In a world of conflict in which religious differences play a significant role, reconciliation grows increasingly important. The Ministry of Reconciliation shows how with a spirituality of reconciliation we can create the spaces in which reconciliation can happen, and with human strategies, how the process of reconciliation can move forward.

From wide-ranging travels Schreiter has gained a profound wisdom and hope as well as the questions and struggles to be faced. In Part One, "Reconciliation as Spirituality, " Schreiter poses this key question: "If God did indeed raise Jesus up to a new life that breaks the grip of violence and sin on the world, what should be the concrete object of our hope?" Each of the next six chapters then meditates on post-Easter appearances as recorded in Scripture. Schreiter's explorations of such events as "the breakfast at the seashore" (John 21:1-17) and "what the women saw" (Mark 16:1-8; John 20:1-18) reveal a direct pastoral style reminiscent of Rahner and Barth at their best.

From this profound and hope-filled beginning Schreiter goes on to emphasize how a spirituality of reconciliation without sound social and theological reflection on its implementation will fail. Part Two, "Elements of a Strategy for Reconciliation, " tackles such vexing questions as individual and social responsibility; truth and justice; amnesty and pardon; and how the church can aid in reconciliation. Schreiter explores questions as: How can forgiveness happen? What is justice, and how should it be sought and administered? How can a society be rebuilt that includes the perpetrators of evil?

An international team of scholars address the theology and practice of peacebuilding.

"Peacebuilding" refers to a range of topics, ranging from conflict prevention to post-conflict reconciliation. In this volume a strong cast of Catholic theologians, ethicists, and scholar-practitioners join to examine the challenge of peacebuilding in theory and practice. While many of the essays deal with general themes of reconciliation, forgiveness, interreligious dialogue, and human rights, there are also case studies of peacebuilding in such diverse contexts as Colombia, the Philippines, the Great Lakes region of Africa, Indonesia, and South Africa. This volume will be of interest to all scholars engaged in developing a theology and ethic of just peace, as well as students seeking to understand the interaction between theology, ethics, and lived Christianity.

Contributors include: John Paul Lederach; Maryann Cusimano Love; Daniel Philpott; William Headley and Reina Neufeldt; Todd Whitmore; Peter-John Pearson; Thomas Michel; Kenneth Himes; Lisa Sowle Cahill; Peter Phan; and David O'Brien.

Robert J. Schreiter brings together acute analyses of the Christian world mission agenda by astute observers of both church and world. In six chapters -- including Schreiter's own essay on a new ecumenical catholicity and a seventh by him on the status of the global Christian mission agenda, focusing especially on the Catholic role in mission -- the reader is taken on a trip that reveals how globalization entails both local and international responses.

The book is an exploration of the creative crossings between the liberative stream of the eschatology of Edward Schillebeeckx and the stylistic strategies of "Third Cinema," political cinema dedicated to the representation of Third World liberation.

The book is an exploration of the creative crossings between the liberative stream of the eschatology of Edward Schillebeeckx and the stylistic strategies of 'Third Cinema', political cinema dedicated to the representation of Third World liberation.

In 2002 Philip Jenkins wrote "The Next Christendom." Over the past half century the centre of gravity of the Christian world has moved decisively to the global South, says Jenkins. Within a few decades European and Euro-American Christians will have become a small fragment of world Christianity. By that time Christianity in Europe and North America will to a large extent consist of Southern-derived immigrant communities. Southern churches will fulfil neither the Liberation Dream nor the Conservative Dream of the North, but will seek their own solutions to their particular problems. Jenkins' book evoked strong reactions, a bit to his own surprise, as the book contained little new. In the United States of America, the prospect of a more biblical Christianity caused reactions of alarm in liberal circles. In contrast, conservatives were delighted by the same prospect. In Europe the book landed in the middle of the debate on Europe as an exceptional case. It was detested by those who stick to the theory of ongoing and irreversible secularisation and welcomed by those who see a resurgence of religion, also in Europe. In the present volume, scholars of religion and theologians assess the global trends in World Christianity as described in Philip Jenkins' book. It is the outcome of an international conference on Southern Christianity and its relation to Christianity in the North, held in the Conference Centre of Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Encompassing recent developments in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and communication theory The New Catholicity explores the many aspects of globalization that challenge Christianity as it enters into its third millennium. In Schreiter's view, a deep irony, perhaps even a paradox, is concealed within the riddle of globalization. Such forces as feminist, liberation, ecological, and global theological movements find their counterparts in antiglobalism, ethnification, and primitivism. Liberation thought in a post-Soviet world seeks to be more realistic about economics but finds "reformist gradualism" a bitter pill to swallow. Intercultural theologies find analogous difficulties when they attend to "integrated" as opposed to "globalized" concepts of culture. The seeming polar opposition of [bad] "syncretism" and [good] "synthesis" in the context of changing religious identities end up much less amenable to simple value judgments than they once appeared to be.

This work offers a compendium of different christologies from Africa, Asia and Latin America, and in so doing provides a good introduction to the theologies of the Third World generally. But it is more than an encyclopaedic account; it asks what these christologies have in commone and where they differ, and what they mean for ecumenism. Some of the figures discussed here, like M.M. Thomas and Stanley Samartha from India or C.S. Song from Taiwan and Kosuke Koyama from Japan, Leonardo Boff and Jon Sobrino from Latin America, James Cone from the USA and Alan Boesak from South Africa, may be familiar. But there are also many new and significant names, particularly from Africa, where new titles for Christ are being created which seek to express the significance of Jesus in the categories of African thought. There are also accounts of Korean Minjung theology, Indian Dalit theology and Japanese Burakumin theology, expressing the pictures of a suffering Christ created by a suffering people.