This book develops a thorough account of the sphere of human moral action in sustained dialogue with JA1/4rgen Moltmann. By examining God's role as promise-giver, particularly in the Christian understanding of resurrection, this work describes the occupancy of both history and space in moral terms. This leads to an understanding of Jesus' description of 'the kingdom of God' to feature prominently in describing both the possibility and content of human moral action. By offering an account of each of the main doctrines found in Moltmann's corpus - the role of the future, the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and anthropology - this book locates how each contributes to the understanding of ethics from a Christian perspective and subsequently applies these findings to the contemporary issue of poverty and global economics.

Volatile social dissonance in America's urban landscape is the backdrop as Valerie A. Miles-Tribble examines tensions in ecclesiology and public theology, focusing on theoethical dilemmas that complicate churches' public justice witness as prophetic change agents. She attributes churches' reticence to confront unjust disparities to conflicting views, for example, of Black Lives Matter protests as "mere politics," and disparities in leader and congregant preparation for public justice roles. As a practical theologian with experience in organizational leadership, Miles-Tribble applies adaptive change theory, public justice theory, and a womanist communitarian perspective, engaging Emilie Townes's construct of cultural evil as she presents a model of social reform activism re-envisioned as public discipleship. She contends that urban churches are urgently needed to embrace active prophetic roles and thus increase public justice witness. "Black Lives Matter times" compel churches to connect faith with public roles as spiritual catalysts of change.

Can a Christian organization with colonial roots work towards reproductive justice for Kenyan women and resist sexist interpretations of Christianity? How does a women's organization in Africa navigate controversial ethical dilemmas, while dealing with the pressures of imperialism in international development? Based on a case study of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) in Kenya, this book explores the answers to these questions. It also introduces a theoretical framework drawn from postcolonial feminist critique, narrative identity theory and the work of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians: 'everyday Christian ethics'. The book evaluates the theory's implications as a cross-disciplinary theme in feminist studies of religion and theology. Eleanor Tiplady Higgs argues that Kenya YWCA's narratives of its Christian history and constitution sustain a link between its ethical perspective and its identity. The ethical insights that emerge from these practices proclaim the relevance of the value of 'fulfilled lives', as prescribed in the New Testament, for Christian women's experiences of reproductive injustice.

For thousands of years the Jewish tradition has been a source of moral guidance, for Jews and non-Jews alike. As the essays in this volume show, the theologians and practitioners of Judaism have a long history of wrestling with moral questions, responding to them in an open, argumentative mode that reveals the strengths and weaknesses of all sides of a question. The Jewish tradition also offers guidance for moral conduct in both children and adults, and how to motivate people to do the right thing despite weakness and temptation. The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality offers a collection of original essays addressing these topics-historical and contemporary, as well as philosophical and practical-by leading scholars from around the world. The first section of the volume describes the history of the Jewish tradition's moral thought, from the Bible to contemporary Jewish approaches. The second part includes chapters on specific fields in ethics, including the ethics of medicine, business, sex, speech, politics, war, and the environment.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is many things to many people-committed pacifist, reluctant revolutionary, Protestant saint but in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics of Formation, Ryan Huber argues that Bonhoeffer should be engaged as a Christian ethicist of formation. Huber demonstrates that formation lies at the heart of Bonhoeffer's ethical project and personal story, providing a third way between virtue and character ethics in contemporary Christian thought concerned with moral growth.

This volume focuses on 'fittingness' as an ethical-aesthetical idea, and in particular examines how the concept is beneficial for environmental ethics. It brings together an innovative set of contributions to argue that fittingness is a significant but under-investigated facet of human ethical deliberation with both ethical and aesthetic dimensions. Individuals and communities make numerous decisions about courses of action which are informed by judgements of 'fit'. 'Fittingness' denotes a relation between conscious embodied persons and their habitats and is of relevance to judgements about how humans shape, and take up with, the non-human environment, and hence to ethical decisions about the development and use of the environment and non-human creatures. Fittingness interacts powerfully with a whole cluster of relational and moral terms - such as appropriateness, prudence, temperance, mutuality - that the book suggests can be of great benefit in reframing human relationships to the non-human.

The American justice system was founded on the idea of "majority-rule," but in a democracy this is achievable only if the majority has the interests of the whole at heart. Since the days of America's founding, white, Christian males created laws from their standpoint as the majority, leading them to exercise power in a largely "majoritarian" way rather than upholding the interests of all citizens. The nation has not realized its stated ideals of equality of liberty, opportunity and justice for all. As a solution, W. Royce Clark formulates a non-majoritarian ethic based not on any majority but on a universal instinct, the combination of Albert Schweitzer's "will-to-live" and Friedrich Nietzsche's "will-to-power," along with democratic principles articulated by John Rawls and James Madison, which would represent all citizens.

Chaplain G.A. Studdert Kennedy has been described as the most popular British chaplain of the First World War. Widely known as "Woodbine Willie" for the cigarettes he distributed to the troops, his wartime poetry and prose communicated the challenges, hardships and hopes of the soldiers he served. As a chaplain, he was subject to the same hardships as his soldiers. This book analyses his experiences through the contemporary understanding of psychological, moral and spiritual impact of war on its survivors and suggests that the chaplain suffered from Combat Stress, Moral Injury, and Spiritual Injury. Through the analysis of his wartime and postwar publications, the author illustrates the continuing impact of war on the life of a veteran of the Great War.

Every day, we do commonplace things and interact with ordinary people without giving them much thought. This volume offers a theological guide to thinking Christianly about the ordinary nature of everyday life. Leading ethicist Brent Waters shows that the activities and relationships we think of as mundane are actually expressions of love of neighbor that are vitally important to our wellbeing. We live out the Christian gospel in the contexts that define us and in the routine chores, practices, activities, and social settings that give ordinary life meaning. It is in those contexts that we discover what we were created for, to be, and to become.

Can religions supply an ethics that can unite rather than divide peoples? In ancient times, many people believed in super-human powers spatially beyond them, whether above or below them. They conceived of them in anthropomorphic terms, and developed symbols, rituals, and general ways of life to court their favor because they felt dependent upon these powers for certain essentials of daily living such as warmth, water, or good health. Some deities were believed to have personally intervened in human history, and took a human form to fight their enemies, provided humans with rules for living, or re-created the world after its destruction. As time passed, these claims became more comprehensive, finally universal, even Absolute, even as the process of questioning the claims, which is called "desacralization," became more widespread. Many sensed that if their absolutized deity were dislodged by doubt, the world would flounder without an ethic. Some religions tried to defend their deity by emphasizing that it was really beyond any "attributes," beyond human reason. It became the Ineffable, the Incommensurable, even the "Wholly-Other." If it was thought to have become Incarnate, that had to be defended in a similar way. In order to solve the problem of the Absolute, W. Royce Clark analyzes the thought of four prominent Christian theologians and philosophers- Friedrich Schleiermacher, G.W.F. Hegel, Paul Tillich, and Robert P. Scharlemann-as the grounds for the basis of a possible universal ethic.

The Other Black Church will explore the movements led by Father Divine, Charles Mason and Albert Cleage 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 the Christian text and re-imagined 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 US-based democracy. These prophets of Black theological thought and their attention to the limits of the state are most fully articulated in 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 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 proximity of many different religions, each with its own unique metaphysics and ethics, did not exist in the ancient world when those religions came into existence. Many went uncontested for centuries, and many merged with governments to shape the laws for the entire people of a culture or nation. Theocracies can exist only where there is no plurality of religions or where the minor religions do not mind the dominant one dictating policy for all citizens. In the word's two greatest democracies, the U.S. and India, despite the diversity that a democratic society presupposes, a majoritarian religion continues to assert an advantage over others to shape the social contract. An Ethic of Trust: Mutual Autonomy and the Common Will-to-Live addresses this problem, moving beyond sheer utilitarianism. W. Royce Clark argues that because of religious pluralism, a nation's ethic must be grounded on "freestanding" principles. This means that its base must be universally obvious, and its principles must be agreeable to all citizens. The base is instinctual, the "will-to-live" which is present in all living creatures, and the recognition of that can influence people to agree to a voluntary unity and a couple of other basic principles to which all would agree, principles which embrace differences within relationships, whether in a marriage or a constitutional republic. But to voluntarily agree to these requires a genuine mutual trust and mutual autonomy which can maximize unity while allowing individual liberties. To arrive at this point, Clark blends scholars who are often cast as opposites-Albert Schweitzer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and John Rawls-to forge a new path for an inclusive ethic for a nation, within which both the religious and non-religious will have equal freedom and stability.

To many Westerners, the most appealing teachings of the Buddhist tradition pertain to ethics. Many readers have drawn inspiration from Buddhism's emphasis on compassion, nonviolence, and tolerance, its concern for animals, and its models of virtue and self-cultivation. There has been, however, controversy and confusion about which Western ethical theories resemble Buddhist views and in what respects. In this book, Charles Goodman illuminates the relations between Buddhist concepts and Western ethical theories. Every version of Buddhist ethics, says Goodman, takes the welfare of sentient beings to be the only source of moral obligations. Buddhist ethics can thus be said to be based on compassion in the sense of a motivation to pursue the welfare of others. On this interpretation, the fundamental basis of the various forms of Buddhist ethics is the same as that of the welfarist members of the family of ethical theories that analytic philosophers call 'consequentialism.' Goodman uses this hypothesis to illuminate a variety of questions. He examines the three types of compassion practiced in Buddhism and argues for their implications for important issues in applied ethics, especially the justification of punishment and the question of equality.

Anne Carson (b. June 21, 1950, in Toronto, Canada) is one of the most versatile of contemporary classicists, poets and translators in the English language. In this book, Ruprecht explores the role played by generic transgressions on the one hand, and by embodied spirituality on the other, throughout Carson's ambitious literary career. Where others see classical dichotomies (soul versus body, Classical versus Christian), Carson sees connection. Like Nietzsche before her, Carson decries the image of the Classics as merely bookish, and classicists as disembodied intellects. She has brought religious, bodily erotics back into the heart of the classical tradition.

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 provides an introductory theoretical foundation of the ethics embedded in Islamic economics and finance, and it shows how this ethical framework could pave the way to economic and social justice. It demonstrates how Islamic finance-a risk-sharing and asset-backed finance-has embedded universal values, ethical rules, and virtues, and how these qualities may be applied to a supposedly value-neutral social science to influence policy-making. This book argues that ethical and responsible finance, such as Islamic finance, could lead the efforts to achieve sustainable economic development. Iqbal and Mirakhor then conduct a comparative analysis of Islamic and conventional financial systems and present Islamic finance as an alternative that can address today's growing problems of inequality, social injustice, financial repression, unethical leadership, and lack of opportunity to share prosperity.

Incarnate Earth reimagines the doctrine of Incarnation by extending the unity between Creator and creation beyond Jesus to the entire world. In dialogue with contemporary theologies of deep incarnation and the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, the author argues that the face of Christ is encountered in the cruciform demand for justice embodied in the creaturely finitude and vulnerability that grounds ethics. Central to this vision is a recognition that the religious role-functions at the heart of Jesus' life-the revelation of God and the redemption of the world-are performed throughout the physical world, irreducible to humanity or one heroic representative of the species. Thus, the human encounters the divine Christ in and as the face of any vulnerable thing-animal, vegetal, elemental, or otherwise-not as a transcendent being mediated through humanity. The radical nature of this reimagination necessitates renewed discussions of ecological and animal ethics, calling for compassionate care for all vulnerable bodies insofar as this is possible. It will be of interest to scholars of Christian theology and the philosophy of religion, particularly those focused on ecotheology, religious naturalism and environmental ethics.

In a time of climate change, environmental degradation, and social injustice, the question of the value and purpose of human life has become urgent. What are the grounds for hope in a wounded world? This Sacred Life gives a deep philosophical and religious articulation of humanity's identity and vocation by rooting people in a symbiotic, meshwork world that is saturated with sacred gifts. The benefits of artificial intelligence and genetic enhancement notwithstanding, Norman Wirzba shows how an account of humans as interdependent and vulnerable creatures orients people to be a creative, healing presence in a world punctuated by wounds. He argues that the commodification of places and creatures needs to be resisted so that all life can be cherished and celebrated. Humanity's fundamental vocation is to bear witness to God's love for creaturely life, and to commit to the construction of a hospitable and beautiful world.

This book explores the impact of developments in pharmaceutical medicine in the twentieth century on a Christian ethical evaluation of transhumanism and future 'hi tech' medical enhancement technologies. It suggests that the Christian ethical assessment of proposed future radical transhumanist biomedical technologies should be conducted in the light of responses to past medical advances. Two specific case studies are featured, focusing on the oral contraceptive pill and on Prozac and SSRI antidepressants. Whilst future biomedical technologies may have therapeutic benefits for the relief of disease and contribute to improving human health and welfare, the book considers the implications for society and their acceptability as therapies from a Christian perspective. Stressing the inadequacy of natural law alone, the author proposes an ethical framework for assessing novel biomedical technologies according to the effects on personal autonomy, embodiment and bodily life, and on the imago Dei.

Can war be justified? Pacifists answer that it cannot; they oppose war and advocate for nonviolent alternatives to war. But defenders of just war theory argue that in some circumstances, when the effectiveness of nonviolence is limited, wars can be justified. In this book, two philosophers debate this question, drawing on contemporary scholarship and new developments in thinking about pacifism and just war theory. Andrew Fiala defends the pacifist position, while Jennifer Kling defends just war traditions. Fiala argues that pacifism follows from the awful reality of war and the nonviolent goal of building a more just and peaceful world. Kling argues that war is sometimes justified when it is a last-ditch, necessary effort to defend people and their communities from utter destruction and death. Pulling from global traditions and histories, their debate will captivate anyone who has wondered or worried about the morality of political violence and military force. Topics discussed include ethical questions of self-defense and other-defense, the great analogy between individuals and states, evolving technologies and methods of warfighting, moral injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, broader political and communal issues, and the problem of regional security in a globalizing world. The authors consider cultural and religious issues as well as the fundamental question of moral obligation in a world saturated in military conflict. The book was written in the aftermath of the war on terrorism and includes reflection on lessons learned from the past decades of war, as well as hopes for the future in light of emerging threats in Europe and elsewhere. The book is organized in a user-friendly fashion. Each author presents a self-contained argument, which is followed by a series of responses, replies, and counter-arguments. Throughout, the authors model civil discourse by emphasizing points of agreement and remaining areas of disagreement. The book includes reader-friendly summaries, a glossary of key concepts, and suggestions for further study. All of this will help students and scholars follow the authors' dialogue so they may develop their own answer to the question of whether war can be justified. Key Features Summarizes the debate between pacifism and just war theory Considers historical and traditional sources as well as contemporary scholarship and applications Models philosophical dialogue and civil discourse, while seeking common ground Discusses issues of concern in contemporary warfighting and peacemaking, while offering an analysis of the war on terrorism

Josh Morris privileges the voices of veterans to argue that returning soldiers need families, friends, and religious communities to listen to their stories with compassion to avoid amplifying the effects of moral injury. When society greets returning soldiers in ways that reinforce cultural norms that frame military service as heroic, rather than acknowledging its ambiguities and harmful effects, it exacerbates moral injury and keeps veterans from resolving inner conflicts and coping effectively with civilian life. Morris, a military chaplain and veteran who served in Afghanistan, knows these difficulties first hand. Using stories from other veterans, Morris helps us see how cultural assumptions about military service can complicate moral injury and a veteran's return home. Drawing from liberation theologies, ideology critique, and Antonio Gramsci's advocacy for the working class, the book suggests useful perspectives and spiritual care resources for military chaplains, religious leaders, caregivers, and concerned civilians. Morris argues that military chaplains are uniquely positioned to help returning soldiers resist the amplification of existing moral injury. Moving from "thank you for your service" to liberative solidarity can galvanize resistance and make change possible.

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 important, 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.

This book compares Islamic and Western ideas of human rights in order to ascertain which human rights, if any, can be considered universal. This is a profound topic with a rich history that is highly relevant within global politics and society today. The arguments in this book are formed by bringing William Talbott's Which Rights Should Be Universal? (2005) and Abdulaziz Sachedina's Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (2014) into conversation. By bridging the gap between cultural relativists and moral universalists, this book seeks to offer a new model for the understanding of human rights. It contends that human rights abuses are outcomes of complex systems by design and/or by default. Therefore, it proposes that a rigorous systems-thinking approach will contribute to addressing the challenge of human rights. Engaging with Islamic and Western, historical and contemporary, and relativist and universalist thought, this book is a fresh take on a perennially important issue. As such, it will be a first-rate resource for any scholars working in religious studies, Islamic studies, Middle East studies, ethics, sociology, and law and religion.

Through practical theological and anthro/gynopological methods, Insurrectionist Wisdoms: Toward a North American Indigenized Pastoral Theology offers an analysis of the situation of working-class Maya mexicanas living in Yucatan, Mexico, working on the assembly line of a multinational corporation. Relying on in-depth, firsthand interviews, Marlene M. Ferreras brings to light the exploitation of women of color by large, multimillion-dollar corporations and delves into the ways these women can, and do, fight back. Drawing on a decolonial approach to pastoral theology and feminism, Ferreras proposes Lxs Hijxs de Maiz as an image for pastoral care and counseling.