Over a decade ago the field of bioethics was established in response to the increased control over the design of living organisms afforded by both medical genetics and biotechnology. Since its introduction, bioethics has become established as an academic discipline with journals and professional societies, is covered regularly in the media, and affects people everyday around the globe. In response to the increasing need for information about medical genetics and biotechnology as well as th...

Benedict de Spinoza's writings laid the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment and for modern Biblical criticism. By virtue of his magnum opus, the Ethics, Spinoza is considered one of Western philosophy's definitive ethicists.

Ancient Christians invoked sin to account for an astonishing range of things, from the death of God's son to the politics of the Roman Empire that worshipped him. In this book, award-winning historian of religion Paula Fredriksen tells the surprising story of early Christian concepts of sin, exploring the ways that sin came to shape ideas about God no less than about humanity.Long before Christianity, of course, cultures had articulated the idea that human wrongdoing violated relat...

In 1951, theologian H. Richard Niebuhr published Christ and Culture, a hugely influential book that set the agenda for the church and cultural engagement for the next several decades. But Niebuhr's model was devised in and for a predominantly Christian cultural setting. How do we best understand the church and its writers in a world that is less and less Christian? Craig Carter critiques Niebuhr's still pervasive models and proposes a typology better suited to mission after Christ...

Classic theories of Aristotle, Kant, and Mill have influenced Christian thought in morality and ethics for centuries. But they can go only so far, Wyndy Corbin Reuschling writes in Reviving Evangelical Ethics. While the philosophers' approach to three key elements--virtue, duty, and utility--have been used widely in forming ethical and moral practices, Corbin Reuschling sees spiritual danger in their limitations. She probes deeply to deconstruct each philosophy, then reconstructs ...

This collection of essays and thoughts covers such areas as basic Christian thought, which includes traditional family morality and a great concern for alleviating poverty and promoting social justice, political thought comparing the need for a system which includes both socialist and capitalist elements, and the need for values in our society, which has come to emphasize money, power, and greed as philosophical goals and values, though they are not. The book also has thoughts concerning l...

Most of us think we know the moving story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life--a pacifist pastor turns anti-Hitler conspirator due to horrors encountered during World War II--but does the evidence really support this prevailing view? This pioneering work carefully examines the biographical and textual evidence and finds no support for the theory that Bonhoeffer abandoned his ethic of discipleship and was involved in plots to assassinate Hitler. In fact, Bonhoeffer consistently affirmed a strong ...

Christian Political Ethics brings together leading Christian scholars of diverse theological and ethical perspectives--Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist--to address fundamental questions of state and civil society, international law and relations, the role of the nation, and issues of violence and its containment. Representing a unique fusion of faith-centered ethics and social science, the contributors bring into dialogue their own varying Christian understandings wit...

Pilar Hogan Closkey and John Hogan have brought together the annual Archbishop Oscar Romero Lectures (2001-2007) to consider the life and death of Archbishop Romero and the daily struggles of the poor in our world, especially in the city of Camden, New Jersey-one of America's poorest cities. Romero's 'dangerous memory' provides the background, while urban poverty and the option for the poor are the foreground. Romero's commitment to the poor compels us to look at ourselves, and the authors...

In the first anthology of its kind, Thomas O'Brien and Scott Paeth have gathered unique pieces from across religious perspectives to illustrate the growing influence and contribution of religion to the field of business ethics. Events in the recent past make clear people in business urgently need to focus on the moral dimension of practices and behaviors. Courses in business ethics are increasingly more prevalent in business schools and in departments of philosophy and religious studies, a...

How can ordinary Christians find moral guidance for the mundane dilemmas they confront in their daily lives? To answer this question, Julie Hanlon Rubio brings together a rich Catholic theology of marriage and a strong commitment to social justice to focus on the place where the ethics of ordinary life are played out: the family.Sex, money, eating, spirituality, and service. According to Rubio, all are areas for practical application of an ethics of the family. In each area, intent...

The Genesis story of Cain’s murder of Abel is often told as a simplistic contrast between the innocence of Abel and the evil of Cain. This book subverts that reading of the Biblical text by utilising Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of homo sacer, the state of exception and the idea of sovereignty to re-examine this well-known tale of fratricide and bring to the fore its political implications.Drawing from political theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, this book creates a the...