Ecologies of Grace

Ecologies of Grace
Author: Willis Jenkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2013-02-12
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0199989885

Christianity struggles to show how living on earth matters for living with God. While people of faith increasingly seek practical ways to respond to the environmental crisis, theology has had difficulty contextualizing the crisis and interpreting the responses. In Ecologies of Grace, Willis Jenkins presents a field-shaping introduction to Christian environmental ethics that offers resources for renewing theology. Observing how religious environmental practices often draw on concepts of grace, Jenkins maps the way Christian environmental strategies draw from traditions of salvation as they engage the problems of environmental ethics. He then uses this new map to explore afresh the ecological dimensions of Christian theology. Jenkins first shows how Christian ethics uniquely frames environmental issues, and then how those approaches both challenge and reinhabit theological traditions. He identifies three major strategies for making environmental problems intelligible to Christian moral experience. Each one draws on a distinct pattern of grace as it adapts a secular approach to environmental ethics. The strategies of ecojustice, stewardship, and ecological spirituality make environments matter for Christian experience by drawing on patterns of sanctification, redemption, and deification. He then confronts the problems of each of these strategies through critical reappraisals of Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, and Sergei Bulgakov. Each represents a soteriological tradition which Jenkins explores as an ecology of grace, letting environmental questions guide investigation into how nature becomes significant for Christian experience. By being particularly sensitive to the ways in which environmental problems are made intelligible to Christian moral experience, Jenkins guides his readers toward a fuller understanding of Christianity and ecology. He not only makes sense of the variety of Christian environmental ethics, but by showing how environmental issues come to the heart of Christian experience, prepares fertile ground for theological renewal.

Commanding Grace

Commanding Grace
Author: Daniel L. Migliore
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2010-08-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0802865704

In this seminal volume, contemporary theologians revisit the theological ethics of Karl Barth as it bears on such topics as the moral significance of Jesus Christ, the Christian as ethical agent, the just war theory, the relationship between doctrines of the atonement and modern penal justice systems, the virtues and limits of democracy, and the difference between an economy of competition and possession and an economy of grace. Book jacket.

The Analogy of Grace

The Analogy of Grace
Author: Gerald McKenny
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2010-03-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0191614874

Once considered inimical to ethics, Karl Barth's theology is now rightly recognized for the central role ethics plays in it. But can Barth be safely placed in the mainstream tradition of Christian moral theology or does he offer a challenge to the latter? Gerald McKenny argues that the claim that God not only establishes the good from eternity but also brings it about in time is of fundamental importance to Barth's mature ethics. The good confronts us from the site of its fulfilment in Jesus Christ, who has accomplished it in our place. The result is a vision of the moral life as a human analogy to God's grace, a vision which contrasts with the bourgeois vision of the moral life as an expression of human capability. Barth's moral theology is presented here as the attempt to reorder ethical thought and practice in light of this fundamental claim. This lucid and well-argued study is the most comprehensive treatment of Barth's ethics to date, offering a thorough account of the development of Barth's ethical thought and a wide-ranging analysis of its chief concepts and arguments. McKenny explains why certain widespread assumptions about Barth's moral theology are mistaken and explores the rich, complex, and often surprising ways in which Barth's position engages the traditions of Christian ethics and modern continental moral thought. Above all, McKenny shows why Barth's moral theology deserves our attention in spite of, or rather because of, its uneasy fit in the mainstream tradition of Christian moral theology.

Christian Grace and Pagan Virtue

Christian Grace and Pagan Virtue
Author: J. Warren Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2010-12-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199708541

Ambrose of Milan (340-397) was the first Christian bishop to write a systematic account of Christian ethics, in the treatise De Officiis, variously translated as "on duties" or "on responsibilities." But Ambrose also dealt with the moral life in other works, notably his sermons on the patriarchs and his addresses to catechumens and newly baptized. There is a vast modern literature on Ambrose, but only in recent decades has he begun to be taken seriously as a thinker, not just as a working bishop and ecclesiastical politician. Because Ambrose was one of the few Latin Christian writers in antiquity who knew Greek, another major area of Ambrose scholarship has been the study of his sources, notably the Jewish philosopher Philo, and Christian writers such as Origen of Alexandria. In this book, Warren Smith examines the neglected biblical, liturgical and theological foundations of Ambrose's thought on ethics. Earlier studies have found little that was distinctively Christian in Ambrose's image of the virtuous person. Smith shows that though, like the pagans, Ambrose emphasized moderation, courage, justice, and prudence, for him these characteristics were shaped by the church's beliefs about God's salvific economy. The courage of a Christian facing persecution, for example, was an expression of faith in Christ's resurrection and the church's eschatological hope. Eschatology, for Ambrose, was not pagan wisdom clothed in pious language, but the very logic upon which virtue rests.

The Meaning of Grace

The Meaning of Grace
Author: Charles Journet
Publisher: Scepter Publishers
Total Pages: 148
Release: 1996
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780933932944

Few concepts are more important in Catholic theology than that of grace, but most adult Catholics never move beyond a schoolchild's understanding of grace. Charles Journet explores philosophy, revelation and history to explain grace fully. Journet lays out both the doctrinal development of grace and corrects persistent mistakes that Catholics make about grace. He covers habitual grace, actual grace, predestination, justification, merit, and much more. He even includes a revealing exploration of Adam's earthly paradise and how the nature of the Fall called forth God's response of grace.

Asian American Christian Ethics

Asian American Christian Ethics
Author: Grace Y. Kao
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Asian Americans
ISBN: 9781481301756

This groundbreaking volume presents the collective work of twelve Christian ethicists of Asian descent in the U.S. who map the new and burgeoning field of study located at the juncture of Christian ethics and Asian American studies. Led by Grace Kao and Ilsup Ahn, these scholars identify the purposes and chart the contours of what constitutes a distinctly Asian American Christian ethical approach to moral concerns. Asian American Christian Ethics rethinks perennial issues in Christian ethics (war and peace, family/marriage/parenting, gender and sexuality, economics and wealth, virtue ethics), pressing social matters (race relations, immigration, healthcare, the environment), and issues of special interest to Asian Americans (education, labor, plastic surgery). Each chapter utilizes classical Christian sources read from the particular vantage point of Asian American Christian theology, ethics, and culture. Beginning with a description of the range of Christian responses to the issue, each author describes and enacts a constructive proposal for an Asian American Christian ethical response. An ideal volume for researchers, teachers, and students alike, Asian American Christian Ethics articulates the foundations, questions, and goals of this vibrant and flourishing field of study.

Trauma and Grace

Trauma and Grace
Author: Serene Jones
Publisher: Presbyterian Publishing Corp
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2009-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0664234100

This substantive collection of essays by Serene Jones explores recent works in the field of trauma studies. Central to its overall theme is an investigation of the myriad ways both individual and collective violence affect one's capacity to remember, to act, and to love; how violence can challenge theological understandings of grace; and even how the traumatic experience of Jesus' death is remembered. Of particular interest is Jones's focus on the long-term effects of collective violence on abuse survivors, war veterans, and marginalized populations, and the discrete ways in which grace and redemption might be exhibited in each context. At the heart of each essay are two deeply interrelated faith-claims that are central to Jones's understanding of Christian theology: first, we live in a world profoundly broken by violence; second, God loves this world and desires that suffering be met by words of hope, of love, and of grace. This truly cutting-edge book is the first trauma study to directly take into account theological issues.

Renewing Moral Theology

Renewing Moral Theology
Author: Daniel A. Westberg
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2015-05-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 083082460X

Moral theology, rooted in Thomas Aquinas, has long found its home in the Catholic and Anglican traditions, and in recent years it has become more familiar through the perspective known as virtue ethics. Renewing Moral Theology unfolds an ethical perspective that is Thomistic in structure, evangelical in conviction and Anglican in ethos.

The Ethics of Grace

The Ethics of Grace
Author: Paul Martens
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2022-09-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567694704

This volume draws together leading theologians and Christian ethicists from across the globe to critically engage with and reflect upon Gerald McKenny, widely acknowledged as one of the most original and important Christian ethicists working today. The essays highlight the significance of McKenny's interventions with a range of important debates in contemporary theological ethics, ranging from analyses of the Protestant conception of grace to bioethics and medicine. The Ethics of Grace is the first volume to facilitate critical engagements with a number of key themes in McKenny's work, not in the least his interpretation of Karl Barth. Among the contributions, Jennifer Herdt discusses McKenny's Barthian interest in the relationship between nature and grace; Angela Carpenter uses his Barthian understanding of grace and human action as a framework to discuss Jonathan Edwards; Stanley Hauerwas pushes McKenny's theology beyond Barth. Economic, political, and technological themes are also discussed in depth, for instance in Robert Song's chapter on the phenomenology of biotechnological enhancement. Reaching far beyond the work of Gerald McKenny, this multifaceted volume is a high-level resource for students and scholars of theological and philosophical ethics.

The Pentecostal Principle

The Pentecostal Principle
Author: Nimi Wariboko
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2012
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0802866972

This volume brings Pentecostal intuitions to bear on the task of reconceptualizing the process of ethical methodology in a pluralistic world, applying a Pentecostal sensibility to the study of social ethics.