Sacred Nature examines the crisis of environmental degradation through the prism of religious naturalism, which seeks rich spiritual engagement in a world without a god. Jerome Stone introduces students to the growing field of religious naturalism, exploring a series of questions about how it addresses the environmental crises, evaluating the merits of public prophetic discourse that uses the language of spirituality. He presents and defends the concept of religious naturalism while drawing out the implications of religious naturalism for addressing some of the major environmental issues facing humans today. This book is designed for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as scholars specializing in contemporary religious thought or environmental studies.

Devoted to Nature explores the religious underpinnings of American environmentalism, tracing the theological character of American environmental thought from its Romantic foundations to contemporary nature spirituality. During the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, religious sources were central to the formation of the American environmental imagination, shaping ideas about the natural world, establishing practices of engagement with environments and landscapes, and generating new modes of social and political interaction. Building on the work of seminal environmental historians who acknowledge the environmental movement's religious roots, Evan Berry offers a potent theoretical corrective to the narrative that explained the presence of religious elements in the movement well into the twentieth century. In particular, Berry argues that an explicitly Christian understanding of salvation underlies the movement's orientation toward the natural world. Theologically derived concepts of salvation, redemption, and spiritual progress have not only provided the basic context for Americans' passion for nature but have also established the horizons of possibility within the national environmental imagination.

This international volume provides a comprehensive account of contemporary research, new perspectives and cutting-edge issues surrounding religion and spirituality in social work. The introduction introduces key themes and conceptual issues such as understandings of religion and spirituality as well as definitions of social work, which can vary between countries. The main body of the book is divided up into sections on regional perspectives; religious and spiritual traditions; faith-based service provision; religion and spirituality across the lifespan; and social work practice. The final chapter identifies key challenges and opportunities for developing both social work scholarship and practice in this area. Including a wide range of international perspectives from Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Malta, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, the UK and the USA, this Handbook succeeds in extending the dominant paradigms and comprises a mix of authors including major names, significant contributors and emerging scholars in the field, as well as leading contributors in other fields of social work who have an interest in religion and spirituality. The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Spirituality and Social Work is an authoritative and comprehensive reference for academics and researchers as well as for organisations and practitioners committed to exploring why, and how, religion and spirituality should be integral to social work practice.

Ethics in Crisis offers a constructive proposal for the shape of contemporary Christian ethics drawing on a new and persuasive interpretation of the ethics of Karl Barth. David Clough argues that Karl Barth's ethical thought remained defined by the theology of crisis that he set out in his 1922 commentary on Romans, and that his ethics must therefore be understood dialectically, caught in an unresolved tension between what theology must and cannot be. Showing that this understanding of Barth is a resource for contemporary constructive accounts of Christian ethics, Clough points to a way beyond the idolatry of ethical absolutism on the one hand, and the apostasy of ethical postmodernism on the other.

Does God's existence make a difference to how we explain morality? Mark C. Murphy critiques the two dominant theistic accounts of morality-natural law theory and divine command theory-and presents a novel third view. He argues that we can value natural facts about humans and their good, while keeping God at the centre of our moral explanations. The characteristic methodology of theistic ethics is to proceed by asking whether there are features of moral norms that can be adequately explained only if we hold that such norms have some sort of theistic foundation. But this methodology, fruitful as it has been, is one-sided. God and Moral Law proceeds not from the side of the moral norms, so to speak, but from the God side of things: what sort of explanatory relationship should we expect between God and moral norms given the existence of the God of orthodox theism? Mark C. Murphy asks whether the conception of God in orthodox theism as an absolutely perfect being militates in favor of a particular view of the explanation of morality by appeal to theistic facts. He puts this methodology to work and shows that, surprisingly, natural law theory and divine command theory fail to offer the sort of explanation of morality that we would expect given the existence of the God of orthodox theism. Drawing on the discussion of a structurally similar problem-that of the relationship between God and the laws of nature-Murphy articulates his new account of the relationship between God and morality, one in which facts about God and facts about nature cooperate in the explanation of moral law.

Rabbinic tales of drought, disaster, and charismatic holy men illuminate critical questions about power, ethics, and ecology in Jewish late antiquity. Through a sustained reading of the Babylonian Talmud's tractate on fasts in response to drought, this book shows how Bavli Ta'anit challenges Deuteronomy's claim that virtue can assure abundance and that misfortune is an unambiguous sign of divine rebuke. Employing a new method for analyzing lengthy talmudic narratives, Julia Watts Belser traces complex strands of aggadic dialectic to show how Bavli Ta'anit's redactors articulate a strikingly self-critical theological and ethical discourse. Bavli Ta'anit castigates rabbis for misuse of power, exposing the limits of their perception and critiquing prevailing obsessions with social status. But it also celebrates the possibilities of performative perception - the power of an adroit interpreter to transform events in the world and interpret crisis in a way that draws forth blessing.

Virtues and Their Vices is the only extant contemporary, comprehensive treatment of specific virtues and, where applicable, their competing vices. Each of the essays, written exclusively for this volume, not only locates discussion of that virtue in its historical context, but also advances the discussion and debate concerning the understanding and role of the virtues. Each of the first four sections focuses on a particular, historically important class of virtues: the cardinal virtues, the capital vices (or 'seven deadly sins') and the corrective virtues, intellectual virtues, and the theological virtues. The final section discusses the role virtue theory and the virtues themselves play in a number of disciplines, ranging from theology and political theory to neurobiology and feminism. The treatment of the virtues in this present volume is sensitive to the historical heritage of the virtues, including their theological heritage, without paying undue attention to the historical and theological issues. Virtues and Their Vices engages contemporary philosophical scholarship as well as relevant scholarship from related disciplines throughout. It is a unique and compelling addition to the philosophical treatment of the virtues as well as their import in a wide spectrum of disciplines.

In the context of growing concern over climate change and other environmental pressures, Biblical Prophets and Contemporary Environmental Ethics explores what an ecological reading of the biblical text can contribute to contemporary environmental ethics. The Judaeo-Christian tradition has been held partly to blame for a negative attitude to creation - one that has legitimised the exploitative use of the earth's resources. Hilary Marlow explores some of the thinking in the history of the Christian tradition that has contributed to such a perception, before discussing a number of approaches to reading the Old Testament from an ecological perspective. Through a detailed exegetical study of the texts of the biblical prophets Amos, Hosea, and First Isaiah, Marlow examines the portrayal of the relationship between YHWH the God of Israel, humanity and the non-human creation. In the course of this exegesis, searching questions emerge: what are the various understandings of the non-human creation that are present in the text? What assumptions are made about YHWH's relationship to the created world and how he acts within it? And what effect do the actions and choices of human beings have on the created world? Following this close textual study, Marlow examines the problem of deriving ethical norms from the biblical text and discusses some key ethical debates in contemporary environmental theory. The book explores the potential contribution of the biblical exegesis to such debates and concludes by proposing an inter-relational model for reading the Old Testament prophets in the light of contemporary environmental ethics.

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

This book collection is a celebration of women who speak truth to power in the public square. A perfect fit for undergraduate students of rhetoric, gender, religion and history, Women's Voices of Duty and Destiny showcases the speech texts of 14 women addressing societal issues from the values of their religious beliefs and discourse communities. Between the tensions of the duty of gender roles and human destiny, these global voices representing different time periods and religions address the thematic issues of faith, society, education, reform, freedom and peacemaking. Written in clear, straightforward language, students will directly encounter the words and voices of leaders who strive to make the world better for all in the quest for human dignity. Each speaker seeks to forward the transcendent value of human freedom as reinforced by her explicit references to the divine. This collection is appropriate for 200-400 level undergraduate classes and offers a broad sampling of women who speak in the public square.

Pacifism is popular. Many hold that war is unnecessary, since peaceful means of resolving conflict are always available, if only we had the will to look for them. Or they believe that war is wicked, essentially involving hatred of the enemy and carelessness of human life. Or they posit the absolute right of innocent individuals not to be deliberately killed, making it impossible to justify war in practice.
Peace, however, is not simple. Peace for some can leave others at peace to perpetrate mass atrocity. What was peace for the West in 1994 was not peace for the Tutsis of Rwanda. Therefore, against the virus of wishful thinking, anti-military caricature, and the domination of moral deliberation by rights-talk In Defence of War asserts that belligerency can be morally justified, even though tragic and morally flawed.
Recovering the Christian tradition of reflection running from Augustine to Grotius, this book affirms aggressive war in punishment of grave injustice. Morally realistic in adhering to universal moral principles, it recognises that morality can trump legality, justifying military intervention even in transgression of positive international law-as in the case of Kosovo. Less cynical and more empirically realistic about human nature than Hobbes, it holds that nations desire to be morally virtuous and right, and not only to be safe and fat. And aspiring to practical realism, it argues that love and the doctrine of double effect can survive combat; and that the constraints of proportionality, while real, are nevertheless sufficiently permissive to encompass Britain's belligerency in 1914-18. Finally, in a painstaking analysis of the Iraq invasion of 2003, In Defence of War culminates in an account of how the various criteria of just war should be thought together. It also concludes that, all things considered, the invasion was justified.

Is there a connection between religion and morality? Ivan Karamazov, in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, famously declares that if God does not exist, then "everything is permitted." Most philosophers reject such a view and hold that moral truths do not depend on God. C.Stephen Evans argues that the truth lies somewhere between these two claims. It is not quite right to say that there would be nothing left of morality if God did not exist, but moral obligations do depend on God ontologically. Such obligations are best understood as God's commands or requirements, communicated to humans in a variety of ways, including conscience. In God and Moral Obligation, Evans also argues that two views often thought to be rivals to a divine command morality, natural law ethics and virtue ethics, are not rivals at all but provide necessary complementary elements of a comprehensive morality. A number of objections to a divine command account of moral obligations are posed and answered. In the concluding chapters Evans points out the advantages such an account has over secular rivals. The authority and objectivity of moral obligations are best explained by seeing them as divine commands.

In the wake of the economic crisis, few questions are more pressing than those around the ethics of finance and economics. Theology and Economic Ethics seeks to expand the self-critical resources of contemporary theological economic ethics by bringing the method of a pre-modern thinker, Martin Luther (1483-1546), into interaction with that of a modern contribution to social ethics, the Swiss theologian Arthur Rich (1910-92). The work is undertaken through a close engagement with a selected publication of Luther (his 1519/20 Grosser Sermon von dem Wucher) and of Rich (his masterwork, Wirtschaftsethik, published in two volumes in 1984 and 1990 respectively). It is the first substantial treatment in English of Rich's magnum opus. Sean Doherty introduces Luther's sermon on usury, situates it in its context, then provides a commentary on this work, discussing how Luther brings key theological motifs to bear on a particular economic question. The study proceeds with a sketch of Arthur Rich's life and work, and presents Rich's method as set out in Wirtschaftsethik. Doherty illuminates Rich's understanding of ethics, his approach to Scripture, and his adoption of the thought of Max Weber and John Rawls. Bringing insights from the study of Luther to bear in an analysis of Rich's method, Doherty questions some of Rich's assumptions, and notes ways in which a more self-critical approach could have made his project more successful. Finally, the book makes tentative suggestions as to the wider applicability of these findings for a Christian approach to economic ethics.

This book proposes a methodological framework for an ethical reading of Old Testament narrative and demonstrates its benefits and validity by providing an exemplary reading of the story of Josiah in Kings. Part One delineates the meaning of "ethical reading" practised in the work. The theoretical framework is critically adopted from Martha Nussbaum. This approach to ethics does not extract general rules out of story, rather it allows the reader to appreciate the world of the story itself, which is analogous with real life. Part Two expounds "synchronic literary criticism anchored in discourse analysis" and elucidates its use for ethical reading of Old Testament narrative. Part Three offers exemplary ethical readings and shows how discourse analysis can help the literary issues such as plot delimitation and characterisation. Through the ethical commentary of the story of Josiah, the theme of contingency in life can be noticed to prevail in the story. When contingency in life is accepted as a real part of the human moral life, understanding of ethics should be enlarged so that it may be coped with properly. Here ethics is understood in terms of practical wisdom that can be used for ethical improvisation for ever-changing situations. The particularities in Old Testament narrative are useful features that make the reader perceptive to the complexity of life and thus train practical wisdom; and the literary and discourse-analytical approach makes the most of the genre-characteristics of Old Testament narrative, which realistically reflects the complexity of moral life.

Just before Jesus of Nazareth left his disciples, he made a promise to send the "Spirit of Truth who would lead them into all truth." Today, the greatest prophet of God since Jesus of Nazareth lives among us and, true to the task of all genuine prophets of God, passes on what God wants to tell the people. Not always what they want to hear! A collection of 14 great divine revelations, via the inner word of His speaking instrument for this time, it is the direct word of God-Father or of the Christ of God. Who wouldn't want to read about this? But best of all, you can read and decide for yourself...

This book is a collection of essays presented at the conference on "Sustaining Ethical Leadership: An Interdisciplinary Conversation", Ottawa, Canada, 2009. The driving idea behind the conference was to encourage an interdisciplinary enquiry regarding the nature of ethical leadership in contemporary times and to work out its implications in various domains of human life and action. Contributors examine the concept of ethical leadership from different intellectual and philosophical standpoints, and provide with an insightful analysis. They touch upon social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental aspects of ethical decision making, emphasizing the importance of intellectual clarity and moral integrity in the process. The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on a specific aspect of ethical leadership. In the first section the theoretical and philosophical issues pertaining to the foundations of ethical leadership are explored, whereas the second and third sections bring out the practical and contemporary challenges regarding the manifestation of ethical leadership. This book is a collection of essays presented at the conference on "Sustaining Ethical Leadership: An Interdisciplinary Conversation", Ottawa, Canada, 2009. The driving idea behind the conference was to encourage an interdisciplinary enquiry regarding the nature of ethical leadership in contemporary times and to work out its implications in various domains of human life and action. Contributors examine the concept of ethical leadership from different intellectual and philosophical standpoints, and provide with an insightful analysis. They touch upon social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental aspects of ethical decision making, emphasizing the importance of intellectual clarity and moral integrity in the process. The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on a specific aspect of ethical leadership. In the first section the theoretical and philosophical issues pertaining to the foundations of ethical leadership are explored, whereas the second and third sections bring out the practical and contemporary challenges regarding the manifestation of ethical leadership.

Religion in the Anthropocene charts a new direction in humanities scholarship through serious engagement with the geopolitical concept of the Anthropocene. Drawing on religious studies, theology, social science, history, philosophy, and what can be broadly termed as environmental humanities, this collection represents a groundbreaking critical analysis of diverse narratives on the Anthropocene. The contributors to this volume recognize that the Anthropocene began as a geological concept, the age of the humans, but that its implications are much wider than this. Does the Anthropocene idea challenge the possibility of a sacred Nature, or is it a secularized theological anthropology more properly dealt with through traditional concepts from Roman Catholic social teaching on human ecology? Not all contributors to this volume agree about the answers to these and many more different questions. Readers will be challenged, provoked, and stimulated by this book.

Reason in Action collects John Finnis's work on the theory of practical reason and moral philosophy. The essays in the volume range from foundational issues of meta-ethics to the practical application of natural law theory to ethical problems such as nuclear deterrence, obscenity and free speech, and abortion and cloning. Defending the objectivity of some evaluative and moral judgments, the volume's meta-ethical papers debate with figures as diverse as Jurgen Habermas, Bernard Williams, David Hume, Max Weber, and Christine Korsgaard, and offer a new understanding of Wittgenstein's On Certainty. Further papers engage with Philippa Foot, Geoffrey Warnock, Leo Strauss, Terence Irwin, Matthew Kramer, neo-scholastic interpreters of Aquinas, utilitarians, game theorists, and Immanuel Kant on the shape of moral thought. John Rawls's conception of public reason, J.S. Mill's understanding of free speech, and Jacques Maritain's appeal to "connatural" knowledge are critically contested. Foundational questions addressed in the volume include: how legal reasoning differs from general practical reasoning; how aesthetic appreciation differs from erotic attraction; how subrational elements enter into the rational standard of fairness; how virtues depend upon principles and norms; and how incommensurabilities count in moral thought. These essays mark the development of Finnis's new classical theory of natural law, engaged with contemporary thinkers and problems. Several essays, including two previously unpublished, show the theory's emergence before Natural Law and Natural Rights. Other unpublished essays include a discussion of pornography, an analysis of freedom of speech, and a substantive introduction reflecting on the theory, its reception, and the convergence on it of capabilities theorists such as Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.

Many of the most controversial moral decisions we face hinge upon competing descriptions of life, and never is this truer than at the beginning of life. James Mumford draws upon phenomenology (a branch of continental philosophy) to question the descriptive adequacy, the essential 'purchase upon reality', of many of the approaches, attitudes and arguments which make up beginning of life ethics today. He argues that many of the most prevalent positions and practices in our late modern culture have simply failed to take into account the reality of human emergence, the particular way that new members of our species first appear in the world. Historically, phenomenologists have been far more interested in death than in birth. Mumford therefore first develops his own phenomenological investigation of human emergence, taking leads and developing approaches from phenomenologists both French and German, both living and dead. In the second half of the book phenomenology is finally applied to ethics, and acute moral questions are divided into two kinds: first those concerning 'what' it is that we are dealing; and, secondly, the more contextual 'where' questions relating to the situation in which the subject is found. Finally, although this book primarily constitutes a philosophical rather than a religious critique of contemporary ethics, with the findings from continental philosophy being brought to bear upon core convictions of English-speaking 'liberal' moral and political philosophers, Mumford concludes by exploring an alternative theological basis for human rights which might fill the vacuum created.

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.

This volume is a project in systematic theology: a rigorous engagement with the Christian tradition in relation to animals under the doctrinal headings of creation, reconciliation and redemption and in dialogue with the Bible and theological voices central to the tradition. The book shows that such engagement with the tradition with the question of the animal in mind produces surprising answers that challenge modern anthropocentric assumptions. For the most part, therefore, the novelty of the project lies in the questions raised, rather than the proposal of innovative answers to it. The transformation in our thinking about animals for which the book argues results in the main from looking squarely for the first time at the sum of what we are already committed to believing about other animals and their place in God's creation.

Is there a connection between religion and morality? Ivan Karamazov, in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, famously declares that if God does not exist, then "everything is permitted." Most philosophers reject such a view and hold that moral truths do not depend on God. C.Stephen Evans argues that the truth lies somewhere between these two claims. It is not quite right to say that there would be nothing left of morality if God did not exist, but moral obligations do depend on God ontologically. Such obligations are best understood as God's commands or requirements, communicated to humans in a variety of ways, including conscience. In God and Moral Obligation, Evans also argues that two views often thought to be rivals to a divine command morality, natural law ethics and virtue ethics, are not rivals at all but provide necessary complementary elements of a comprehensive morality. A number of objections to a divine command account of moral obligations are posed and answered. In the concluding chapters Evans points out the advantages such an account has over secular rivals. The authority and objectivity of moral obligations are best explained by seeing them as divine commands.

Once considered inimical to ethics, Karl Barth's theology is now rightly recognized for the central role ethics plays in it. But can Barth be safely placed in the mainstream tradition of Christian moral theology or does he offer a challenge to the latter? Gerald McKenny argues that the claim that God not only establishes the good from eternity but also brings it about in time is of fundamental importance to Barth's mature ethics. The good confronts us from the site of its fulfilment in Jesus Christ, who has accomplished it in our place. The result is a vision of the moral life as a human analogy to God's grace, a vision which contrasts with the bourgeois vision of the moral life as an expression of human capability. Barth's moral theology is presented here as the attempt to reorder ethical thought and practice in light of this fundamental claim. This lucid and well-argued study is the most comprehensive treatment of Barth's ethics to date, offering a thorough account of the development of Barth's ethical thought and a wide-ranging analysis of its chief concepts and arguments. McKenny explains why certain widespread assumptions about Barth's moral theology are mistaken and explores the rich, complex, and often surprising ways in which Barth's position engages the traditions of Christian ethics and modern continental moral thought. Above all, McKenny shows why Barth's moral theology deserves our attention in spite of, or rather because of, its uneasy fit in the mainstream tradition of Christian moral theology.

From Morality to Metaphysics offers an argument for the existence of God, based on our most fundamental moral beliefs. Angus Ritchie engages with a range of the most significant secular moral philosophers of our time, and argues that they all face a common difficulty which only theism can overcome. The book begins with a defence of the 'deliberative indispensability' of moral realism, arguing that the practical deliberation human beings engage in on a daily basis only makes sense if they take themselves to be aiming at an objective truth. Furthermore, when humans engage in practical deliberation, they necessarily take their processes of reasoning to have some ability to track the truth. Ritchie's central argument builds on this claim, to assert that only theism can adequately explain our capacity for knowledge of objective moral truths. He demonstrates that we need an explanation as well as a justification of these cognitive capacities. Evolutionary biology is not able to generate the kind of explanation which is required-and, in consequence, all secular philosophical accounts are forced either to abandon moral objectivism or to render the human capacity for moral knowledge inexplicable. This case is illustrated with discussions of a wide range of moral philosophers including Simon Blackburn, Thomas Scanlon, Philippa Foot, and John McDowell. Ritchie concludes by arguing that only purposive accounts of the universe (such as theism and Platonism) can account for human moral knowledge. Among such purposive accounts, From Morality to Metaphysics makes the case for theism as the most satisfying, intelligible explanation of our cognitive capacities.