The concept of moral injury emerged in the past decade as a way to understand how traumatic levels of moral emotions generate moral anguish experienced by some military service members. Interdisciplinary research on moral injury has included clinical psychologists (Litz et al., 2009; Drescher et al., 2011), theologians (Brock & Lettini, 2012; Graham, 2017), ethicists (Kinghorn, 2012), and philosophers (Sherman, 2015). This project articulates a new key concept-moral orienting systems- a dynamic matrix of meaningful values, beliefs, behaviors, and relationships learned and changed over time and through formative experiences and relationships such as family of origin, religious and other significant communities, mentors, and teachers. Military recruit training reengineers pre-existing moral orienting systems and indoctrinates a military moral orienting system designed to support functioning within the military context and the demands of the high-stress environment of combat, including immediate responses to perceived threat. This military moral orienting system includes new values and beliefs, new behaviors, and new meaningful relationships. Recognizing the profound impact of military recruit training, this project challenges dominant notions of post-deployment reentry and reintegration, and formulates a new paradigm for first, understanding the generative circumstances of ongoing moral stress that include moral emotions like guilt, shame, disgust, and contempt, and, second, for responding to such human suffering through compassionate care and comprehensive restorative support. This project calls for more effective participation of religious communities in the reentry and reintegration process and for a military-wide post-deployment reentry program comparable to the encompassing physio-psycho-spiritual-social transformative intensity experienced in recruit-training boot camp.

The essays gathered here provide a panoramic view of current thinking on biblical texts that play important roles in contemporary struggles for social justice - either as inspiration or impediment. Here, from the hands of an ecumenical array of leading biblical scholars, are fresh and compelling resources for thinking biblically about what justice is and what it demands. Individual essays treat key debates, themes, and texts, locating each within its historical and cultural settings while also linking them to the most pressing justice concerns of the twenty-first century. The volume aims to challenge academic and ecclesiastical complacency and highlight key avenues for future scholarship and action.

Set against an ethical-theological-philosophical framework of the role of love in the Abrahamic tradition (Islam, Judaism, and Christianity), The Ethics of Hospitality highlights the personal witness of refugee families seeking asylum from the Northern Triangle in Central America to the U.S. Their heart-wrenching stories include why they fled their homelands, their experiences along the arduous overland journey, and their inhospitable reception when they arrived to the U.S. and requested asylum. It includes an overview of the systemic connections between the U.S. and the violence which catapults these families to seek safety. The voices of the families join the witness of interreligious volunteers of greater San Antonio who assist the refugee families in diverse capacities and who testify to the mutual blessing they receive when love of God, expressed as love of neighbor, becomes central to the immigration conversation. Ultimately, the proposal is that the interreligious community has the privilege and responsibility to respond in love with refugees seeking asylum, while also leading the outcry in the public square for their radical welcome.

Divided into four parts-Earth, Air, Fire, and Water-this book takes an elemental approach to the study of religion and ecology. It reflects recent theoretical and methodological developments in this field which seek to understand the ways that ideas and matter, minds and bodies exist together within an immanent frame of reference. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Nature focuses on how these matters materialize in the world around us, thereby addressing key topics in this area of study. The editors provide an extensive introduction to the book, as well as useful introductions to each of its parts. The volume's international contributors are drawn from the USA, South Africa, Netherlands, Norway, Indonesia, and South Korea, and offer a variety of perspectives, voices, cultural settings, and geographical locales. This handbook shows that human concern and engagement with material existence is present in all sectors of the global community, regardless of religious tradition. It challenges the traditional methodological approach of comparative religion, and argues that globalization renders a comparative religious approach to the environment insufficient.

In this brilliant theological essay, Paul J. Griffiths takes the reader through all the stages of regret. To various degrees, all human beings experience regret. In this concise theological grammar, Paul J. Griffiths analyzes this attitude toward the past and distinguishes its various kinds. He examines attitudes encapsulated in the phrase, "I would it were otherwise," including regret, contrition, remorse, compunction, lament, and repentance. By using literature (especially poetry) and Christian theology, Griffiths shows both what is good about regret and what can be destructive about it. Griffiths argues that on the one hand regret can take the form of remorse-an agony produced by obsessive and ceaseless examination of the errors, sins, and omissions of the past. This kind of regret accomplishes nothing and produces only pain. On the other hand, when regret is coupled with contrition and genuine sorrow for past errors, it has the capacity both to transfigure the past-which is never merely past-and to open the future. Moreover, in thinking about the phenomenon of regret in the context of Christian theology, Griffiths focuses especially on the notion of the LORD's regret. Is it even reasonable to claim that the LORD regrets? Griffiths shows not only that it is but also that the LORD's regret should structure how we regret as human beings. Griffiths investigates the work of Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Tomas Transtroemer, Paul Celan, Jane Austen, George Herbert, and Robert Frost to show how regret is not a negative feature of human life but rather is essential for human flourishing and ultimately is to be patterned on the LORD's regret. Regret: A Theology will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy, theology, and literature, as well as to literate readers who want to understand the phenomenon of regret more deeply.

In 21st century America, personhood is under daily assault, sometimes with dire consequences. Scientist, ethicist, and ordained minister Craig C. Malbon encourages the reader to consider such assaults on personhood endured by victims of abortion, ageism, Alzheimer's disease, drug addiction, mental and physical disabilities, gender, gender orientation, racism, sexual preference, identity politics, and our will-to-power over the "other." In exploring personhood status, Malbon poses difficult questions for us. Is personhood assigned as all-or-nothing, or is it a sliding scale based upon criteria arbitrarily aimed at our vulnerabilities? Does the voiceless embryo and fetus have advocates who can speak to the moral question of abortion? Is the personhood of an economically insecure pregnant woman degraded to the point where lack of access to early termination of pregnancy results in "coercive childbearing?" Does being a member of the LGBTQI+ community target one for assaults on personhood, to the extreme of being killed? In delving into the biology and psychology of assaults of "self" upon the "other," Malbon sees powerful linkages of everyday assaults on personhood to darker, profound "original sins" that are foundational to the rise of the American empire, i.e., assaults on the indigenous Native Americans and assaults derivative to the institution of slavery upon Africans, African Americans, and their descendants.

While some see the comic as trivial, fit mainly for amusement or distraction, Soren Kierkegaard disagrees. This book examines Kierkegaard's earnest understanding of the nature of the comic and how even the triviality of comic jest is deeply tied to ethics and religion. It rigorously explicates terms such as "irony," "humor," "jest," and "comic" in Kierkegaard, revealing them to be essential to his philosophical and theological program, beyond aesthetic interest alone. Drawing centrally from Kierkegaard's most concentrated treatment of these ideas, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), this account argues that he defines the comic as a "contradiction" or misrelation that is essentially (though not absolutely) painless because it provides a "way out." The comic lies in a contradiction between norms and so springs from one's viewpoint, whether ethical or religious. "Irony" and "humor" play essential transitional roles for Kierkegaard's famous account of the stages of existence because subjective development is closely tied to one's capacity to perceive the comic, making the comic both diagnostic of and formative for one's subjective maturity. For Kierkegaard, the Christian is far from humorless, instead having the maximal comic perception because he has the highest possible subjective development. The book demonstrates that the comic is not the expression of a particular pseudonym or of a single period in Kierkegaard's thinking but is an abiding and fundamental concept for him. It finds his comic understanding even outside of Postscript, locating it in such differing works as Prefaces (1844), Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847), and the Corsair affair (c.1845-1848). The book also examines the comic in contemporary Kierkegaard scholarship. First, it argues that Deconstructionists, while accurately perceiving the widespread irony in Kierkegaard's corpus, incorrectly take the irony to imply a lack of earnest interest in philosophy and theology, misunderstanding Kierkegaard on the nature of irony. Second, it considers two theological readings to argue that their positions, while generally preferable to the Deconstructionists', lack the same attentiveness to the comic's role in Kierkegaard. Their significant theological arguments would be strengthened by increased appreciation of the legitimate power of the comic for cultivating ethics and religion.

If God rescues us to be his people, then how can our lives demonstrate our love for him? Luke Davis takes us on a journey through some of the big questions in the arena of Christian ethics, highlighting why our ideas matter. He helps us to have a firm grasp of what the issue is, what God's Word has to say about it, and what practical impact that has on our lives.

Exam Board: SQA Level: Higher Subject: RMPS First Teaching: August 2018 First Exam: June 2019 The only resource for RMPS at Higher level, by a bestselling author and expert in the field. Completely updated with the latest SQA assessment changes. This book provides comprehensive coverage of the updated Higher in Religious, Moral and Philosophical Studies, but is also ideal for students across Scotland studying key topic areas in Morality and Belief as part of the broad general education and the senior phase of RME. - Written in a lively, accessible and engaging style that reflects real-life situations and moral issues - Highlights the importance of dealing with varieties of belief within religious traditions - Deals with up-to-date contemporary and topical issues in a highly practical manner

On March 24, 1980, a sniper shot and killed Archbishop Oscar Romero as he celebrated mass. Today, nearly four decades after his death, the world continues to wrestle with the meaning of his witness. Blood in the Fields: Oscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform treats Romero's role in one of the central conflicts that seized El Salvador during his time as archbishop and that plunged the country into civil war immediately after his death: the conflict over the concentration of agricultural land and the exclusion of the majority from access to land to farm. Drawing extensively on historical and archival sources, Blood in the Fields examines how and why Romero advocated for justice in the distribution of land, and the cost he faced in doing so. In contrast to his critics, who understood Romero's calls for land reform as a communist-inspired assault on private property, Blood in the Fields shows how Romero relied upon what Catholic Social Teaching calls the common destination of created goods, drawing out its implications for what property is and what possessing it entails. For Romero, the pursuit of land reform became part of a more comprehensive politics of common use, prioritizing access of all peoples to God's gift of creation. In this way, Blood in the Fields reveals how close consideration of this conflict over land opened up into a much more expansive moral and theological landscape, in which the struggle for justice in the distribution of land also became a struggle over what it meant to be human, to live in society with others, and even to be a follower of Christ. Understanding this conflict and its theological stakes helps clarify the meaning of Romero's witness and the way God's work to restore creation in Christ is cruciform.

Autumn Alcott Ridenour offers a Christian theological discussion on the meaning of aging toward death with purpose, identity, and communal significance. Drawing from both explicit claims and constructive interpretations of St. Augustine's and Karl Barth's understanding of death and aging, this volume describes moral virtue as participation in Christ across generations, culminating in preparation for Sabbath rest during the aging stage of life. Addressing the inevitability of aging, the prospect of mortality, the importance of contemplative action and expanding upon the virtues of growing older, Ridenour analyzes how locating moral agency as union with Christ results in virtuous practices for aging individuals and their surrounding communities. By responding with constructive theology to challenges from transhumanist, bioethical and medical arenas, the volume highlights implications not only for virtue ethics, but also for the goals of medicine.

Imitating Christ in Magwi: An Anthropological Theology achieves two things. First, focusing on indigenous Roman Catholics in northern Uganda and South Sudan, it is a detailed ethnography of how a community sustains hope in the midst of one of the most brutal wars in recent memory, that between the Ugandan government and the rebel Lord's Resistance Army. Whitmore finds that the belief that the spirit of Jesus Christ can enter into a person through such devotions as the Adoration of the Eucharist gave people the wherewithal to carry out striking works of mercy during the conflict, and, like Jesus of Nazareth, to risk their lives in the process. Traditional devotion leveraged radical witness. Second, Gospel Mimesis is a call for theology itself to be a practice of imitating Christ. Such practice requires both living among people on the far margins of society - Whitmore carried out his fieldwork in Internally Displaced Persons camps - and articulating a theology that foregrounds the daily, if extraordinary, lives of people. Here, ethnography is not an add-on to theological concepts; rather, ethnography is a way of doing theology, and includes what anthropologists call "thick description" of lives of faith. Unlike theology that draws only upon abstract concepts, what Whitmore calls "anthropological theology" is consonant with the fact that God did indeed become human. It may well involve risk to one's own life - Whitmore had to leave Uganda for three years after writing an article critical of the President - but that is what imitatio Christi sometimes requires.

The Year without a Purchase is the story of one family's quest to stop shopping and start connecting. Scott Dannemiller and his wife, Gabby, are former missionaries who served in Guatemala. Ten years removed from their vow of simple living, they found themselves on a never-ending treadmill of consumption where each purchase created a desire for more and never led to true satisfaction. The difference between needs and wants had grown very fuzzy, and making that distinction clear again would require drastic action: no nonessential purchases for a whole year. No clothes, no books, no new toys for the kids. If they couldn't eat it or use it up within a year (toilet paper and shampoo, for example), they wouldn't buy it. Filled with humorous wit, curious statistics, and poignant conclusions, the book examines modern America's spending habits and chronicles the highs and lows of dropping out of our consumer culture. As the family bypasses the checkout line to wrestle with the challenges of gift giving, child rearing, and keeping up with the Joneses, they discover important truths about human nature and the secret to finding true joy. The Year without a Purchase offers valuable food for thought for anyone who has ever wanted to reduce stress by shopping less and living more.

In the last fifty years, the Appalachian Mountains have suffered permanent and profound change due to the expansion of surface coal mining. The irrevocable devastation caused by this practice has forced local citizens to redefine their identities, their connections to global economic forces, their pasts, and their futures. Religion is a key factor in the fierce debate over mountaintop removal; some argue that it violates a divine mandate to protect the earth, while others contend that coal mining is a God-given gift to ensure human prosperity and comfort. In Religion and Resistance in Appalachia: Faith and the Fight against Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining, Joseph D. Witt examines how religious and environmental ethics foster resistance to mountaintop removal coal mining. Drawing on extensive interviews with activists, teachers, preachers, and community leaders, Witt's research offers a fresh analysis of an important and dynamic topic. His study reflects a diversity of denominational perspectives, exploring Catholic and mainline Protestant views of social and environmental justice, evangelical Christian readings of biblical ethics, and Native and nontraditional spiritual traditions. By placing Appalachian resistance to mountaintop removal in a comparative international context, Witt's work also provides new outlooks on the future of the region and its inhabitants. His timely study enhances, challenges, and advances conversations not only about the region, but also about the relationship between religion and environmental activism.

This book establishes that normativity has necessary characteristics explicable only through the natural law formulation developed by Aquinas and based on loving God and neighbor, albeit understood in terms other than Christian charity and updated according to the personalism of John Paul II. The resulting personalist natural law can counter objections rising from classical and contemporary metaethics, moral diversity, undeserved suffering, antithetical interpretations of Aquinas's natural law, and alternative ethical theories, e.g., atheistic eudaimonism. Also established are the virtues of love; the nature of indefeasibility, moral objectivity, human flourishing, and Thomistic self-evidence; the relationship between the Bonum Precept (good is to be done and pursued; evil is to be avoided) and the love precepts (God is to be loved above all; neighbors are to be loved as oneself) as well as specific moral and legal obligations. These specifications update the nature of the common good, Just War Theory, the warrant for capital punishment, environmental obligations, and the basis for universal, unalienable rights, including religious liberty. The Appendix sketches the history of natural law from its origins in ancient Greek philosophy and Roman law, through developments during the Enlightenment and the American revolution, to contemporary incarnations. Overall, the book's scope and detailed arguments make it a comprehensive resource for those interested in normative foundations, justifying morality's objectivity and universality, global jurisprudence, and recasting Thomistic natural law in terms of personalist love.

In his latest work, E. Bernard Jordan builds on his bestseller "The Laws of Thinking" to unveil more of the spiritual truths that dictate success and prosperity.

Each of his twenty laws--from the law of employment to the law of values--is broken down into simple explanations and exercises to help the reader better understand their divine purpose.

In this provocative book, Jordan demonstrates that when living in sync with God's universal laws, economic hardship will disappear--you need only have faith, focus, and fundamental knowledge to succeed.

Forgiveness was a preoccupation of writers in the Victorian period, bridging literatures highbrow and low, sacred and secular. Yet if forgiveness represented a common value and language, literary scholarship has often ignored the diverse meanings and practices behind this apparently uncomplicated value in the Victorian period. Forgiveness in Victorian Literature examines how eminent writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde wrestled with the religious and social meanings of forgiveness in an age of theological controversy and increasing pluralism in ethical matters. Richard Gibson discovers unorthodox uses of the language of forgiveness and delicate negotiations between rival ethical and religious frameworks, which complicated forgiveness's traditional powers to create or restore community and, within narratives, offered resolution and closure. Illuminated by contemporary philosophical and theological investigations of forgiveness, this study also suggests that Victorian literature offers new perspectives on the ongoing debate about the possibility and potency of forgiving.

Ecclesia and Ethics considers the subject of Ecclesial Ethics within its theological, theoretical and exegetical contexts. Part one presents the biblical-theological foundations of an ecclesial ethic - examining issues such as creation, and Paul's theology of the Cross. Part two moves on to examine issues of character formation and community. Finally, part three presents a range of exegetical applications, which examine scripture and ethics in praxis. These essays look at hot-button issues such as the 'virtual self' in the digital age, economics, and attitudes to war. The collection includes luminaries such as N.T. Wright, Michael J. Gorman, Stanley Hauerwas and Dennis Hollinger, as well as giving space to new theological and exegetical voices. As such Ecclesia and Ethics provides a challenging and contemporary examination of modern ethical debates in the light of up-to-date theology and exegesis.