisure. This book traces the rise and fall of the evangelical movement, the powerhouse of Victorian religion, via its preoccupation with pleasure. Victorian evangelicalism demonstrated an ability to excite the affections but also a corresponding suspicion of worldly pleasures. Suspicion developed into hostility, and a movement premised on freedom became coercive and alienating. The crisis of Victorian religion began. It is generally held that the mid-Victorian turn to recreation and sport solved the problem, 'justifying God to the people' through cricket, cycling and football. This book argues otherwise - that the problem of pleasure was inflamed by the ecclesiastical remedy. The problem of overdrawn boundaries between church and world gave way to a new and subtle confusion of gospel and culture. Historians have praised the mood of engagement but the costs were profound. In fact, sport became the perfect vehicle for that humanistic, 'unmystical' morality that defines the secularity of the twentieth century. Secularisation did not wait for the Dionysian rebellions of the 1960s: it emerged - almost a hundred years earlier - in the Victorian transformation of religion into ethics. Central to the process was the problem of pleasure. DOMINIC ERDOZAIN is Lecturer in the History of Christianity, King's College London

This book focuses on the themes of border violence; racial criminalization; competing hermeneutics of the sacred; and State-sponsored modes of desacralizing black and brown-bodied people, all in the context of the US-Mexico borderlands. It provides a much-needed substantive response to the State's use of sacrilization to justify its acts of violence and offers new ways of theologizing the acceptance of the "other" in its place. As a counter-hermeneutic of the sacred, the ultimate objective of the book is to offer an alternative epistemological, theoretical and practical framework that resacralizes the other. Rejecting the State-driven agenda of othering border-crossers, it follows Gloria Anzaldua's healing move to the Sacred Other and creates a new hermeneutic of the sacred at the borderlands. One that resacralizes those deemed by the State as the non-sacred human other anywhere in the world. This is an important and topical book that addresses one of the key issues of our time. As such, it will be of keen interest to any scholar of Religious Studies and Liberation Theology as well as religion's interaction with migration, race and contemporary politics.

In this book, the author presents a detailed study of the notion of conscience from the perspective of its historical development and existential environment. The purpose of the study is to highlight conscience's dignity and fallibility, as well as its dependence upon the context of virtue and grace, in order to develop as our capacity to perceive the truth in moral action. Starting from the premise that current moral theory is suffering from fragmentation, the author proposes that this fragmented outlook has affected the common understanding of conscience and is therefore in need of renewal, chiefly in terms of the reintegration of conscience with its proper setting. In order to explore this theory, he investigates how conscience has been understood over the centuries, particularly in the New Testament and during the Scholastic period, and analyses a number of important issues concerning its nature and function.

This book brings development theory and practice into dialogue with a religious tradition in order to construct a new, transdisciplinary vision of development with integral ecology at its heart. It focuses on the Catholic social tradition and its conception of integral human development, on the one hand, and on the works of economist and philosopher Amartya Sen which underpin the human development approach, on the other. The book discusses how these two perspectives can mutually enrich each other around three areas: their views on the concept and meaning of development and progress; their understanding of what it is to be human - that is, their anthropological vision; and their analysis of transformational pathways for addressing social and environmental degradation. It also examines how both human development and the Catholic social tradition can function as complementary analytical lenses and mobilizing frames for embarking on the journey of structural and personal transformation to bring all life systems, human and non-human, back into balance. This book is written for researchers and students in development studies, theology, and religious studies, as well as professional audiences in development organizations.

Poverty is a multi-dimensional concept which is complex in its origin as well as in its manifestations. Oppression and denial of Human Rights can contribute to poverty. However, this oppression and exploitation of the poor is not to be understood simplistically but as a systemic injustice rooted within the context of well organized socio-political and cultural structures of oppression. This study is a concerted effort to identify, articulate and highlight the existence, the causes and effects of poverty in Nigeria, particularly in Igboland, where Human Rights infringements have contributed to poverty. It also aims at alerting the respective governments to their administrative inadequacies that are contrary to social ethics and have given rise to poverty. It concludes by discussing viable strategies of alleviating poverty in Igboland.

Nonviolent methods of action have been a powerful tool since the early twentieth century for social protest and revolutionary social and political change, and there is diffuse awareness that nonviolence is an efficient spontaneous choice of movements, individuals and whole nations. Yet from a conceptual standpoint, nonviolence struggles to engage with key contemporary political issues: the role of religion in a post-secular world; the crisis of democracy; and the use of supposedly 'nonviolent techniques' for violent aims. Drawing on classic thinkers and contemporary authors, in particular the Italian philosopher Aldo Capitini, this book shows that nonviolence is inherently a non-systematic and flexible system with no pure, immaculate thought at its core. Instead, at the core of nonviolence there is praxis, which is impure because while it aims at freedom and plurality it is made of less than perfect actions performed in an imperfect environment by flawed individuals. Offering a more progressive, transformative and at the same time pluralistic concept of nonviolence, this book is an original conceptual analysis of political theory which will appeal to students of international relations, global politics, security studies, peace studies and democratic theory.

The book evaluates on-going ethical conversations to learn how emotional communication is received, teachings are internalized, and a religious world-view is brought to life. Exploring how religious values saturate people's consciousness to induce subtle shifts in moral and ethical sensibilities, this book is about people's practices that illuminate how Islam is lived. Based on fieldwork conducted in Ankara between 2010 and 2016, the study enquires into people's ethical, religious, and moral motivations through the use of the ethnographic method and "thick description". Conversations and interviews with officials, community leaders, students, entrepreneurs, professionals, and blue-collar workers were subjected to close scrutiny to foreground societal change and churning. To capture perspectives absent or deliberately overlooked in mainstream public discourse and scholarship, fieldwork was conducted in locations ranging from homes, offices, and university dorms to the shrines of saints. In listening closely to how people talk about their religious practices, the book addresses the question of how Islamic subjectivities are being forged in Turkey. The study unveils how people are pushed to re-think old practices and attitudes in the process of reinterpreting Islam in light of contemporary concerns. Filling a gap in the literature where micro-level, grounded analyses of culture and society are relatively rare, this book is a key resource for readers interested in the anthropology of religion and gender, ethnography, Turkey, and the Middle East.

In this multi-disciplinary collection we ask the question, 'What did, and do, Quakers think about good and evil?' There are no simple or straightforwardly uniform answers to this, but in this collection, we draw together contributions that for the first time look at historical and contemporary Quakerdom's approach to the ethical and theological problem of evil and good. Within Quakerism can be found Liberal, Conservative, and Evangelical forms. This book uncovers the complex development of metaethical thought by a religious group that has evolved with an unusual degree of diversity. In doing so, it also points beyond the boundaries of the Religious Society of Friends to engage with the spectrum of thinking in the wider religious world.

We are living in an emerging technoculture. Machines and gadgets not only weave the fabric of daily life, but more importantly embody philosophical and religious values which shape the contemporary moral vision-a vision that is often at odds with Christian convictions. This book critically examines those values, and offers a framework for how Christian moral theology should be formed and lived-out within the emerging technoculture. Brent Waters argues that technology represents the principal cultural background against which contemporary Christian moral life is formed. Addressing contemporary ethical and religious issues, this book will be of particular interest to students and scholars exploring the ideas of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Grant, Arendt, and Borgmann.