LITMIR.BIZ

The present volume is the third in a five-volume study of church doctrine. The multivolume set covers the major parts of church doctrine: Canon, God, Creation, Reconciliation, and Redemption. The first volume begins with an introduction to the entire project on why doctrine matters, which stresses the ecumenical, global, and above all biblical horizons of church doctrine as a primary expression of Christian witness. The second volume discusses the doctrine of God. The purpose of this third volume is to reaffirm the traditional church doctrine of Creation, and yet to do so in a way that submits that tradition to the overruling, overpowering authority of Scripture. God the Creator, according to the Bible, owns the entire universe; it does not belong to humankind. We live in service of his covenant of grace; but we do so along with our fellow creatures in a common vulnerability and finitude. The volume addresses the question of how the church doctrine of Creation speaks to the manifold ecological crisis of our time. Church doctrine is not a luxury but a necessity for the living community of faith, by which its witness in word and deed is tested against the one true measure of Christ the risen Lord.

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Transforming Wisdom offers an extensive, multidisciplinary introduction to pastoral psychotherapy from some of the most respected practitioners in the field. With special attention to theological perspectives on the practice of psychotherapy, this collection of essays will be useful to students seeking an orientation to the art and science of pastoral psychotherapy as well as to seasoned professionals looking to refresh and renew their practice.
As the subtitle, Pastoral Psychotherapy in Theological Perspective, suggests, this book is intended to represent the field of pastoral psychotherapy as a mental-health discipline that maintains intentional dialogue with its theological roots. Even as pastoral psychotherapy has developed from the ancient notion of the cure of souls to the current search for a psychology of happiness, therapists grounded in faith communities seek a practice that is respectful of all persons, mindful of the deep wisdom that emanates from the true self, or soul.
While many contributors write from a psychoanalytic or psychodynamic perspective grounded in Christian theological idioms, diverse theoretical perspectives, including Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, Narrative Therapy, Buddhist Mindfulness, and Jungian understanding of individuation, are represented.

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This analytical, polemical, and personal book creates a lively interaction between mysticism and activism. Looking beyond superficial links between spirituality and justice, it creates an in-depth engagement of mysticism as an inner revolution and activism as a mirroring socioeconomic transfiguration.
Based on the twin premises of the mystical tradition and Social Gospel-liberation theology that those who experience God in prayer or engage in social action ought to be our primary theologians, it examines what these two traditions say about theology, to each other, and to us. The broad synthesis that results from this fascinating dialogue brings new insights into mysticism, activism, theology, and ethics, and casts a unique light on how we pray and live.
If Only We Could See brings together a wealth of spiritual material from the early Desert, medieval mystics, and modern spiritual writers alongside an equally rich resource of abolitionists, anti-apartheid activists, civil rights leaders, nonviolent change agents, and peacemakers. The results yield valuable insights for a theology that challenges every personal and political status quo.

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What can God and eros have to do with each other? Against Nietzsche's claim that Christianity poisoned eros, God and Eros rereads the mystery of human love as an ecstatic sharing in the mystery of the triune God who is Love. Body, sex, and affectivity, far from being locked in a lower order called «nature,» instead belong to a sacramental order that is permeated by the call to love. In presentations designed to appeal to a general audience, the faculty of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, Melbourne, approach this mystery through the lens of St. John Paul II's «theology of the body,» with the goal to both introduce and more clearly illumine its major features. In particular, emphasis is placed on how a theology of the body is not just about «sex.» Rather, it is above all about how each and every person–no matter what her state of life–is stamped by the watermark of being-from and being-for. Working within this broader perspective, God and Eros offers the reader a lively, engaging, and at times challenging tour of the full «ethos of the nuptial mystery.»

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Beginning with her award-winning book Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (1990), Nancey Murphy has used philosophy of science as a way into, and catalyst for, fresh thinking in cosmology, divine action, epistemology, cognitive neuroscience, theological anthropology, philosophy of mind, and Christian virtue ethics. The essays in this book, written by her students and colleagues, creatively honor Murphy by extending a number of her core insights within their respective disciplines. An introduction provides both an account of Murphy's unique location (an Anabaptist teaching at an evangelical graduate institution) and a summary of her contributions to theology as a philosopher of science whose corpus more than any other epitomizes the paradigm shift in philosophy sometimes called «Anglo-American postmodernity.» Subsequently, fourteen essays provide unique engagements with Murphy on subjects including divine action, the interaction between science and theology, epistemology, the nature of humanity, and political theology. In its entirety, Practicing to Aim at Truth provides the first in-depth interaction with and extension of Nancey Murphy's unique school of thought, providing a resource both for those wishing to extend her research program as well as those wishing to understand it charitably in order to critique it.

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What does it mean to be a woman? Do women have a unique nature and a unique vocation? Should feminists work to help women specifically or to support all people?
Thinking Woman examines the lives and ideas of women in the history of philosophy who wished to understand and advocate for themselves as women. Some, like Hildegard of Bingen and Edith Stein, found women to be a unique creature designed by God, necessary for good stewardship of creation. Others, such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Sojourner Truth, found women to be identical to men in all but biology and thus identical before the law. Still others, from Simone de Beauvoir to Judith Butler, found the very question troubling as they tried to sort out cultural ideas from biological rules. These women and their views form a canon on the question of women, a canon that can help guide the conversation for thinkers and activists today who want both to understand women and to advocate for justice for all people.

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This book explores a hitherto neglected area of theological anthropology: the unity of human emotionality and rationality embodied in the biblical concept of the heart. While the theological contours of human reason have for long been clearly drawn and presented as the exclusive seat of the image of God, affectivity has been relegated to a secondary position. With the reintegration of the body into recent philosophical and theological discourses, a number of questions have arisen: if the image (also) resides in the body, how does this change one's view of the theological significance of human affectivity? In what way is our likeness to God realized in the whole of what we are? Can one overcome the traditional dissociation between intellect and affectivity by a renewed theory of love? In conversation with patristic and medieval authors (e.g., Irenaeus, Tertullian, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus, Aquinas) and in dialogue with more recent interlocutors (Pascal, Ricoeur, Marion, Milbank, John Paul II), this work pursues a novel theological vision of the essential unity of our humanity.

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Biblical faith is passionately and relentlessly material in its accent. This claim is rooted in the conviction that the creator God loves and cares for the creation and summons creation to be in sync with the will of the creator God. This collection of essays is focused on the bodily life of the world as it is ordered in all of its problematic political and economic forms. The phrase of the title, «all flesh,» in the flood narrative of Genesis 9, refers to all living creatures who are in covenant with God–human beings, animals, birds, and fish–as recipients of God's grace, as dependent upon Gods' generosity, and as destined for praise and obedience to God. The insistence on the materiality of life as the subject of the Bible means that the hard issues of economics and the demanding questions of politics are front and center in the text. So the Pentateuch pivots around the exodus narrative and the emancipation from an unbearable context of abusive labor practices. In like manner the prophets endlessly address such questions of social policy, and the wisdom teachers reflect on how to manage the material things of life and social relationships for the well-being of the community. This accent, pervasive in these essays, is a powerful alternative and a strong resistance against all of the contemporary efforts to transcend (escape!) the material into some form of the «spiritual.» All around us are efforts to find an easier, more harmonious faith. This may be evoked simply because life is «too hard,» or more ominously because of a desire to shield economic, political advantage from the inescapable critique of biblical faith. Such a temptation is a serious misreading of the Bible and a serious misjudgment about the nature of human existence. Thus the Bible addressed the most urgent issues of our day, and refuses the «religious temptation» that avoids lived reality where the power of God is a work.

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Hans Gustafson proposes pansacramentalism as holding potential for finding the divine in all things and all things in the divine, which carries significant inherent interreligious implications–especially for doing theology. Presupposing the challenge of doing theology divorced from spirituality (lived religious experience), he presents pansacramentalism as a bridge between the two. In so doing, Gustafson offers a history of spirituality and sketches the foundations of a classical approach to sacramentality (through Aquinas) and a contemporary approach to the same (through Rahner and Chauvet). By presenting three fascinating case studies, this book offers particular instances of sacramentality in lived religious experience (i.e., sacramental spirituality). These case studies draw on Thomas Merton and place, Nicholas Black Elk and multiple religious identity, and Fyodor Dostoevsky and Wendell Berry and literature. The book culminates by a) constructing a philosophy of sacramental mediation and criteriology of sacrament, b) engaging panentheism and the suffering of God and world, and c) proposing «panentheistic pansacramentalism» as a new model for understanding the divine-world relationship set in the context of a pansacramental theology of religious pluralism. Finally, a method for doing theology interreligiously is offered based on the overall content of the book and within the context of the interdisciplinary field of interreligious studies.

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Why is the Church of England perceived by many as homophobic, misogynist, or just plain weird? Because two movements within it, the Calvinists and the Charismatics, have recently achieved a degree of influence disproportionate to their numerical strength. And how has this come about? Both movements are well organized and wealthy. The Calvinists have played the media and ecclesiastical politics games with skill and determination, while sternly identifying themselves as guardians of the one true Reformed doctrine, having no truck with «the world.» The Charismatics, on the other hand, have embraced many elements of late-modern culture but retain a premodern worldview. Peter Herriot argues that to recover from the opportunity costs and reputational damage that it has suffered at their hands, the Church of England must seize back the agenda from the Calvinists and face outwards rather than inwards. In its efforts to come to terms with globalization, the elephant in the Anglican crypt, the church's leadership will need to sideline the Calvinists and encourage the Charismatics with their recent increased social involvement. Written by a social psychologist, this book is full of detailed case studies that give a vivid insight into the organizational structures and subcultures of these two very different evangelical movements.

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