This book takes religion as an entry point for a deeper exploration into why practices of gender-based violence continue and what possible actions might help to contribute to their eradication. International donors are committed to reducing and ending gender-related harm, particularly violence against women, but clear answers as to why harmful practices persist are often slow to emerge. Theological research struggles to find strong links, yet religion is often referred to by local people as the reason for practices such as female cutting, male circumcision, early and forced marriage, nutritional taboos and birth practices, mandatory (un)veiling, harmful spiritual practices, polygamy, gender unequal marital and inheritance rights and so-called honour crimes. This book presents empirical cases of religious, non-religious and secular actors, including local and international governmental and non-governmental agencies in the fields of development, health and equality policies. Tracing their different understandings of how religion is entangled with gender-based violence both contextually as well as historically, the book sheds light on helpful and unhelpful as well as erroneous and harmful understandings of such practices in local and global perspectives. Centralising the perspectives of women themselves, this book will be an important read for development practitioners and policy makers, as well as for researchers across religious studies, gender studies, and global development.

Generally neglected for their rhetorical power, animated cartoons provide a treasure chest of provocative and comic gems that teach about the seven deadly sins. After a brief history of parables and fables, icons and visual communication, this book explores each of the seven deadly sins as represented in short animated films from Disney, Pixar, the Warner Brothers, and foreign animators. Terry Lindvall argues that attending to the tropes of the cartoons leads to exemplary and revelatory discoveries, to seeing more of what pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust mean across cultures and historical eras.

Biblical ABCs is a theological resistance primer. Its author, Kornelis Heiko Miskotte, was a Dutch pastor, theologian, and antifascist who lived and worked under the Nazi occupation of his country. Miskotte's family hid Jews inside their home, and Miskotte facilitated underground Christian discussion groups. In 1941, he published an illegal pamphlet as a study guide for these groups. In an atmosphere saturated with propaganda and lies, Miskotte felt that Christians needed a refresher course in the basics of biblical language-an anti-Nazi catechism, as it were. Miskotte presents this instruction in twelve brief, poetic meditations on important terms drawn from the Bible. Like his teacher Karl Barth, Miskotte insists on the primacy of the Word, and like his imprisoned colleague Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he emphasizes the this-worldliness of the Old Testament. Miskotte also shows his deep debt to the Jewish theologian, Franz Rosenzweig. He begins his primer with the A of the biblical ABCs: the Name of God, the Tetragrammaton, which Miskotte sees as the cornerstone of all resistance to authoritarianism and truth decay.

What would it mean to imagine Islam as an immanent critique of the West? Sayyid Ahmad Khan lived in a time of great tribulation for Muslim India under British rule. By examining Khan's work as a critical expression of modernity rooted in the Muslim experience of it, Islam as Critique argues that Khan is essential to understanding the problematics of modern Islam and its relationship to the West. The book re-imagines Islam as an interpretive strategy for investigating the modern condition, and as an engaged alternative to mainstream Western thought. Using the life and work of nineteenth-century Indian Muslim polymath Khan (1817-1898), it identifies Muslims as a viable resource for both critical intervention in important ethical debates of our times and as legitimate participants in humanistic discourses that underpin a just global order. Islam as Critique locates Khan within a broader strain in modern Islamic thought that is neither a rejection of the West, nor a wholesale acceptance of it. The author calls this "Critical Islam". By bringing Khan's critical engagement with modernity into conversation with similar critical analyses of the modern by Reinhold Niebuhr, Hannah Arendt, and Alasdair MacIntyre, the author shows how Islam can be read as critique.

Among the pressing concerns of Americans in the first century of nationhood were day-to-day survival, political harmony, exploration of the continent, foreign policy, andfixed deeply in the collective consciousnesshell and eternal damnation. The fear of fire and brimstone and the worm that never dies exerted a profound and lasting influence on Americans ideas about themselves, their neighbors, and the rest of the world. Kathryn Gin Lum poses a number of vital questions: why did the fear of hell survive Enlightenment critiques in America, after largely subsiding in Europe and elsewhere? What were the consequences for early and antebellum Americans of living with the fear of seeing themselves and many people they knew eternally damned? How did they live under the weighty obligation to save as many souls as possible? What about those who rejected this sense of obligation and fear? Gin Lum shows that beneath early Americans vaunted millennial optimism lurked a pervasive anxiety: that rather than being favored by God, they and their nation might be the object of divine wrath. As time-honored social hierarchies crumbled before revival fire, economic unease, and political chaos, saved and damned became as crucial distinctions as race, class, and gender. The threat of damnation became an impetus for or deterrent from all kinds of behaviors, from reading novels to owning slaves. Gin Lum tracks the idea of hell from the Revolution to Reconstruction. She considers the ideas of theological leaders like Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney, as well as those of ordinary women and men. She discusses the views of Native Americans, Americans of European and African descent, residents of Northern insane asylums and Southern plantations, New Englands clergy and missionaries overseas, and even proponents of Swedenborgianism and annihilationism. Damned Nation offers a captivating account of an idea that played a transformative role in Americas intellectual and cultural history.

An ancient question asks what role moral formation ought to play in education. It leads to such questions as, do intellectual and moral formation belong together? Is it possible to form the mind and neglect the heart? Is it wise? These perennial questions take on new significance today, when education-especially, higher education-has become a defining feature in the lives of young people. Throughout his more than 40 years in academia, John Garvey has reflected on the relationship between intellectual and moral formation, especially in Catholic higher education. For 12 years as the President of The Catholic University of America, he made the cultivation of moral virtue a central theme on campus, highlighting its significance across all aspects of University culture, from University policy to campus architecture. During his two decades of presiding at commencement exercises, first as Dean of Boston College Law School and then as President of The Catholic University of America, Garvey made a single virtue the centerpiece of his remarks each year. The Virtues is the fruit of those addresses. More reflective than analytical, its purpose is to invite conversation about what it means to live well. Following Catholic tradition, The Virtues places the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love at the center of the moral life, and the cardinal virtues-justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence-with them. Alongside these major virtues, Garvey considers a collection of "little virtues," habits that assist and accompany us in small but important ways on the path to goodness. Though he treats each virtue individually, a common thread unites his reflections. "The intellectual life depends on the moral life," Garvey writes. "Without virtue we cannot sustain the practices necessary for advanced learning. In fact, without virtue, it's hard to see what the purpose of the university is. Learning begins with love (for the truth). If we don't have that, it's hard to know why we would bother with education at all." The Virtues invites its readers, especially students, to appreciate that the cultivation of virtue is indispensable to success, academic or otherwise, and more importantly, essential to their ultimate aim, a life well lived.

Introducing Christian Ethics helps Christians form a sound basis for making ethical decisions in today's complex postmodern world. Raising 14 key ethical questions on today's most pressing issues including abortion, war, sexual ethics, capital punishment, and more, Scott Rae guides his readers in making moral choices wisely. Based on the best-selling college and seminary ethics textbook Moral Choices, this book distills nearly two decades of teaching and study into a succinct and user-friendly volume. It is an ideal primer for pastors, students, and everyday Christians who desire engagement with the world around them in an intelligent and informed manner. Teaching and study resources for the book, including additional video clips based on the questions corresponding to each chapter, make it ideal for use in the classroom as well as for pastors and for teaching settings within the church. Resources are available through ZondervanAcademic.com.

This book examines the historical antecedents of the concept of general chapter, the supreme authority in an institute of consecrated life. This provides the basis for an examination of the contemporary understanding of the nature of its power and authority, as portrayed in the 1983 Code of Canon Law. The general chapter is analysed in terms of its juridic status, collegial nature, participative character and representative function as well as its dynamic aspects and faith dimension. The author applies the findings to one institute of consecrated life, Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary Loreto Branch. This application provides an example of the challenges inherent in working participatively and collaboratively within a hierarchical structure. Because consecrated life has an inalienable ecclesial dimension, understanding authority and power and their exercise in institutes of consecrated life has relevance for understanding authority and its exercise in other organs of authority at all levels in the church.

This popular textbook has been thoroughly revised and updated to reflect recent global developments, whilst retaining its unique and compelling narrative-style approach. Using ancient stories from diverse religions, it explores a broad range of important and complex moral issues, resulting in a truly reader-friendly and comparative introduction to religious ethics. * A thoroughly revised and expanded new edition of this popular textbook, yet retains the unique narrative-style approach which has proved so successful with students * Considers the ways in which ancient stories from diverse religions, such as the Bhagavad Gita and the lives of Jesus and Buddha, have provided ethical orientation in the modern world * Updated to reflect recent discussions on globalization and its influence on cross-cultural and comparative ethics, economic dimensions to ethics, Gandhian traditions, and global ethics in an age of terrorism * Expands coverage of Asian religions, quest narratives, the religious and philosophical approach to ethics in the West, and considers Chinese influences on Thich Nhat Hanh s Zen Buddhism, and Augustine s Confessions * Accompanied by an instructor s manual (coming soon, see www.wiley.com/go/fasching) which shows how to use the book in conjunction with contemporary films

Religion, Politics and Cults in East Africa is the first major, original, and extensive research-based study of the apocalyptic and doomsday Catholic Marian Movement and its Benedictine monastic moral and religious practices, including vows of poverty, celibacy, obedience, daily contemplation in silence, and hard work. The Marian Movement is presented within the cultural, historical, political, and religious context of the East African Revival Movement, the Anglican Balokole Movement, Alice Lakwena's Holy Spirit Movement, Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), and other religio-political liberation movements, including the Maji Maji, the Mau Mau, and Nyabingi Liberation Movement. The Marian Movement was locally known as "Abanyabugoto" and "The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God". It began in 1989 as a Catholic women's Marian devotional and moral reformation movement, founded and headed by Keledonia Mwerinde. Faced with African cultural patriarchy and male-dominated Catholic Church hierarchy, Mwerinde recruited Joseph Kibwetere and the Rev. Fr. Dominic Kataribabo to serve as the public face of the Marian Movement. In response to Catholic hierarchy's opposition and persecution, Fr. Kataribabo designed a theology of ritual sacrifice, atonement, and martyrdoms for the devout Marian Catholics, who were devotees of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He martyred the Marian devotees in March 2000, in order to transform them into Mary's saints, and to liberate their souls and send them to heaven, where they would instantly attain eternal life, lasting peace, and happiness.

How did we get so far off base?

Do you ever get the feeling that somebody has gone through our world and switched the price tags on everything? Things that ought to be treated as precious-like family, friends and faith-are inconsequential, and things like a new BMW, membership in the country club and the climb up the corporate ladder are all too often considered of great importance.

Author Tony Campolo believes we are forcing ourselves to do things we think are important in order to "keep up" with the rest of the world. "God wants us to have fun-yet we don't know how," Campolo says. Who Switched The Price Tags? challenges us to take a serious look at the important areas of our lives and put the right price tags back on the right items in order to experience the true fulfillment God has planned for us.

This book examines the shifting moral and spiritual lives of white Afrikaners in South Africa after apartheid. The end of South Africa's apartheid system of racial and spatial segregation sparked wide-reaching social change as social, cultural, spatial and racial boundaries were transgressed and transformed. This book investigates how Afrikaners have mediated the country's shifting boundaries within the realm of religion. For instance, one in every three Afrikaners used these new freedoms to leave the traditional Dutch Reformed Church (NGK), often for an entirely new religious affiliation within the Pentecostal or Charismatic churches, or New Religious Movements such as Wiccan neopaganism. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Western Cape area, the book investigates what spiritual life after racial totalitarianism means for the members of the ethnic group that constructed and maintained that very totalitarianism. Ultimately, the book asks how these new Afrikaner religious practices contribute to social solidarity and integration in a persistently segregated society, and what they can tell us about racial relations in the country today. This book will be of interest to scholars of religious studies, social and cultural anthropology and African studies.

Conjugal Chastity in Pope Wojtyla explains how Karol Wojtyla, philosopher, theologian, and Pope, tried to show how the sexual act, within the context of marriage, is an expression of love. After explaining how love as goodwill is the foundation of conjugal love, the correct relationship between love and justice is clarified. The negative dimension of the personalistic norm of Wojtyla is then critically examined. Conjugal love is explained in terms of conjugal beneficience based on conjugal benevolence. This love leads to total self-giving in each conjugal act. The procreative meaning of the conjugal act seems to be its most formal element (the soul of the act, so to speak); the unitive element is described as an essential property of this act, something which necessarily flows from the conjugal act which is open to life. Chastity is the virtue that allows sexuality to be integrated into a love which is truly personal and reflects Trinitarian Love.

This book shows how Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI mandated many confused, inconsistent, and misguided policies on clerical sexual abuse; actions that ultimately hindered the implementation of effective reforms to alleviate the crisis that has enveloped the Catholic Church for the last two decades. It also examines the possibility of authentic change by articulating the positive outreach of Pope Francis to the victims of abuse, his attempts at institutional atonement, as well as his struggles to implement systematic actions for the protection of young people.

The Principle of Subsidiarity in Catholic Social Thought: Implications for Social Justice and Civil Society in Nigeria provides a theoretical and practical framework for a just vision of society. It focuses on how support for individuals and social groups in Nigeria can foster the building of their communities through the practice of social justice. Social justice will ensure the building of trust across ethnic lines, challenge corruption, encourage accountability and servant leadership, protect minority tribes from larger ones, and promote grassroots self-help tribal, communal, religious, and non-governmental associations as agents of positive social change and development. These dynamics interact within a healthy federal structure that respects its constituent parts for the common good. This volume is recommended as a graduate text for courses in theology, religious education, and social philosophy, and for all interested in promoting the common good.

Conscience has long been a foundational theme in Christian ethics, but it is a notoriously slippery and contested term. This volume works to define conscience and reveal the similarities and differences between different Christian traditions' thinking on the subject. In a thorough and scholarly manner, the authors explore Christian theological, legal, constitutional, historical, and philosophical meanings of conscience. Covering a range of historical periods, major figures in the development of conscience, and contemporary applications, this book is a vital source for scholars from a wide variety of disciplines seeking to understand conscience from a range of perspectives.

Pope Francis' Laudato Si is a game-changing document for the life of the Church and the ecological health of this planet. A Catholic vision is deficient if it does not include the earth and its life-forms. Loving one's neighbour must include loving the planetary neighbourhood in which all live. For its part, the 'integral ecology' on which the Pope insists must include the dimensions of mind and heart, science and art, faith and the whole spiritual life of culture. Here, the great theological themes animating the Catholic vision, play their part as ever-renewable resources: the Creator and the gift of creation,, the incarnation of the Word amongst us, the inexhaustible life of the Trinity itself, the Eucharist as communion with Christ in the here and now of earthly life, just as 'Sister Death' must be given her place for the sake of ecological and eschatological realism. Integral ecology and Catholic vision are two sides of the conversion of mind and heart necessary to promote the communion of life now, and in the world to come.

When tragedy strikes a community, it is often unexpected with long-lasting effects on the people left in its wake. Too often, there aren't adequate systems in place to aid those affected in processing what has happened. This study uniquely combines practical theology, pastoral insight and scientific data to demonstrate how Christian congregations can be helped to be resilient in the face of sudden devastating events. Beginning by identifying the characteristics of trauma in individuals and communities, this collection of essays from practitioners and academics locates sudden trauma-inducing tragedies as a problem in practical theology. A range of biblical and theological responses are presented, but contemporary scientific understanding is also included in order to challenge and stretch some of these traditional theological resources. The pastoral section of the book examines the ethics of response to tragedy, locating the role of the minister in relation to other helping agencies and exploring the all-too-topical issue of ministerial abuse. Developing a nuanced rationale for good practical, pastoral, liturgical and theological responses to major traumas, this book will be of significant value to scholars of practical theology as well as practitioners counselling in and around church congregations.

The lived theology movement is built on the work of an emerging generation of theologians and scholars who pursue research, teaching, and writing as a form of public discipleship, motivated by the conviction that theology can enhance lived experience. This volume-based on a two-year collaboration with the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia-offers a series of illustrations and styles of lived theology, in conversation with other major approaches to the religious interpretation of embodied life. Lived theology begins with a modest proposal: How might theological writing, research, and teaching be re-imagined to engage with lived experience, while still contributing to academic scholarship? The contributors consider this question in a variety of contexts, including towns in Mississippi struggling with histories of racist violence; a homeless shelter in Atlanta; students volunteering with faith based organizations in Columbus, Ohio; churches in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and a college classroom in the MidWest. Answers to, and explorations of this question form the narrative framework of this book. Behind this question is the theological conviction that within the lived experience of faith communities lies a wealth of insight on themes that have long occupied the attention of scholars-morality, justice, grace, reconciliation, and redemption.

In calling for a renewal of moral theology, the Second Vatican Council also charted a course for the Church's future. The Decree on Priestly Formation specified the need for "livelier contact with the mystery of Christ and the history of salvation" and called for the discipline to be "more thoroughly nourished by scriptural teaching." To this can be added the teaching of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church, which found the mystery of the human person disclosed in the person of Christ, and the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church's recovery of the universal call to holiness. The essays in this volume reflect an effort to explore and respond to these hallmarks of renewal indicated by the Council fathers. They therefore treat topics of theological anthropology, the use of Scripture, and growth in holiness through the pursuit of virtue, and also engage the increasingly important question of the role of Scripture in moral theology. These sources of Catholic moral teaching are brought to bear on a variety of pressing contemporary issues: sexual difference, the relationship of sexual expression to marital commitment, methods of family planning, reproductive technologies, and public moral discussion of abortion. Important figures of this postconciliar renewal-such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Servais Pinckaers, OP, Benedict XVI, and particularly John Paul II-figure prominently in this volume. Drawing on these outstanding thinkers, these essays seek to follow the course of renewal illumined by the Council so as, in the words of Optatum totius, no. 16, "to shed light on the loftiness of the calling of the faithful in Christ and the obligation that is theirs of bearing fruit in charity for the life of the world."

In this book Tobias Hoffmann studies the medieval free will debate during its liveliest period, from the 1220s to the 1320s, and clarifies its background in Aristotle, Augustine, and earlier medieval thinkers. Among the wide range of authors he examines are not only well-known thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, but also a number of authors who were just as important in their time and deserve to be rediscovered today. To shed further light on their theories of free will, Hoffmann also explores their competing philosophical explanations of the fall of the angels, that is, the hypothesis of an evil choice made by rational beings under optimal psychological conditions. As he shows, this test case imposed limits on tracing free choices to cognition. His book provides a comprehensive account of a debate that was central to medieval philosophy and continues to occupy philosophers today.

Introducing Christian Ethics 2e, now thoroughly revised and updated, offers an unparalleled introduction to the study of Christian Ethics, mapping and exploring all the major ethical approaches, and offering thoughtful insights into the complex moral challenges facing people today. * This highly successful text has been thoughtfully updated, based on considerable feedback, to include increased material on Catholic perspectives, further case studies and the augmented use of introductions and summaries * Uniquely redefines the field of Christian ethics along three strands: universal (ethics for anyone), subversive (ethics for the excluded), and ecclesial (ethics for the church) * Encompasses Christian ethics in its entirety, offering students a substantial overview by re-mapping the field and exploring the differences in various ethical approaches * Provides a successful balance between description, analysis, and critique * Structured so that it can be used alongside a companion volume, Christian Ethics: An Introductory Reader, which further illustrates and amplifies the diversity of material and arguments explored here

This book advances that history by exploring stories, images and discourses across a worldwide range of geographical, cultural and confessional contexts. Its twelve authors not only enrich our understanding of the significance of the contextual method, but also produce a new range of original ways of doing theology in contemporary situations. The authors discuss some prioritised thematic perspectives with an emphasis on liberating paths, and expand the ongoing discussion on the methodology of theology into new areas. Themes such as interreligious plurality, global capitalism, ecumenical liberation theology, eco-anxiety and the anthropocene, postcolonialism, gender, neo-pentecostalism, world theology, and reconciliation are examined in situated depth. Additionally, voices from Indigenous lands, Latin America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Europe and North America enter into a dialogue on what it means to contextualise theology in an increasingly globalised and ever-changing world. Such a comprehensive discussion of new ways of thinking about and doing contextual theology will be of great use to scholars in Theology, Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, Political Science, Gender Studies, Environmental Humanities, and Global Studies.

Four centuries of African American preaching has provided hope, healing, and heaven for people from every walk of life. Many notable men and women of African American lineage have contributed, through the art of preaching, to the biblical emancipation and spiritual liberation of their parishioners. In African American Preaching: The Contribution of Dr. Gardner C. Taylor, Gerald Lamont Thomas offers a historical overview of African American preaching and its effect on the cultural legacy of black people, nothing the various styles and genius of pulpit orators. The book's focus is on the life, ministry, and preaching methodology of one of this era's most prolific voices, Dr. Gardner C. Taylor, and should be read by everyone who takes the task of preaching seriously.