Power For Feminism And Christ S Self Giving

Contesting the feminist critique of the dangers of Christianity's self-giving ethics, this book advances a contemporary feminist christology engaging the strength of self-giving power.

This project brings readers into conversation at the intersections of gender studies and Christian theology--particularly diverse feminist and queer theologies. Interrupting a Gendered, Violent Church develops over three parts to an extended essay that points to the real ways churches foster violence around gender. This volume discusses this violent reality while also exploring church as a nexus for resistance to gender-based violence and sketches the contours of a Christian theology mapped apart from patriarchal heteronormativity's hold on late modern Christian life. The goal of the Dispatches series is to offer a genuinely creative and disruptive theological-ethical ressourcement for church in the present moment. Volumes illuminate and explore, creatively and concisely, the implications and relevance of theology for the global crises of late modernity. Our authors have been invited to introduce succinct and provocative arguments intended to provoke dialogue and exchange of ideas, while setting in relief the implications of theology for political and moral life.

The Virgin Mary has been idealized as a self-sacrificing mother throughout Christian history, but she is not the only ancient maternal figure whose story is connected to violent loss. This book examines several ancient representations of mothers and children in contexts of sociopolitical violence, demonstrating that notions of early Christian motherhood, as today, are contextual and produced for various political, social, and ethical reasons. In each chapter, the ancient maternal figure is juxtaposed with an example of contemporary maternal activism to show that maternal self-sacrifice can be understood as strategic, varied, politically charged, and rhetorically flexible.

Joseph Sverker explores the division between social constructivism and a biologist essentialism by means of Christian theology. For this, Sverker uses a fascinating approach: He lets critical theorist Judith Butler, psycholinguist Steven Pinker, and systematic theologian Colin Gunton interact. While theology plays a central part to make the interaction possible, the context is also that of the school and the effect of institutions on the pupil as a human being and learner. In order to understand what underlies the division between nature and nurture, or biology and the social in school, Sverker develops new central concepts such as a kenotic personalism, a weak ontology of relationality, and a relational and performative reading of evolution. He argues that most fundamental for what it is to be human is the person, vulnerability, bodiliness, openness to the other, and dependence. Sverker concludes that the division between constructivism and essentialism discloses a deeper divide, namely that between fundamentally vulnerable persons on the one hand and constructed independent individuals on the other.

For centuries, evangelical Protestants and Catholics have hurled harsh epithets at each other. But that has changed dramatically in the last forty years. In 1960, many prominent evangelicals opposed John Kennedy for president because he was a Catholic. Today, Catholics and evangelicals work together on many issues of public policy. This book records one important process in this transformation. In 2004, the board of The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE—the largest representative body of evangelicals in the US) unanimously approved For the Health of the Nation as the official public policy document for its public policy efforts representing 30 million evangelicals. When scholars read this new ground-breaking document, they quickly realized there was widespread agreement between the NAE’s official public policy document and the official public policy positions of American Catholics. The result was a series of annual meetings held at Georgetown University and Eastern University that brought together prominent Catholic and Evangelical scholars and public policy specialists to explore the extent of the common ground. This book reports on that dialogue—and its contribution to the increasing Catholic-evangelical cooperation.

ORIGINAL ARTICLES The Boundaries and Authority of Catholic Social Teaching: A Reply to John Finnis Bernard G. Prusak Struggling with Self-Love: A Thomistic Perspective on Anxious Attachment and the Vice of Self-Debasement Sheryl Overmyer Synodality in the Catholic Church: Toward a Conciliar Ecclesiology of Inclusion for LGBTQ+ Persons Ish Ruiz CATHOLIC PEACEBUILDING IN TIMES OF CRISIS Catholic Peacebuilding in Times of Crisis: Hope for a Wounded World Caesar A. Montevecchio Truth, Healing, and Reconciliation: The Challenge for Future Relationship between Indigenous Peoples and the Catholic Church Maka Black Elk Walking Towards Peace: Generating Synergies at a Regional Level Isabel Aguilar Umaña and Cecelia Suárez Trueba Peacebuilding in an Interfaith Context in the Great Lakes Region of Africa: The Challenges of Creating New Approaches Emmanuel Ntakarutimana, OP Imagination in Catholic Thought and Peacebuilding Eduardo Gutiérrez González BOOK REVIEWS Gary Chartier, Understanding Friendship: On the Moral, Political, and Spiritual Meaning of Love Nickolas L. Becker, OSB David C. Cramer and Myles Werntz, A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence: Key Thinkers, Activists, and Movements for the Gospel of Peace David Kwon David DeCosse, Created Freedom under the Sign of the Cross: A Catholic Public Theology for the United States Matthew A. Shadle Christine Firer Hinze, Radical Sufficiency: Work, Livelihood, and a US Catholic Economic Ethic Mary M. Doyle Roche Kate Jackson-Meyer, Tragic Dilemmas in Christian Ethics Thomas Ryan Bradford E. Hinze, Confronting a Church in Controversy Federico Cinocca Richard Horsley, You Shall Not Bow Down and Serve Them: The Political Economic Projects of Jesus and Paul Najeeb T. Haddad Marc A. Pugliese and John Becker, Process Thought and Roman Catholicism: Challenges and Promises Simeiqi He

Does a consumer who bought a shirt made in another nation bear any moral responsibility when the women who sewed that shirt die in a factory fire or in the collapse of the building? Many have asserted, without explanation, that because markets cause harms to distant others, consumers bear moral responsibility for those harms. But traditional moral analysis of individual decisions is unable to sustain this argument. Distant Harms, Distant Markets presents a careful analysis of moral complicity in markets, employing resources from sociology, Christian history, feminism, legal theory, and Catholic moral theology today. Because of its individualistic methods, mainstream economics as a discipline is not equipped to understand the causality entailed in the long chains of social relationships that make up the market. Critical realist sociology, however, has addressed the character and functioning of social structures, an analysis that can helpfully be applied to the market. The True Wealth of Nations research project of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies brought together an international group of sociologists, economists, moral theologians, and others to describe these causal relationships and articulate how Catholic social thought can use these insights to more fully address issues of economic ethics in the twenty-first century. The result was this interdisciplinary volume of essays, which explores the causal and moral responsibilities that consumers bear for the harms that markets cause to distant others.

Central to identity, personal responsibility, economic systems, theology, and the political and military imaginaries, the practice of sacrifice has inspired, disturbed, and abused. Mimesis and Sacrifice brings together scholars from the humanities, military, business, and social sciences to examine the role that sacrifice plays in different present-day settings, from economics to gender relations. Inspired by Rene Girard's work, chapters explore (i) the extent to which the social character of human living makes us mimetic, (ii) whether mimesis necessarily leads to competitive aggression, (iii) whether aggression must be defused by aggressive sacrificial rituals-and whether all sacrifice has this aim, and (iv) the role of the “second lesson of the cross” (as Girard called it), the lesson of self-giving for others, in addressing present societal problems. By investigating sacrifice across this span of arenas and questions yet within one volume, Mimesis and Sacrifice presents a new appreciation of its influence and consequences in the world today, contributing not only to mimetic theory but to greater understanding of which societal arrangement enable us to live well together and what hobbles that goal.