This collection brings together legal scholars and Christian theologians for an interdisciplinary conversation responding to the challenges of global migration. Gathering 14 leading scholars from both law and Christian theology, the book covers legal perspectives, theological perspectives, and key concepts in migration studies. In Part 1, scholars of migration law and policy discuss the legal landscape of migration at both the domestic and international level. In Part 2, Christian theologians, ethicists, and biblical scholars draw on the resources of the Christian tradition to think about migration. In Part 3, each chapter is co-authored by a scholar of law and a scholar of Christian theology, who bring their respective resources and perspectives into conversation on key themes within migration studies. The work provides a truly interdisciplinary introduction to the topic of migration for those who are new to the subject; an opportunity for immigration lawyers and legal scholars to engage Christian theology; an opportunity for pastors and Christian theologians to engage law; and new insights on key frameworks for scholars who are already committed to the study of migration.

This book explores how the rising numbers of refugees entering Europe from 2015 onwards played into fears of cultural, religious, and ethnic differences across the continent. The migrant, or refugee crisis, prompted fierce debate about European norms and values, with some commentators questioning whether mostly Muslim refugees would be able to adhere to these values, and be able to integrate into a predominantly Christian European society. In this volume, philosophers, legal scholars, anthropologists and sociologists, analyze some of these debates and discuss practical strategies to reconcile the values that underpin the European project with multiculturalism and religious pluralism, whilst at the same time safeguarding the rights of refugees to seek asylum. Country case studies in the book are drawn from France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom; representing states with long histories of immigration, countries with a more recent refugee arrivals, and countries that want to keep refugees at bay and refuse to admit even the smallest number of asylum seekers. Contributors in the book explore the roles which national and local governments, civil society, and community leaders play in these debates and practices, and ask what strategies are being used to educate refugees about European values, and to facilitate their integration. At a time when debates on refugees and European norms continue to rage, this book provides an important interdisciplinary analysis which will be of interest to European policy makers, and researchers across the fields of migration, law, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and political science. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429279317, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Despite the command from Christ to love your neighbour, Western Christianity has continued to be afflicted by the evil of racism and the acts of violence that accompany it. Through a systems theoretical and deconstructive account of religion and the political theology of St. Paul, this book traces how the racism and violence of modern Western Christianity is a symptom of its failure to secure its own myth of sovereignty within a complex world of plurality. Divided into three sections, the book begins with a philosophical and critical account of what it calls the immune system of Christian identity. Focusing on Pauline political theology as reflective of an inherent religious "autoimmunity" built into Christian community, a theory of theological-political violence is located within Western Christianity. The second section traces major theoretical aspects of the historical "apparatus" of Christian Identity. It demonstrates that it is ultimately around the figure of the black slave that racialized Christian identity becomes a system of anti-blackness and white supremacy. The book concludes by offering strategies for thinking resistance against such racialised Christian identity. It does this by constructing a "pragmatics of faith" by engaging Deleuze's and Guattari's use of the term pragmatics, Moten's theory of black fugitivity, and Long's account of African American religious production. This wide-ranging and interdisciplinary view of Christianity's relationship to racism will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Theological Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Race Studies, American Studies, and Critical Theory.

After the re-emergence of the tradition of virtue ethics in the early 1980s Reinhold Niebuhr has often served as a foil for authors who locate themselves in that tradition. However, this exercise has often proved controversial. This collection of essays continues this work, across a wide range of subjects, with the aim of avoiding some of the polemics that have previously accompanied it. The central thesis of this book is that putting the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian realism in dialogue with contemporary virtue theory is a profitable undertaking. An introductory essay argues against locating Niebuhr as a consequentialist and in favour of thinking of his work in terms of a dispositional ethics Contributors take different positions on whether Niebuhr's dispositional ethics should be considered a form of virtue ethics or an alternative to virtue ethics. Several of the articles relate Niebuhr and Christian realism to particular virtues. Throughout there is an appreciation of the ways in which any Niebuhrian approach to dispositional ethics or virtue must be shaped by a sense of tragedy, paradox, or irony. The most moral disposition will be one which includes doubts about its own virtue. This volume allows for a repositioning of Niebuhr in the context of contemporary moral theory as well as a rereading of the tradition of virtue ethics in the light of a distinctly Protestant, Christian realist and paradoxical view of virtue. As a result, it will be of great interest to scholars of Niebuhr and Christian Ethics and scholars working in Moral Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion more generally.

Trusting Others, Trusting God is an investigation of the concepts of moral and religious trust. The question of why or how it is rational to trust anyone has been the typical focus of philosophers, with an underlying assumption that trust must be justified. In most cases, trust (even - or perhaps especially religious trust) is portrayed as irrational. Sheela Pawar argues that a grammatical investigation of the concept of trust can help rectify this mistreatment.

In this book, the author presents a detailed study of the notion of conscience from the perspective of its historical development and existential environment. The purpose of the study is to highlight conscience's dignity and fallibility, as well as its dependence upon the context of virtue and grace, in order to develop as our capacity to perceive the truth in moral action. Starting from the premise that current moral theory is suffering from fragmentation, the author proposes that this fragmented outlook has affected the common understanding of conscience and is therefore in need of renewal, chiefly in terms of the reintegration of conscience with its proper setting. In order to explore this theory, he investigates how conscience has been understood over the centuries, particularly in the New Testament and during the Scholastic period, and analyses a number of important issues concerning its nature and function.

Poverty is a multi-dimensional concept which is complex in its origin as well as in its manifestations. Oppression and denial of Human Rights can contribute to poverty. However, this oppression and exploitation of the poor is not to be understood simplistically but as a systemic injustice rooted within the context of well organized socio-political and cultural structures of oppression. This study is a concerted effort to identify, articulate and highlight the existence, the causes and effects of poverty in Nigeria, particularly in Igboland, where Human Rights infringements have contributed to poverty. It also aims at alerting the respective governments to their administrative inadequacies that are contrary to social ethics and have given rise to poverty. It concludes by discussing viable strategies of alleviating poverty in Igboland.

This thought-provoking book explores the connections between health, ethics, and soul. It analyzes how and why the soul has been lost from scientific discourses, healthcare practices, and ethical discussions, presenting suggestions for change. Arguing that the dominant scientific worldview has eradicated talk about the soul and presents an objective and technical approach to human life and its vulnerabilities, Ten Have and Pegoraro look to rediscover identity, humanity, and meaning in healthcare and bioethics. Taking a mulitidisciplinary approach, they investigate philosophical, scientific, historical, cultural, social, religious, economic, and environmental perspectives as they journey toward a new, global bioethics, emphasizing the role of the moral imagination. Bioethics, Healthcare and the Soul is an important read for students, researchers, and practitioners interested in bioethics and person-centred healthcare.

This book examines the connection between religion and violence in the Western traditions of the three Abrahamic faiths, from ancient to modern times. It addresses a gap in the scholarly debate on the nature of religious violence by bringing scholars that specialize in pre-modern religions and scriptural traditions into the same sphere of discussion as those specializing in contemporary manifestations of religious violence. Moving beyond the question of the "authenticity" of religious violence, this book brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines. Contributors explore the central role that religious texts have played in encouraging, as well as confronting, violence. The interdisciplinary conversation that takes place challenges assumptions that religious violence is a modern problem that can be fully understood without reference to religious scriptures, beliefs, or history. Each chapter focuses its analysis on a particular case study from a distinct historical period. Taken as a whole, these chapters attest to the persistent relationship between religion and violence that links the ancient and contemporary worlds. This is a dynamic collection of explorations into how religion and violence intersect. As such, it will be a key resource for any scholar of Religious Studies, Theology and Religion and Violence, as well as Christian, Jewish, and Islamic Studies.

The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts analyzes a large corpus of early Christian texts and Pseudepigraphic materials to understand how the authors of these texts used, abused and silenced enslaved characters to articulate their own social, political, and theological visions. The focus is on excavating the texts "from below" or "against the grain" in order to notice the slaves, and in so doing, to problematize and (re)imagine the narratives. Noticing the slaves as literary iterations means paying attention to broader theological, ideological, and rhetorical aims of the texts within which enslaved bodies are constructed. The analysis demonstrates that by silencing slaves and using a rhetoric of violence, the authors of these texts contributed to the construction of myths in which slaves functioned as a useful trope to support the combined power of religion and empire. Thus was created not only the perfect template for the rise and development of a Christian discourse of slavery, but also a rationale for subsequent violence exercised against slave bodies within the Christian Empire. The study demonstrates the value of using the tools and applying the insights of subaltern studies to the study of the Pseudepigrapha and in early Christian texts. This volume will be of interest not only to scholars of early Christianity, but also to those working on the history of slavery and subaltern studies in antiquity.

Catholic social teaching (CST) refers to the corpus of authoritative ecclesiastical teaching, usually in the form of papal encyclicals, on social matters, beginning with Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891) and running through Pope Francis. CST is not a social science and its texts are not pragmatic primers for social activists. It is a normative exercise of Church teaching, a kind of comprehensive applied - although far from systematic - social moral theology. This volume is a scholarly engagement with this 130-year-old documentary tradition. Its twenty-three essays aim to provide a constructive, historically sophisticated, critical exegesis of all the major (and some of the minor) documents of CST. The volume's appeal is not limited to Catholics, or even just to those who embrace, or who are seriously interested in, Christianity. Its appeal is to any scholar interested in the history or content of modern CST.

Using ethnographic research, The Work of Inclusion brings the standpoints of people with intellectual disabilities to the forefront of the theological conversation around disability, inclusion, grace, and sin. In a world shaped by interdependency, developing a theological attunement to intellectual disability helps us to understand that human agency is both enabled by and limited by dependency relationships. Only by recognizing the kinds of complex layers of agency seen in this ethnographic study can Christian ethics more broadly address the place of hope, grace, and resistance against structures of sin and injustice.

Drawing on work from inside some of America's largest and toughest prisons, this book documents an alternative model of "restorative corrections" utilizing the lived experience of successful inmates, fast disrupting traditional models of correctional programming. While research documents a strong desire among those serving time in prison to redeem themselves, inmates often confront a profound lack of opportunity for achieving redemption. In a system that has become obsessively and dysfunctionally punitive, often fewer than 10% of prisoners receive any programming. Incarcerated citizens emerge from prisons in the United States to reoffend at profoundly high rates, with the majority of released prisoners ending up back in prison within five years. In this book, the authors describe a transformative agenda for incentivizing and rewarding good behavior inside prisons, rapidly proving to be a disruptive alternative to mainstream corrections and offering hope for a positive future. The authors' expertise on the impact of faith-based programs on recidivism reduction and prisoner reentry allows them to delve into the principles behind inmate-led religious services and other prosocial programs-to show how those incarcerated may come to consider their existence as meaningful despite their criminal past and current incarceration. Religious practice is shown to facilitate the kind of transformational "identity work" that leads to desistance that involves a change in worldview and self-concept, and which may lead a prisoner to see and interpret reality in a fundamentally different way. With participation in religion protected by the U.S. Constitution, these model programs are helping prison administrators weather financial challenges while also helping make prisons less punitive, more transparent, and emotionally restorative. This book is essential reading for scholars of corrections, offender reentry, community corrections, and religion and crime, as well as professionals and volunteers involved in correctional counseling and prison ministry.

What if wilderness is bad for wildlife? This question motivates the philosophical investigation in Wilderness, Morality, and Value. Environmentalists aim to protect wilderness, and for good reasons, but wilderness entails unremittent, incalculable suffering for its non-human habitants. Given that it will become increasingly possible to augment nature in ways that ameliorates some of this suffering, the morality of wilderness preservation is itself in question. Joshua S. Duclos argues that the technological and ethical reality of the Anthropocene warrants a fundamental reassessment of the value of wilderness. After exposing the moral ambiguity of wilderness preservation, he explores the value of wilderness itself by engaging with anthropocentricism and nonanthropocentrism; sentientism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism; and instrumental value and intrinsic value. Duclos argues that the value of wilderness is a narrow form of anthropocentric intrinsic value, one with a religio-spiritual dimension. By integrating scholarship from bioethics on the norms of engineering human nature with debates in environmental ethics concerning the prospect of engineering non-human nature, Wilderness, Morality, and Value sets the stage for wilderness ethics-or wilderness faith-in the Anthropocene.

Luxury. The word alone conjures up visions of visions of attractive, desirable lifestyle choices, yet it also faces criticism as a moral vice harmful to both the self and society. Engaging with ideas from business, marketing, and economics, The Vice of Luxury takes on the challenging task of naming how much is too much in today's consumer-oriented society. David Cloutier's critique goes to the heart of a fundamental contradiction. Though overconsumption and materialism make us uneasy, they also seem inevitable in advanced economies. Current studies of economic ethics focus on the structural problems of poverty, of international trade, of workers' rights -- but rarely, if ever, do such studies speak directly to the excesses of the wealthy, including the middle classes of advanced economies. Cloutier proposes a new approach to economic ethics that focuses attention on our everyday economic choices. He shows why luxury is a problem, explains how to identify what counts as the vice of luxury today, and develops an ethic of consumption that is grounded in Christian moral convictions.

What global future would ensure hope, justice and peace to the human mankind? In view of a fast evolving post-Covid world order, this volume explores a novel Christian post-colonial approach to global affairs. It examines the existing 'sociology of the powers' theoretical scheme, the debate between Christian realism and Christian pacifism, the method and practice of prophetic witnessing, to elaborate a new Christian approach to statecraft and futurology in terms of theory, methodology and ontology. This book: * Uses the COVID-19 pandemic as the background to examine why and how the pandemic has accelerated the US's decline, and to identify the tacit game rules that contributed to the UK government's mishandling of the pandemic; * Compares the political systems between China and the West, and engages with selected theoretical narratives from the Global South to envision an alternative 'shared globalisation' project; * Argues why it is important for post-colonial Christian individuals and communities to get involved in this global discussion for a new world order of complex realist interdependencies grounded on hope, social justice and peace. A fresh take on global politics and international relations, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of political science, religious studies, peace studies, theology and future studies.

This volume examines biblical wisdom literature both in its historical context and as it relates to a host of contemporary themes, including overcoming social divisions, reading from a place of inclusion, healing from trauma, and challenging religious attitudes toward climate change and animals. This volume delivers fresh insights on biblical wisdom texts, exploring ways in which wisdom literature speaks perennially to the human condition despite the differences in societies then and now. Employing both biblical studies and theological approaches, the diverse group of authors in this collection examine biblical wisdom literature from a variety of perspectives and methodologies to illuminate the relevance of wisdom for ancient audiences such as exiles, scribes, and leaders, as well as for contemporary audiences concerned with challenges such as climate change, social division, and healing from trauma. Its eleven chapters utilize an accessible style that brings erudite scholarship on biblical wisdom to a broader audience. Biblical Wisdom, Then and Now will be an invaluable resource for undergraduates, graduates, and specialists in biblical studies, as well as the more general reader with an interest in biblical literature and its reception.

The book evaluates on-going ethical conversations to learn how emotional communication is received, teachings are internalized, and a religious world-view is brought to life. Exploring how religious values saturate people's consciousness to induce subtle shifts in moral and ethical sensibilities, this book is about people's practices that illuminate how Islam is lived. Based on fieldwork conducted in Ankara between 2010 and 2016, the study enquires into people's ethical, religious, and moral motivations through the use of the ethnographic method and "thick description". Conversations and interviews with officials, community leaders, students, entrepreneurs, professionals, and blue-collar workers were subjected to close scrutiny to foreground societal change and churning. To capture perspectives absent or deliberately overlooked in mainstream public discourse and scholarship, fieldwork was conducted in locations ranging from homes, offices, and university dorms to the shrines of saints. In listening closely to how people talk about their religious practices, the book addresses the question of how Islamic subjectivities are being forged in Turkey. The study unveils how people are pushed to re-think old practices and attitudes in the process of reinterpreting Islam in light of contemporary concerns. Filling a gap in the literature where micro-level, grounded analyses of culture and society are relatively rare, this book is a key resource for readers interested in the anthropology of religion and gender, ethnography, Turkey, and the Middle East.

Nonviolent methods of action have been a powerful tool since the early twentieth century for social protest and revolutionary social and political change, and there is diffuse awareness that nonviolence is an efficient spontaneous choice of movements, individuals and whole nations. Yet from a conceptual standpoint, nonviolence struggles to engage with key contemporary political issues: the role of religion in a post-secular world; the crisis of democracy; and the use of supposedly 'nonviolent techniques' for violent aims. Drawing on classic thinkers and contemporary authors, in particular the Italian philosopher Aldo Capitini, this book shows that nonviolence is inherently a non-systematic and flexible system with no pure, immaculate thought at its core. Instead, at the core of nonviolence there is praxis, which is impure because while it aims at freedom and plurality it is made of less than perfect actions performed in an imperfect environment by flawed individuals. Offering a more progressive, transformative and at the same time pluralistic concept of nonviolence, this book is an original conceptual analysis of political theory which will appeal to students of international relations, global politics, security studies, peace studies and democratic theory.

We are living in an emerging technoculture. Machines and gadgets not only weave the fabric of daily life, but more importantly embody philosophical and religious values which shape the contemporary moral vision-a vision that is often at odds with Christian convictions. This book critically examines those values, and offers a framework for how Christian moral theology should be formed and lived-out within the emerging technoculture. Brent Waters argues that technology represents the principal cultural background against which contemporary Christian moral life is formed. Addressing contemporary ethical and religious issues, this book will be of particular interest to students and scholars exploring the ideas of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Grant, Arendt, and Borgmann.

This book investigates the intersection of theology and social theory in the work of JA1/4rgen Moltmann. In particular, it examines the way in which his concept of the "Exodus Church" can illuminate the importance of the idea of civil society for a Christian public theology. The concept of civil society can aid in moving from the narrower category of "political theology," a term used frequently by Moltmann to emphasize the church's public commitment, to a broader understanding of theology's public task, which takes into account the plurality of ends and institutions within society. The idea of the Exodus Church enables deeper understanding of Christian ethical participation within a complex modern society.

In this multi-disciplinary collection we ask the question, 'What did, and do, Quakers think about good and evil?' There are no simple or straightforwardly uniform answers to this, but in this collection, we draw together contributions that for the first time look at historical and contemporary Quakerdom's approach to the ethical and theological problem of evil and good. Within Quakerism can be found Liberal, Conservative, and Evangelical forms. This book uncovers the complex development of metaethical thought by a religious group that has evolved with an unusual degree of diversity. In doing so, it also points beyond the boundaries of the Religious Society of Friends to engage with the spectrum of thinking in the wider religious world.

When deciding what to do, is it best to treat one's own interests as more important than the interests of others, others' interests as more important than one's own, or one's own and others' interests as equally important? This book develops an account of others-centeredness, a way of putting others first in the process of deciding what to do. Over the course of six chapters, Putting Others First investigates other-centeredness by drawing upon a wide range of academic disciplines including biblical studies, feminist scholarship, philosophy, psychology, and theology. The author begins by explaining the nature of others-centeredness as a character trait in detail and connecting it with other contemporary projects in virtue theory. He argues that foundational texts of the New Testament can be plausibly read as advocating for others-centeredness. He then develops a provisional case for the value of others-centeredness from the perspective of each of the three major approaches to normative ethics: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. Next, the author confronts challenging questions about the value of others-centeredness, including whether others-centeredness requires an impossibly strong sort of altruism, whether it leads its possessors into self-destructive relationships, and whether it leads to offering help that hurts others. Finally, he examines the place of others-centeredness within a person's moral psychology by considering the relationship between it and other virtues and vices, and reviews relevant scientific findings that illuminate the value and causal role of others-centeredness.

Christian Ethics and Commonsense Morality goes against the grain of various postmodern approaches to morality in contemporary religious ethics. In this book, Jung seeks to provide a new framework in which the nature of common Christian moral beliefs and practices can be given a new meaning. He suggests that, once major philosophical assumptions behind postmodern theories of morality are called into question, we may look at Christian morality in quite a different light. On his account, Christian morality is a historical morality insofar as it is rooted in the rich historical traditions of the Christian church. Yet this kind of historical dependence does not entail the evidential dependence of all moral beliefs on historical traditions. It is possible to argue for the epistemic autonomy of moral beliefs, according to which Christian and other moral beliefs can be justified independently of their historical sources. The particularity of Christian morality lies not in its particular historical sources that also function as the grounds of justification, but rather in its explanatory and motivational capacity to further articulate the kind of moral knowledge that is readily available to most human beings and to enable people to act upon their moral knowledge.

This book focuses on the themes of border violence; racial criminalization; competing hermeneutics of the sacred; and State-sponsored modes of desacralizing black and brown-bodied people, all in the context of the US-Mexico borderlands. It provides a much-needed substantive response to the State's use of sacrilization to justify its acts of violence and offers new ways of theologizing the acceptance of the "other" in its place. As a counter-hermeneutic of the sacred, the ultimate objective of the book is to offer an alternative epistemological, theoretical and practical framework that resacralizes the other. Rejecting the State-driven agenda of othering border-crossers, it follows Gloria Anzaldua's healing move to the Sacred Other and creates a new hermeneutic of the sacred at the borderlands. One that resacralizes those deemed by the State as the non-sacred human other anywhere in the world. This is an important and topical book that addresses one of the key issues of our time. As such, it will be of keen interest to any scholar of Religious Studies and Liberation Theology as well as religion's interaction with migration, race and contemporary politics.