Globalization is a reality in today's world, and with it comes the universalization of the influence of certain Powers and Authorities. These Authorities Education, Law, Medicine, Technology distance people from, and sometimes override the duties of, familial and religious connections and have generated new spheres of loyalty and practice that are touchstones for modern life as a whole.
The contributors claim that the Authorities of modernity depend upon spiritual themes and insights. However, they note, these authorities lack a conscious moral rudder because they are not only ignorant of their roots, but because they have often repudiated them, leaving these professions morally and spiritually vacuous. The essayists claim that theological and ethical resources Christian in root, public in character, and universal in implication can re-engage these Authorities and offer them guidance.
Contributors to the volume include: Richard Osmer (Princeton Theological Seminary); John Witte, Jr. (Emory University); Allen Verhey (Hope College); Ronald Cole-Turner (Pittsburgh Theological Seminary); Jurgen Moltmann (University of Tubingen); and Peter Paris (Princeton Theological Seminary). Max L. Stackhouse is the Stephen Colwell Professor of Christian Ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary and is the author of Christian Social Ethics in a Global Era. Don S. Browning teaches at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and is the author of Religious Thought and the Modern Psychologies: A Critical Conversation in the Theology of Culture.

In the late 20th century, the world has grown increasingly smaller because of advances in technology and the erosion of the nation-state as a political paradigm. The process of globalization-with its promises of a common culture, a common currency, and a common government-offers a new political model for the world that fosters unity and community. At the same time, however, this process threatens to destroy the values, norms, and ideals that particular cultures have wrought and established and to thereby diminish the power of each culture's unique identity. As globalization occurs, society must decide which values will be normative and what roles that social institutions like religion and education will play in selecting and fostering these values. The contributors to this volume examine both the promise and the threat of globalization using the tools of theological ethics to understand and evaluate the "social contexts of life at the deepest moral and spiritual levels." This inaugural volume of a projected four volume series, Theology for the 21st Century: God and Globalization, examines five spheres of life-economics (Mammon), political science (Mars), psychology and sexuality (Eros), the mass media and the arts (Muses), and religion-that foster normative values for society. As the writers argue, their efforts attempt to determine whether "God is behind globalization in any substantive way." Contributors to the volume include: Roland Robertson, University of Pittsburgh; Yersu Kim, UNESCO; Donald W. Shriver, Jr., New York; William Schweiker, University of Chicago; Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, Eastern College; David Tracy, University of Chicago. Max L. Stackhouse teaches at Princeton Theological Seminary and is the author of Covenant and Commitments: Faith, Family, and Economic. Peter Paris teaches at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Preeminent black social ethicist Peter Paris sharpens the Afrocentric quest. He focuses on African "spirituality" - the religious and moral values embodied in African experience and pervading traditional African religious worldviews. From extensive comparative research and personal travel, Paris shows how such values were retained and modified in the diaspora, most notably in African American religious and moral thought and practice. Traditional understandings of God, ancestral spirits, tribal community, family belonging, reciprocity, personal destiny and agency, he shows, have not only survived great cultural upheavals but remarkably even been enriched and enlivened. Paris's Pan-African focus, careful scholarship, and eye for ultimate values in varying cultural milieus combine here to model comparative cultural analysis and to clarify the cultural foundations of black ethical life.

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aThe authors describe the complex congregation in exceedingly careful detail, including a number of archival photographs that bring the narrative to life. Unlike so many congregational histories, difficult periods of tension and conflict are presented alongside feel-good rehearsals of the glory days....The authors and the congregation should be commended for this unique contribution to the field of congregational studies. The research is comprehensive.a
--"Sociology of Religion""There is much to commend it, and my students will be glad to find such a readable book on their syllabi."--"Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion"

"This is an excellent scholarly resource on liberal Protestant church history and is recommended for all congregational libraries."--"Church and Synagogue Libraries"

"A critical history, not a jingoistic celebration....scholarly volume."
--"Spirit"

It was from the pulpit of the Riverside Church that Martin Luther King, Jr., first publicly voiced his opposition to the Vietnam War, that Nelson Mandela addressed U.S. church leaders after his release from prison, and that speakers as diverse as Cesar Chavez, Jesse Jackson, Desmond Tutu, Fidel Castro, and Reinhold Niebuhr lectured church and nation about issues of the day. The greatest of American preachers have served as senior minister, including Harry Emerson Fosdick, Robert J. McCracken, Ernest T. Campbell, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., and James A. Forbes, Jr., and at one time the "New York Times" printed reports of each Sunday's sermon in its Monday morning edition.

For seven decades the church has served as the premier model ofProtestant liberalism in the United States. Its history represents the movement from white Protestant hegemony to a multiracial and multiethnic church that has been at the vanguard of social justice advocacy, liberation theologies, gay and lesbian ministries, peace studies, ethnic and racial dialogue, and Jewish-Christian relations.

A collaborative effort by a stellar team of scholars, The History of the Riverside Church in the City of New York offers a critical history of this unique institution on Manhattan's Upper West Side, including its cultural impact on New York City and beyond, its outstanding preachers, and its architecture, and assesses the shifting fortunes of religious progressivism in the twentieth century.

This analysis of four Black religious leaders--Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Joseph H. Jackson, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.--reviews their differences and determines whether grounds for coalitional activity still exists. These leaders all clearly agreed that racism should be opposed but they vigorously disagreed on the forms the opposition should take.

A Ghanaian scholar of religion argues that poverty is a particularly complex subject in traditional African cultures, where holistic worldviews unite life's material and spiritual dimensions. A South African ethicist examines informal economies in Ghana, Jamaica, Kenya, and South Africa, looking at their ideological roots, social organization, and vulnerability to global capital. African American theologians offer ethnographic accounts of empowering religious rituals performed in churches in the United States, Jamaica, and South Africa. This important collection brings together these and other Pan-African perspectives on religion and poverty in Africa and the African diaspora.

Contributors from Africa and North America explore poverty's roots and effects, the ways that experiences and understandings of deprivation are shaped by religion, and the capacity and limitations of religion as a means of alleviating poverty. As part of a collaborative project, the contributors visited Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa, as well as Jamaica and the United States. In each location, they met with clergy, scholars, government representatives, and NGO workers, and they examined how religious groups and community organizations address poverty. Their essays complement one another. Some focus on poverty, some on religion, others on their intersection, and still others on social change. A Jamaican scholar of gender studies decries the feminization of poverty, while a Nigerian ethicist and lawyer argues that the protection of human rights must factor into efforts to overcome poverty. A church historian from Togo examines the idea of poverty as a moral virtue and its repercussions in Africa, and a Tanzanian theologian and priest analyzes "ujamaa," an African philosophy of community and social change. Taken together, the volume's essays create a discourse of mutual understanding across linguistic, religious, ethnic, and national boundaries.

"Contributors." Elizabeth Amoah, Kossi A. Ayedze, Barbara Bailey, Katie G. Cannon, Noel Erskine, Dwight N. Hopkins, Simeon O. Ilesanmi, Laurenti Magesa, Madipoane Masenya, Takatso A. Mofokeng, Esther M. Mombo, Nyambura J. Njoroge, Jacob Olupona, Peter J. Paris, Anthony B. Pinn, Linda E. Thomas, Lewin L. Williams