Arguments in favour of divine impassibility take many forms, one of which is moral. This argument views emotional risk, vulnerability, suffering, and self-love as obstacles to moral perfection. In Embracing Vulnerability: Human and Divine, the author challenges these mistaken assumptions about moral judgment. Through an analysis of Hebrew thought and modern philosophical accounts of love, justice, and emotion, Roberto Sirvent reveals a fundamental incompatibility between divine impassibility and the Imitation of God ethic (imitatio Dei). This book shows that a God who is not emotionally vulnerable is a God unworthy of our imitation. But in what sense can we call divine impassibility immoral? To be sure, God's moral nature teaches humans what it means to live virtuously. But can human understandings of morality teach us something about God's moral character? If true, how should we go about judging God's moral character? Isn't it presumptuous to do so? After all, if we are going to challenge divine impassibility on moral grounds, what reason do we have to assume that God is bound by our standards of morality? Embracing Vulnerability: Human and Divine addresses these questions and many others. In the process, Sirvent argues for the importance of thinking morally about theology, inviting scholars in the fields of philosophical theology and Christian ethics to place their theological commitments under close moral scrutiny, and to consider how these commitments reflect and shape our understanding of the good life.

George Bell remains one of only a handful of twentieth-century English bishops to possess a continuing international reputation for his involvement in political affairs. His insistence that Christian faith required active participation in public life, at home and abroad, established an eminent, and often provocative, contribution to Christian ethics at large. Bell's participation in the tragic history of the German resistance against Hitler has earned him an enduring place in the historiography of the Third Reich; his February 1944 speech protesting against the obliteration bombing of Germany, made in the House of Lords, is still often considered one of the great prophetic speeches of the twentieth century. Throughout his long career, Bell became a leading light in the burgeoning ecumenical movement, a supporter of refugees from dictatorships of all kinds, a committed internationalist and a patron of the Arts. This book draws together the work of leading international historians and theologians, including Rowan Williams, and makes an important contribution to a range of ongoing political, ecumenical and international debates.

In a culture obsessed with law, judgment, and violence, this book challenges Christians to remember that Jesus urged his followers to judge no one, bring harm upon no one, and follow no law save the law of altruistic love. It traces Christian history first to show that Christians of an earlier age took very seriously the gospel injunctions against punitive legal judgment and then how the advent of formal legal codes and philosophical dualism undermined that perspective to create a division between a private Christian spirituality and a public morality of order and legally sanctioned violence. This historical approach is accompanied by an argument that the recovery of a Christian ethic based upon unconditional love and forgiveness cannot be accomplished without the renewal of a Christian spirituality that mirrors the contemplative spirituality of Jesus.

This volume presents the first organized study of Jung's ethics. Drawing on direct quotes from all of his collected works, interviews, and seminars, psychoanalyst and religious scholar Dan Merkur provides a compendium of Jung's thoughts on various topics and themes that comprise his theoretical corpus-from the personal unconscious, repression, dreams, good and evil, and the shadow, to collective phenomena such as the archetypes, synchronicity, the psychoid, the paranormal, God, and the Self, as well as his contributions to clinical method and technique including active imagination, inner dialogue, and the process of individuation and consciousness expansion. The interconnecting thread in Merkur's approach to the subject matter is to read Jung's work through an ethical lens. What comes to light is how Merkur systematically portrays Jung as a moralist, but also as a complex thinker who situates the human being as an instinctual animal struggling with internal conflict and naturalized sin. Merkur exposes the tension and development in Jung's thinking by exploring his innovative clinical-technical methods and experimentation, such as through active imagination, inner dialogue, and expressive therapies, hence underscoring unconscious creativity in dreaming, symbol formation, engaging the paranormal, and artistic productions leading to expansions of consciousness, which becomes a necessary part of individuation or the working through process in pursuit of self-actualization and wholeness. In the end, we are offered a unique presentation of Jung's core theoretical and clinical ideas centering on an ethical fulcrum, whereby his moral psychology leads to a cure of souls. Jung's Ethics will be of interest to academics, scholars, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of Jungian studies and analytical psychology, ethics, moral psychology, philosophy, religious studies, and mental health professionals focusing on the integration of humanities and psychoanalysis.

A primer on disability ethics from a Catholic perspective offers practical strategies for inclusion Persons with disability make up at least 15 percent of the global population, yet disability is widely unacknowledged and unexplored in theology. Moreover, many people join this minority community in their lifetimes through compromises to their health due to aging or accident. However, too few people without immediate experience of persons with disability remain unconcerned with this largest and most diverse minority of people across the globe. Disability Ethics and Preferential Justice is a response to a dearth of theo-ethical reflection on disability, arguing that justice requires a preferential safeguard for persons and communities of people with disability. Mary Jo Iozzio introduces the basics of disability realities and etiquette for those who have not recognized their absence in common human activities. She uses reflection on the image of God as a foundation for a theological lens within disability ethics and exposes personal and systemic forms of control that able-bodied people (knowingly or not) exercise to maintain power over people with disability. She offers strategies based on Catholic social teaching to inspire deliberate action with an increasingly inclusive and participatory Church and society. Iozzio invites readers to think about their responses to matters of disability inclusion across the common spaces to which all of us should have access. She challenges secular spaces as well as the Church's response to persons with disability concerning especially structural accessibility to worship, the sacraments, and community.

What is the most distinctive feature of human nature? Does human nature play any significant role in explaining ethical objectivity? How do we arrive at moral judgments? What is the relationship between moral judgments and moral motivation? In answering these questions, this book defends a naturalist, realist and internalist theory of the foundations of ethics. This theory, grounded on a particular concept of humanity, combines insights from Mencius and David Hume. The views of each show how important features left underdeveloped by the other can be supplemented and refined. The unified theory that results is a robust contender among current ethical theories. This illuminating book, relating Chinese and Western philosophical traditions, presents a unique account of the unity of the virtues in Mencius, breaks new ground in Hume studies through its discussion of the concept of sympathy in Hume's theory, and brings combined insights to bear on contemporary analytical theories of ethics.

For much of the modern period, theologians and philosophers of religion have struggled with the problem of proving that it is rational to believe in God. Drawing on the thought of Thomas Aquinas, this book lays the foundation for an innovative effort to overturn the longstanding problem of proving faith's rationality, and to establish instead that rationality requires to be explained by appeals to faith. To this end, Schumacher advances the constructive argument that rationality is not only an epistemological question concerning the soundness of human thoughts, which she defines in terms of 'intellectual virtue'. Ultimately, it is an ethical question whether knowledge is used in ways that promote an individual's own flourishing and that of others. That is to say, rationality in its paradigmatic form is a matter of moral virtue, which should nonetheless entail intellectual virtue. This conclusion sets the stage for Schumacher's argument in a companion book, Theological Philosophy, which explains how Christian faith provides an exceptionally robust rationale for rationality, so construed, and is intrinsically rational in that sense.

This book establishes the necessary integration of theological knowledge with theological ethics. It does this as a response to the postmodern critique of Christianity, as exemplified in Rorty and Lyotard. They argue that any claim to know God is necessarily tyrannical. Contemporary responses to such postmodern thinking often fail to address adequately the ethical critique that is made. This book redresses that balance by suggesting that our knowedge of God and love of the Other are so intimately connected that we cannot have one without the other. In the absence of love, then, we simply do not know God. Justin Thacker proposes that an effective theological response to postmodernity must address both knowledge and ethics in an integrated fashion as presented in this book.

This critical study of Karl Barth's Christian theological ethics discusses Barth's controversial and characteristically misunderstood ethics of divine command. The surprising relation of his 'divine command ethics' to contemporary 'narrative theology' and 'virtue ethics' and specific moral themes concerning bonds between parents and children, the nature of truth telling, and the meaning of Christian love of God and neighbor are all discussed. This book reveals Barth's richness, depth, and insight, and places his work in constructive connection with salient themes in both Catholic and Protestant ethics. Attentive to the fullness of Barth's Christological vision and to the purposes and limits of his reflections on the Christian life in pursuit of the good, William Werpehowski also advances conversations in Christian ethics about the nature of practical deliberation and decision, the orientation and dispositions that embody moral faithfulness, and the question and features of 'natural morality.'

A thorough examination of many aspects of morality through the lens of Christianity, this book, originally published in 1939, is philosophical in its approach to assessing religion. It compares moral traditions of many world religions and describes their changes over time as well. Written accessibly, this is a fascinating outlay of moral theology.

This book presents the theological work of Stanley Hauerwas as a distinctive kind of 'liberation theology'. John Thomson offers an original construal of this diffuse, controversial, yet highly significant modern theologian and ethicist. Organising Hauerwas' corpus in terms of the focal concept of liberation, Thomson shows that it possesses a greater degree of coherence than its usual expression in ad hoc essays or sermons. John Thomson locates Hauerwas in relation to a wide range of figures, including the obvious choices - Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr, Barth, Yoder, Lindbeck, MacIntyre, Milbank and O'Donovan - as well as less expected figures such as Gadamer, Habermas, Ricoeur, Pannenberg, Moltmann, and Hardy. Providing a structured and rigorous outline of Hauerwas' intellectual roots, this book presents an account of his theological project that demonstrates an underlying consistency in his attempt to create a political understanding of Christian freedom, reaching beyond the limitations of the liberal post-enlightenment tradition. Hauerwas is passionate about the importance of moral discourse within the Christian community and its implications for the Church's politics. When the Church is often perceived to be in decline and an irrelevance, Hauerwas proffers a way of recovering identity, confidence and mission, particularly for ordinary Christians and ordinary churches. Thomson evaluates the comparative strengths and weaknesses of Hauerwas' argument and indicates a number of vulnerabilities in his project.

In 1967, Lynn White, Jr.'s seminal article The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis was published, essentially establishing the academic study of religion and nature. White argues that religions-particularly Western Christianity-are a major cause of worldwide ecological crises. He then asserts that if we are to halt, let alone revert, anthropogenic damages to the environment, we need to radically transform religious cosmologies. White's hugely influential thesis has been cited thousands of times in a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to religious studies, environmental ethics, history, ecological science, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. In practical terms, the ecological crisis to which White was responding has only worsened in the decades since the article was published. This collection of original essays by leading scholars in a variety of interdisciplinary settings, including religion and nature, environmental ethics, animal studies, ecofeminism, restoration ecology, and ecotheology, considers the impact of White's arguments, offering constructive criticism as well as reflections on the ongoing, ever-changing scholarly debate about the way religion and culture contribute to both environmental crises and to their possible solutions. Religion and Ecological Crisis addresses a wide range of topics related to White's thesis, including its significance for environmental ethics and philosophy, the response from conservative Christians and evangelicals, its importance for Asian religious traditions, ecofeminist interpretations of the article, and which perspectives might have, ultimately, been left out of his analysis. This book is a timely reflection on the legacy and continuing challenge of White's influential article.

This book examines the recent phenomenon in Latin America of national Truth and Reconciliation commissions. Few studies have examined the role of Churches or religion in political processes that proclaim valued theological terms as their agenda - truth, forgiveness, and reconciliation. This book questions the role of religion, specifically of established Churches. The impact of such reconciliation commissions on Indigenous Native Americans is also examined, as is the role of women and how both commissions and Churches or religions were challenged by their experiences. The contributors offer differing perspectives on one or more national truth and reconciliation processes and thus offer a collection that serves as valuable source for the disciplines of Religious Studies, Ethics, Theology, Political Science, Social Sciences and Women's Studies.

This textbook does not focus on one major world religion, but uniquely looks more broadly to demonstrate the relevance and importance of ethics based in a variety of religious traditions. Each chapter includes a helpful pedagogy including a general overview, case studies, suggestions for further reading, questions for discussion, and a chronological structure, making this the ideal textbook for students approaching the topic for the first time. Explores controversial topics such as CRISPR, vegetarianism, nuclear weapons, women's leadership, and reparations for slavery, which are engaging topics for students and will instigate debate.

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.

Humanity operates like a force of nature capable of affecting the destiny of the Earth System. This epochal shift profoundly alters the relationship between humankind and the Earth, presenting the conscious, thinking human animal with an unprecedented dilemma: As human power has grown over the Earth, so has the power of nature to extinguish human life. The emergence of the Anthropocene has settled any question of the place of human beings in the world: we stand inescapably at its center. The outstanding question-which forms the impetus and focus for this book-remains: What kind of human being stands at the center of the world? And what is the nature of that world? Unlike the scientific fact of human-centeredness, this is a moral question, a question that brings theology within the scope of reflection on the critical failures of human irresponsibility. Much of Christian theology has so far flunked the test of engaging the reality of the Anthropocene. The authors of these original essays begin with the premise that it is time to push harder at the questions the Anthropocene poses for people of faith.

This book addresses the question of human rights education in a world that is witnessing a resurgence of religion in public life, and a continuation of religion across much of the globe, long after secularization theories predicted its decline. Promoting a universal vision of human rights while acknowledging religious diversity is a challenge for schools. This book starts with the basic premise that human rights are grounded in a belief in the dignity and ultimate worth of the human person. Drawing on key philosophical and theological sources for understanding dignity, it builds a vision of human rights and religious education that seeks to square the impossible circle of universal human rights education in a religiously diverse world.

Living Theodrama is a fresh, creative introduction to theological ethics. Offering an imaginative approach through dialogue with theatrical theory and practice, Vander Lugt demonstrates a new way to integrate actor-oriented and action-oriented approaches to Christian ethics within a comprehensive theodramatic model. This model affirms that life is a drama performed in the company of God and others, providing rich metaphors for relating theology to everyday formation and performance in this drama. Different chapters explore the role of the triune God, Scripture, tradition, the church, mission, and context in the process of formation and performance, thus dealing separately with major themes in theological ethics while incorporating them within an overarching model. This book contains not only a fruitful exchange between theological ethics and theatre, but it also presents a promising method for interdisciplinary dialogue between theology and the arts that will be valuable for students and practitioners across many different fields.

Islamic Perspectives on the Principles of Biomedical Ethics presents results from a pioneering seminar in 2013 between Muslim religious scholars, biomedical scientists, and Western bioethicists at the research Center for Islamic Legislation & Ethics, Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies. By examining principle-based bioethics, the contributors to this volume addressed a number of key issues related to the future of the field. Discussion is based around the role of religion in bioethical reasoning, specifically from an Islamic perspective. Also considered is a presentation of the concept of universal principles for bioethics, with a response looking at the possibility (or not) of involving religion. Finally, there is in-depth analysis of how far specific disciplines within the Islamic tradition - such as the higher objectives of Sharia (maqasid al-Shari'ah) and legal maxims (qawa'id fiqhiyah) - can enrich principle-based bioethics.

Recovers the religious origins of the War on Drugs Many people view the War on Drugs as a contemporary phenomenon invented by the Nixon administration. But as this new book shows, the conflict actually began more than a century before, when American Protestants began the temperance movement and linked drug use with immorality. Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs argues that this early drug war was deeply rooted in Christian impulses. While many scholars understand Prohibition to have been a Protestant undertaking, it is considerably less common to consider the War on Drugs this way, in part because racism has understandably been the focal point of discussions of the drug war. Antidrug activists expressed—and still do express--blatant white supremacist and nativist motives. Yet this book argues that that racism was intertwined with religious impulses. Reformers pursued the “civilizing mission,” a wide-ranging project that sought to protect “child races” from harmful influences while remodeling their cultures to look like Europe and the United States. Most reformers saw Christianity as essential to civilization and missionaries felt that banning drugs would encourage religious conversion and progress. This compelling work of scholarship radically reshapes our understanding of one of the longest and most damaging conflicts in modern American history, making the case that we cannot understand the War on Drugs unless we understand its religious origins.

Marriage as an institution faces many challenges today. This volume presents essential wisdom from the 2000 year-old Christian tradition that is as true and valuable today as it always was. The readings present positive resources for understanding the sacrament of marriage as a beautiful and sacred Christian vocation, a context in which difficult times can be worked through with grace. Marriage also involves family, even if the couple has no children. In marrying a spouse, one marries his or her whole family. The readings embrace family life as well. Levering introduces historically arranged texts from Christian saints and spiritual leaders describing the nature and value of marriage, offering counsel about how to live out marriage as part of a life of faith, or depicting their own experience of family life. This volume has much to offer married couples, people preparing for marriage, and classroom study of marriage and family.

Critiquing a paradigm of growth within the church, this book contends that the church's growth ethic should be replaced by one based on virtue. Drawing on the work of Sennett, Fromm, and Hauerwas, John Fitzmaurice argues that an approach taking growth to be the overriding task of the church is found to be shallow and risks infantilising the faith it purports to proclaim. MacIntyre's proposal for a recovery of a virtue-based ethic is examined and interpreted theologically through the concepts of narrative theology, community, sacraments and sanctification; the role of 'practices' in developing virtuous character is central. The nature of a virtuous organisation is explored through a lens of organisational psychodynamics; this understanding informs a model of church as a community of interpretation. Fitzmaurice suggests that it is in and though sacramental practices that the transitional space for these virtues to be formed is created. Tracing a similar corrosion of character within secular institutions that have opted for an overriding focus on growth, this book offers an alternative based on the formation of corporate, as well as individual, virtuous character and considers the implications of a virtue-based growth ethic on theological education and ministerial formation as well as in terms of public theology and the manner of the church's engagement with society.

Structured directly around the specification of the OCR, this is the definitive textbook for students of Advanced Subsidiary or Advanced Level courses. The updated third edition covers all the necessary topics for Religious Ethics in an enjoyable student-friendly fashion. Each chapter includes: a list of key issues OCR specification checklist explanations of key terminology overviews of key scholars and theories self-test review questions exam practice questions. To maximise students' chances of success, the book contains a section dedicated to answering examination questions. It comes complete with diagrams and tables, lively illustrations, a comprehensive glossary and full bibliography. Additional resources are available via the companion website.

For much of the modern period, theologians and philosophers of religion have struggled with the problem of proving that it is rational to believe in God. Drawing on the thought of Thomas Aquinas, this book lays the foundation for an innovative effort to overturn the longstanding problem of proving faith's rationality, and to establish instead that rationality requires to be explained by appeals to faith. To this end, Schumacher advances the constructive argument that rationality is not only an epistemological question concerning the soundness of human thoughts, which she defines in terms of 'intellectual virtue'. Ultimately, it is an ethical question whether knowledge is used in ways that promote an individual's own flourishing and that of others. That is to say, rationality in its paradigmatic form is a matter of moral virtue, which should nonetheless entail intellectual virtue. This conclusion sets the stage for Schumacher's argument in a companion book, Theological Philosophy, which explains how Christian faith provides an exceptionally robust rationale for rationality, so construed, and is intrinsically rational in that sense.

Against Indifference analyzes four responses to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust, moving on a spectrum from indifference to courageous action. C. S. Lewis did little to speak up for victimized Jews; Thomas Merton chose to enclose himself in a monastery to pray for and expiate the sins of a world gone awry; Dietrich Bonhoeffer acted to help his twin sister, her Jewish husband, and some other Jews escape from Germany; and the Trocmes established protective housing and an ongoing "underground railroad" that saved several thousand Jewish lives. Why such variation in the responses of those who had committed their lives to Jesus Christ and recognized that His prime commandment is to love God and others? This book provides answers to this question that help shed light on current Christians and their commitment to victims who suffer and need their help.