No Neutral Ground

Cape Town is one of the most beautiful cities in the world - often described as a kind of heaven on earth. Yet for the majority of its inhabitants it is hell. Apartheid-spawned ghettoes are everywhere, and for those living in Manenberg - a coloured township on the Cape Flats, purpose-built by the apartheid government as part of its forced removal plan - life is just as marginal today as it was during apartheid. The main differences now are the rampant drug use and widespread gang presence. No Neutral Ground is a gripping account of Pete Portal's move from London to Manenberg, of addicts and gangsters meeting Jesus and being transformed, and how he went from living with a heroin addict to establishing a church community - and all the heartbreak and failure along the way. This is a story of mighty works of God, as well as relapse, hopelessness and despair; the miraculous and the mundane, heaven and hell, all balanced on a knife edge. Offering searing insight and an inspiring vision of faith, Pete asks why anyone would choose this way of life, if giving up our lives for others is worth it - and what the church could become if we were willing to risk it all to reach the forgotten and the lost.

In a single year, Dr. David Gunn was killed, Jane Roe recanted, the Supreme Court began to backpedal from its landmark 1973 decision, Congress became fixated on a rare late-term abortion procedure, and numerous states imposed legislation limiting a woman's right to choose. It was a year of extremes for an issue that seems to know no middle ground,

Includes the decisions of the Supreme Courts of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the Appellate Courts of Alabama and, Sept. 1928/Jan. 1929-Jan./Mar. 1941, the Courts of Appeal of Louisiana.

Sometimes theological ideas are good topics for ongoing debate. Other times, the community of faith needs to come to a decision: yes or no. Christian Reconstructionism offers the Christian church a basic approach to faith different from mainstream historic Christianity. Is their approach warranted? Or is it a fundamental distortion of the gospel? The present volume seeks to set out the case that Christian Reconstructionism is not a legitimate variation of Christian doctrine, but rather a serious misunderstanding of the gospel attested in Holy Scripture. First, an attempt is made to look at the basic ideas of Christian Reconstructionism. Rather than focusing on names and dates, the focus is on the set of ideas that characterize this view of Christianity. Second, a response is given to each of the main ideas. The response makes use of traditional Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox doctrine; but it is based primarily on careful exegesis of Scripture. The ultimate question is if Christian Reconstructionism is grounded in the Bible, or in a political ideology foreign to Scripture. An epilogue briefly points to a different way of seeing Christian involvement in contemporary, global society.

This volume attempts to insert itself within the larger discussion of Africa in the twenty-first century, especially within the realm of world politics. Despite the underwhelming amount of attention given to Africa's role in international politics in popular news sources, it is evident that Africa has a consistent record of participating in world politics- one that pre-dates colonization and continues today. In continuance of this legacy of active participation in global political exchanges, Africans today can be heard in dialogues that span the world and their roles are impossible to replace by other entities. It is evident that a vastly different Africa exists than ones that bolster images of starvation, corruption, and compliance. The essays in this volume center on Africa and Africans participating in international political discourses, but with an emphasis on various forms of expression and philosophies, as these factors heavily influence Africa's role as a participant in global politics. The reader will find a variety of essays that permeate surface discussions of politics and political activism by inserting African culture, rhetoric, philosophies into the larger discussion of international politics and Africa's role in worldwide political, social, and economic debates.

The claim that there are objective ethical truths has attracted its share of doubters. Many have thought that such truths would require an extra-ethical foundation or vindication--in metaphysics, or the philosophy of language, or epistemology--and have worried that no such thing is available. Pragmatist Quietism argues that, on the contrary, there are objective ethical truths, and that these neither require nor admit of a foundation or vindication from outside of ethics. Recognizing that the idea of an ethical realm untethered from inquiry into reality, meaning, and knowledge may strike us as mysterious, this book offers a comprehensive meta-ethical worldview within which this jarring proposal may be ensconced. The key moves are, first, the assimilation of normative-ethical inquiry to the sorts of debates that many have labelled 'merely verbal' or 'non-substantive', and second, the adoption of pragmatism--the approach to inquiry and explanation on which we endeavour to guide our thinking by considerations of value, rather than aiming to correctly represent the world.