Sustaining Hope In An Unjust World

In our faithful work toward building a better world, we may often feel we're losing the battle. The poor get poorer, the vulnerable continue to be abused, and justice for all is a distant dream. No matter how hard we work, nothing changes. Somedays, we wonder if God is even still with us in the fight. But what happens, in our striving for social justice, when we discover that God offers us something entirely different than the promise of victory? In this love letter to the disheartened activist, pastor Timothy Murphy reflects on his own journey of disappointments and despair and rediscovers a faith - and a God - who inspires us to continue fighting, even when it feels like we're losing the battle.

In these increasingly divisive times, how does God intend for us to live well together in the common life? Drawing from scripture as well as writings from a variety of other faith traditions and contemporary theologians, The World is About to Turn offers a practical guide for dialogue and mutual understanding for leaders of faith organizations, schools, and member of faith communities; everyone who hopes to make a positive difference in our corporate life together. Chapters include: The Failure of the American Religious Experiment; When Justice Rolls Down: Finding the Moral Courage to Do What is Right; Love One Another: Practicing Mercy and Compassion; Walking Humbly with God: Repentance and Reconciliation as a Path to a More Civil Society; Values Matter: Discovering Common Values in Many Faith Traditions; Embracing Differences: The Gift of Religious Pluralism; and Building Bridges of Hope: Ten Ways Forward with Multicultural and Inter Religious Dialogue. Discussion questions at the end of each chapter, as well as an appendix with liturgical worship resources, make this hopeful book perfect for small group study, class usage, and congregational leadership.

How do we make ourselves a Whiteheadian proposition? This question exposes the multivalent connections between postmodern thought and Whitehead’s philosophy, with particular attention to his understanding of propositions. Edited by Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, and Andrew M. Davis, Propositions in the Making articulates the newest reaches of Whiteheadian propositions for a postmodern world. It does so by activating interdisciplinary lures of feeling, living, and co-creating the world anew. Rather than a “logical assertion,” Whitehead described a proposition as a “lure for feeling” for a collectivity to come. It cannot be reduced to the verbal content of logical justifications, but rather the feeling content of aesthetic valuations. In creatively expressing these propositions in wide relevance to existential, ethical, educational, theological, aesthetic, technological, and societal concerns, the contributors to this volume enact nothing short of “a Whiteheadian Laboratory.”

"This book explores the nature, value, and role of hope in human life under conditions of oppression. Oppression is often a threat and damage to hope, yet many members of oppressed groups, including prominent activists pursuing a more just world, find hope valuable and even essential to their personal and political lives. This book offers a unique evaluative framework for hope that captures the intrinsic value of hope for many of us, the rationality and morality of hope, and ultimately how we can hope well in the non-ideal world we share. It develops an account of the relationship between hope and anger about oppression and argues that anger tends to be accompanied by hopes for repair. When people's hopes for repair are not realized, as is often the case for those who are oppressed, anger can evolve into bitterness: a form of unresolved anger involving a loss of hope that injustice will be sufficiently acknowledged and addressed. But even when all hope might seem lost or out of reach, faith can enable resilience in the face of oppression. Spiritual faith, faith in humanity, and moral faith are part of what motivates people to join in solidarity against injustice, through which hope can be recovered collectively. Joining with others who share one's experiences or commitments for a better world, and uniting with them in collective action, can restore and strengthen hope for the future when hope might otherwise be lost"--

A fundamental and well-illustrated reference collection for anyone interested in the role of women in North American religious life.

A fundamental and well-illustrated reference collection for anyone interested in the role of women in North American religious life.

Visit theUnspun website which includes Table of Contents and the Introduction. The World Wide Web has cut a wide path through our daily lives. As claims of "the Web changes everything" suffuse print media, television, movies, and even presidential campaign speeches, just how thoroughly do the users immersed in this new technology understand it? What, exactly, is the Web changing? And how might we participate in or even direct Web-related change? Intended for readers new to studying the Internet, each chapter in Unspun addresses a different aspect of the "web revolution"--hypertext, multimedia, authorship, community, governance, identity, gender, race, cyberspace, political economy, and ideology--as it shapes and is shaped by economic, political, social, and cultural forces. The contributors particularly focus on the language of the Web, exploring concepts that are still emerging and therefore unstable and in flux. Unspun demonstrates how the tacit assumptions behind this rhetoric must be examined if we want to really know what we are saying when we talk about the Web. Unspun will help readers more fully understand and become critically aware of the issues involved in living, as we do, in a wired society. Contributors include: Jay Bolter, Sean Cubitt, Jodi Dean, Dawn Dietrich, Cynthia Fuchs, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Timothy Luke, Vincent Mosco, Lisa Nakamura, Russell Potter, Rob Shields, John Sloop, and Joseph Tabbi.

A philosophical memoir about becoming a father in an increasingly terrible world – can I hope the child growing in my partner's womb will have a good-enough life? For Kant, philosophy boiled down to three key questions: “What can I know?”, “What ought I do?”, and “What can I hope for?” In philosophy departments, that third question has largely been neglected at the expense of the first two – even though it is crucial for understanding why anyone might ask them in the first place. In Infinitely Full of Hope, as he prepares to become a father for the first time, the philosopher Tom Whyman attempts to answer Kant’s third question, trying to make sense of it in the context of a world that increasingly seems like it is on the verge of collapse. Part memoir, part theory, and part reflection on fatherhood, Infinitely Full of Hope asks how we can cling to hope in a world marked by crisis and disaster.