Misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and ensuing acrimony have too often characterized Mormon relations with other Christians. In pursuing "discussions that lead to understanding," this volume brings together, for the first time, a broad range of scholars from Mormon and other Christian traditions. Replacing polemics and apologetics with dialogue, these exchanges show how the full spectrum of contemporary theologies can be informed by uniquely Mormon ideas, and correlatively, how Mormon thought can be illuminated through the study of key ideas of the foremost theologians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Langdon Gilkey, Robert McAfee Brown, Clark Pinnock, Rosemary Radford Reuther, Linda Thomas, Dwight Hopkins, David Griffin, and David Tracy. Besides providing succinct but illuminating presentations of basic Christian theological topics, this work discloses Mormon perspectives, virtually unknown in academia, on these topics. In content, as well as methodology, this book provides promising contexts for mainline Christian-Mormon conversations in particular and an exemplary model for intra-faith dialogue in general.

In recent years, the flow of Christian theology has been channeled in diverse streams represented by such trends and movements as black theology, liberation theology, feminist theology, and womanist theology. To survey this abundance and diversity of current Christian theology, this book examines the theologies of representative theologians. Particularly to help students navigate the sea of information, the editors have identified various routes for reading, and have traced several threads or issues common to many of the essays, thus demarcating such recurrent concerns as the ways in which the theologians consider the sources and goals for theology, their variant assumptions and conclusions about the nature of God, their divergent approaches to understanding the person and purpose of the Christ, and their distinct expectations for the destiny of history and faith.