Finding God In The Singing River

We live in an age of vast and rapid destruction of habitats and species. Yet Christianity holds great potential for healing this situation. Indeed, the Bible and Christian tradition are a treasure trove of rich images and stories about God as an "earthen" being who sustains the natural world with compassion and thereby models for humankind environmentally healthy ways of being.Mark Wallace's stimulating book retrieves a central but often neglected biblical theme - the idea of God as carnal Spirit who indwells all things - as the basis for constructing a "green spirituality" responsive to the environmental needs of our time.In the biblical tradition, he writes, God as Spirit is an ecological presence that shows itself to us daily by living in and through the earth. One message of Christianity, therefore, is celebration of the bodily, material world - ancient redwoods, vernal springs, broad-winged hawks, everyday pigweed - as the place that God indwells and cares for in order to maintain the well-being of our common planetary home.Alongside his green reading of the Bible and tradition, Wallace employs the resources of deep ecology, Neopagan spirituality, and the environmental justice movement to rethink Christianity as an earth-based, body-loving religion. He also analyzes color images reproduced in the book. Wallace's bold yet careful work reawakens our sense of the sacrality of the earth and the life that the trinitarian God creates there. It also grounds the impulses of New Age spirituality in a profoundly biblical notion of God's being and activity.

For too many students, Christian theology is learned in isolation from other religions traditions. With this, the second volume of her important work, Kristin Johnston Largen returns to expand the systematic theology she began in the original volume. Largen places the work of Christian theology soundly within the interreligious dialogue that is the defining feature of our time. In doing so, she prepares students of theology for the task of understanding and articulating their Christian beliefs in the context of a religiously and culturally diverse world. In the original volume, Largen focused her work on three loci—God, Creation, and Humanity. In this second volume she expands the project to include salvation, the Church, and the Holy Spirit. As before, each locus is set within the broader context of interreligious dialogue by considering how the varied beliefs of the world’s religious traditions inform our understanding of our own tradition. This volume explores indigenous religions, Sikhism, Confucianism, and Daoism, in particular.

This book develops a Pentecostal ecological theology (ecotheology) by utilizing key pneumatological themes that emerge from the Pentecostal tradition. It examines the salient Pentecostal and Charismatic voices that have stimulated ecotheology in the Pentecostal tradition and situates them within the broader context of Christian ecumenical ecotheologies (Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and Ecofeminist). The author advances a novel approach to Pentecostal ecotheology through a pneumatology of the Spirit-baptized creation, the charismatic creational community, the holistic ecological Spirit, and the eschatological Spirit of ecological mission. Significantly, this book is the first substantive contribution to a Pentecostal pneumatological theology of creation with a particular focus on the Pentecostal community and its significance for the broader ecumenical community. Furthermore, it offers a fresh theological approach to imagining and sustaining earth-friendly practice in the twenty-first century Pentecostal church.

We live in an ecological age. Science in the last few hundred years has given us a picture of nature as blind to the future and mechanical in its workings, even while ecology and physics have made us aware of our interconnectedness and dependency upon the web of life. As we witness a possible sixth great mass-extinction, there is increasing awareness too of the fragility of life on this planet. In such a context, what is the nature of Christian hope? St Paul declares that all of creation "will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God." How are we to imagine this "freedom" when death and decay are essential to biological life as we currently experience it, and when the scientific predictions for life are bleak at best? This book explores these questions, reflecting on how our traditions shape our imagination of the future, and considering how a theology of hope may sustain Christians engaged in conservation initiatives. The essays in this volume are partly in dialogue with the ground-breaking work of Celia Deane-Drummond, and are set in the context of global and local (Aotearoa New Zealand) ecological challenges.

Beyond Belief: Theoaesthetics or Just Old-Time Religion? explores the possible reemergence of a theological dimension to contemporary art. Long estranged from symbol and sacrament, contemporary artists--and those who think and write about them--seem to have turned once again to a vision rooted in the sacred. In an era marked culturally by world-weary cynicism and self-conscious irony, a new humanism may be emerging, one which aims to move beyond fragmentation and opposition to integration and unification. The aim of this book is not to propose a resurgence of religious iconography, but rather to give voice to long-suppressed--often maligned, and certainly professionally risky--positions informed by and reverberating with themes of the sacred. The essays included here, by a range of scholars working on these issues today, originated as a lively and spirited session of the 2008 College Art Association annual conference. Contributors: Daniel A. SiedellÊ, Karen Gonzalez Rice, Jason A. Danner, Arthur Pontynen, Michelle Lang, Scott Parsons, and David OÕHaraÊ

“Excellent . . . provides well-researched history as well as reports of recent unusual phenomenon” —from the author of Biloxi Memories (Southern Spirit Guide). The Hospitality State plays hosts to dozens of supernatural entities in this creeptastic guide to the other side. Chilling accounts of poltergeist activity include such landmarks as the McRaven House, where spiteful spirits smack guests without warning and an image of a Confederate soldier appears in contemporary photographs. A section on Anchuca in Vicksburg describes the vision of a woman in a fancy dress who floats through bedroom doors and the sound of dripping water without a source. Other establishments include Merrehope, King’s Tavern, and the Williams Gingerbread House. “Sucked me right in to Mississippi’s rich, haunted history. Sillery eloquently describes the settings of her stories, so I could easily visualize each of the places she writes about . . . At some points, I was scared out of my bones.” —Jackson Free Press

Reorienting Christian ethics from its usual anthropocentrism to an ecocentrism entails a new framework that Moe-Lobeda lays out in her first chapters, culminating in a creative rethinking of how it is that we understand morally.

A journey in Christian theology through biblical, historical, and thematic perspectives, with special attention to the context of today's world.