Lesslie Newbigin and Edinburgh’s Common Call

In a world where pluralism is the norm, interfaith encounter and dialogue are essential parts of the Christian experience. Lesslie Newbigin reflected extensively on a theological understanding of the Christian encounter with those of other faiths, emphasizing the importance of both a humble orientation toward God and others and a firm commitment to the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. This juxtaposition of humble witness and firm faith in interfaith encounter is also reflected in the Edinburgh 2010 mission conference’s Common Call. This article will explore Newbigin’s reflections on interfaith dialogue and consider their implications for the future of the ecumenical movement.     

Asian Women in the Ecumenical Movement: Voices of Resistance and Hope

Throughout Asian ecumenical history, Christian women have found ways to organize themselves and create structures that give them the space to articulate their concerns and contribute their theological and leadership skills to the church and society. Asia's complex context has played a pivotal role in framing the contributions of women to the ecumenical movement, while the ecumenical movement in Asia has played a key role in helping define feminism, feminist theory, and feminist theology for this continent, contributing to national‐level initiatives in each Asian country as well as to regional and to World Christianity. At the same time, ecumenical women in each nation of Asia have linked with secular women's efforts and with women of other faiths to bring transformation in the lives of women, to challenge violence in all its manifestations, and to demand justice and dignity for all women and men.     

Religion, Contraception, and Method Choice of Married Women in Ghana

Using pooled data from the 1998 and 2003 Demographic and Health Surveys, this paper investigates the association between religion and contraceptive behavior of married women in Ghana. Guided by the particularized theology and characteristics hypotheses, multinomial logit and complementary log-log models are used to explore denominational differences in contraceptive adoption among currently married women and assess whether the differences could be explained through other characteristics. We found that while there were no differences between women of different Christian faiths, non-Christian women (Muslim and Traditional) were significantly more likely to have never used contraception compared with Christian women. Similar observations were made on current use of contraception, although the differences were greatly reduced in the multivariate models.     

Love Your Neighbour as Yourself

This paper examines the many ways interreligious dialogue and interreligious relationship-building interact with and serve how we live out – with others – the moral core of the Christian faith, which is the love of God and neighbour. I take as an example the contemporary Poor People’s Campaign in the United States. The campaign originated with the Rev. Dr Martin Luther King Jr, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, and others involved in the civil rights movements of the early 1960s. While the Poor People’s Campaign was initiated by and is led by Christians, it is intentionally inclusive of people of many different faiths and those with no particular faith, all of whom share the commitment to love and to serve the poor.     

Discerning the Spirits,Practicing the Faiths: Why Be Lutheran?

Some spiritual wanderers today are “unstuck” in their faith, therefore, they have many faiths; while others are securely “stuck” in their tradition. Getting stuck is desirable, and the path is through spiritual practice. One’s inner life and even perception of reality become transformed through daily habits such as prayer, worship, and discipline. The Lutheran insight that a practicing Christian is simultaneously saint and sinner offers comfort and honest self–understanding.     

The roman catholic church and interreligious dialogue: Implications for Christian‐Muslim relations

At the Second Vatican Council, 1965, the Roman Catholic Church, in the declaration Nostra Aetate, opened a new and more positive relationship with Islam and other world religions. In 1984 the Vatican issued a second document, on mission and dialogue, which strongly encouraged interreligious dialogue and set out in detail the breadth of activities involved. Since then there has been in some Catholic circles a growing fear that the emphasis on dialogue has led to an abandoning of the. Church's missionary obligation to proclaim the full Christian Gospel to non‐Christians and to invite them to Christian faith. At the end of 1990 the present Pope issued the encyclical letter Redemptoris Missio, ’on the permanent validity of the Church's missionary mandate’. This was followed five months later by another Vatican document on Dialogue and Proclamation. This paper examines these four documents in the light of the wider debate taking place among Christians on the relationship of Christianity to men and women of other faiths. It concentrates on the specific case of Christian‐Muslim relations and concludes that there is even more need for Christians and Muslims to be religiously sensitive and open; to know and esteem each other's values, and to cooperate for the social, moral and religious well‐being of the whole human family.     

Christian‐Muslim theological encounter: The priority of tawhid

Both Islam and Christianity are monotheistic faiths, yet the one God proclaimed and worshipped by each appears to be a different deity by virtue of the different conceptual construct that applies in each case. For Islam the defining motif is the idea of tawhld, for Christianity it is the notion of Trinity. In respect to theological dialogue between these two faiths the onus lies with the side holding the more complex construct to relate that back to the simpler and less complex, especially where the simpler motif is deemed to be contained within ike complex. Thus it behoves the Christian side to examine critically the trinitarian and related doctrines concerning the understanding of God, with a view to a clearer restatement of the essential oneness of deity which, after all, is the undergirding conceptual reference. In attempting this task, the ‘problematic of unity’ inherent in the Christian concept of God is addressed and a theological revision is suggested. The intention is to rethink critically aspects of Christian doctrine so as to further Christian‐Muslim theological dialogue, without in any way diminishing the essential insight of either side, but rather with a view to opening new lines of expression that each might equally affirm.     

Spirituality in nursing theory and practice: dilemmas for Christian bioethics.

Moral strangerhood is due in part to competing worldviews. The profession of nursing is experiencing a paradigm shift which creates ethical dilemmas for both Christian nurses and Christian patients. Nursing's new focus on spirituality and spiritual care presents itself as broadly defining a desired state or patient outcome -- spiritual integrity -- supposed to be applicable to all patients of all faiths. Analysis of nursing's definition of spirituality reveals assumptions and values consistent with an Eastern/New Age worldview which may cause hostility towards Christian patients stereotyped as dogmatic or noncompliant.     

Attachment and women’s faith development

This article explores the relationship between human attachment and God attachment, particularly in Christian women’s experiences of faith. It is based on the attachment perspective as a conceptual framework. The main aim was to evolve an attachment‐theoretical approach to women’s faith development and to offer a complementary path to interpret women’s faith development. The method was qualitative, as the data were collected via biographical narrative depth interviews. The findings suggest that an early attachment experience is a significant factor in the women’s faith development; three patterns of women’s faith are presented in which the differences in their images of self and God are represented accordingly.     

The Luminous Darkness of Du Bois’ Double Consciousness: Through the Lens of Contemporary Christian Women

The purpose of this article is first to examine W. E. B. Du Bois’ psychosocial theory of race, which is commonly known as “double-consciousness.” This is done to highlight how African Americans are able to navigate through life when one’s moral agency is truly constrained by internal and external forces. Second, drawing from Du Bois’ theoretical construct of race, connections are made to the lived experiences of Christian women in the anthropological, ethnographic study of Marla F. Frederick. The relevance and limitations of Du Bois’ theoretical paradigm as it pertains to the contemporary Christian women are examined, and attention is given to how the multiple selves of the Christian women are negotiated in public and private spheres.     

Holy mothers of God: sex work,inheritance, and the women of Jesus’ genealogy*

ABSTRACT

In this article I consider the stories of Jesus’ women ancestors in the genealogy which opens the Gospel of Matthew. Reading these stories in light of Marxist-feminist analyses of marriage, sex work and reproductive labor, alongside contemporary sex workers’ rights discourse, and through Marcella Althaus-Reid's claim that all theology is “a sexual act”, I explore their implications for contemporary debates about property and propriety in both Christian systematic theology and contemporary Christian sexual ethics – which cannot, of course, be disentangled from one another. To conclude, I return to the twinned questions of righteousness and purity which centrally define both theological accounts of Christian identity and Christian sexual ethics, suggesting that righteousness relies for its coherence not only on the abjection of those who fall short of its standards, but also on their labor.     

“God Loves an Infant’s Praise”: Cultural Borrowing and Cultural Resistance in Two Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Sunday-School Texts

Two mid-nineteenth-century American Jewish Sunday-school textbooks—Mrs. Eliezer [Rachel Peixotto] Pyke’s Scriptural Questions for the Use of Sunday Schools for the Instruction of Israelites (1843) and Simha C. Peixotto’s Elementary Introduction to the Scriptures for the Use of Hebrew Children (1840)—shed important light on the relationship between Jews and the dominant Christian (largely Protestant) culture that surrounded them. A comparison of these books with the Protestant Sunday-school texts upon which they drew serves as a revealing case study of cultural borrowing and cultural resistance between minority and majority faiths.     

Religious Representation in Comenius's Orbis sensualium pictus (1658)*

The Orbis sensualium pictus (1658) was an important element in the pedagogical programme of the Czech Reformer, Jan Amos Komenský (Comenius). Through the use of illustrations with an associated key, it was intended to educate young children about the names and terms of items and activities that they saw in the world around them. Although the significance of the work has long been recognised and has been studied in the wider context of Comenius’ philosophical ideas, comparatively little attention has been paid to the illustrations in this work. The intention of this article is to examine the portrayal of religious faiths in the Orbis sensualium pictus as well as to demonstrate that, in spite of Comenius's rejection of confessional differences, they depict Christian worship and religious practice from a largely Lutheran perspective.     

Blurring boundaries and advancing interreligious understanding by engaging textual ‘others’ in a women’s interfaith book group

This article casts analytical light on how Jewish, Christian and Muslim women develop understanding of religious identities by engaging with multidimensional textual ‘others’ in the Daughters of Abraham interfaith book groups. It focuses on a group discussion of a rabbi’s memoir about her religious journey. Drawing on ethnographic material and Talal Asad’s analysis of the relationship between text and reader, I examine how narratives outside primary religious texts influence ideas about Jewish, Christian and Muslim identities. I argue that the Daughters members’ appropriation of literary voices advances their engagement with religious diversity by developing understanding of religious self and others. Moreover, members’ navigation of inter- and intra-religious relations during discussions of texts blur boundaries for inclusion into this interfaith encounter. This examination raises questions about issues of identity, power dynamics and interfaith relations. Importantly, it provides novel insight into the understudied areas of women’s interreligious encounter and shared reading practices.     

Towards a Christian bioethics.

Rather than revealing itself as a single, unified, ecumenical faith, Christianity is sundered with Christians united neither in one communion nor in one baptism. Christian Bioethics seeks to examine the traditional content-full moral commitments which the Christian faiths bring to life, sexuality, suffering, illness and death within the contexts of medicine and health care. Seeking to understand the differences which separate the bioethics of Roman Catholics, Protestants, and the Orthodox, Christian Bioethics explores the manners in which the faiths diverge. The failure of the Enlightenment project to disclose a content-full communality that would bind mankind has left much to be reconsidered by Christians who face new ethical dilemmas in the novel guise of advances in health care technologies.     

Multiculturalism in Britain and the Political Identity of Europe

The United Kingdom has traditionally been united by culture not ethnicity. Immigration has started to threaten this identity because of racism, lack of forethought and ill-conceived multiculturalism. The storm over Archbishop Rowan Williams' Sharia speech revealed how Islam in particular poses a problem. Williams is right to advocate more political pluralism in the face of variegated religious identities which exercise strong social influence but this needs to be an ‘organicist’ rather than ‘liberal’ pluralism, if Britain's political and religious inheritance is not to be threatened. The Christian character of Britain actually protects a certain pluralist variety and the role of other faiths, because of the peculiar character of Christianity.     

Articulating Christian doctrine in the pluralistic world of the twenty-first century

The reviewer offers an appreciative theological summary of Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen's monumental text, Christian Theology in the Pluralistic World: A Global Introduction. Persaud calls attention to the trinitariancentre of Kärkkäinen's theological articulation, which is the basis for Kärkkäinen's openness to finding and naming commonalities and differences between biblical, creedal, confessional Christianity and each of the two other Abrahamic faiths (Judaism and Islam) and two Asiatic faiths (Hinduism and Buddhism). The reviewer calls for further engagement with the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (31 October 1999), in relation to the pressing question of religious conversion in today's pluralistic world.     

Jan Amos Comenius’s Trinitarian and Conciliar Vision of a United Europe: Christ as the Universal ‘Centre of Security’

This article explores Jan Amos Comenius’s vision of a Christian united Europe and its connection to his theological programme of reform. This is manifest first of all in his linguistic projects, in which he sought to break down the language barriers separating Christians both from each other and from the mission field of the New World, but it came to fruition especially in his comprehensive reform project of pansophia, especially as this was represented in his massive Consultatio catholica. For it is here that Comenius expands on his dream of a union of nations under one Christian religion. In this, Christ who transcends time and space, uniting in himself all the diverse aspirations of the nations, is revealed as the global ‘centre of security.’ Importantly, Comenius’s expression of this is profoundly indebted to Nicholas of Cusa and the article concludes by highlighting Comenius’s own Trinitarian and conciliar vision of Christian Europe.     

Chiluba's Christian nation: Christianity as a factor in Zambian politics 1991–1996

This article examines the role of Christianity in the change of regime in Zambia in 1991, and after its new President, Frederick Chiluba, declared Zambia a ‘Christian Nation’ at Christmas 1991. Chiluba, a born‐again Christian, had the support of many of Zambia's churches in his campaign to oust the long‐serving incumbent. President Kenneth Kaunda, himself prone to use Christianity for political support. Particularly significant in Chiluba's campaign were the Christian media. The three branches of Zambian Christianity (the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, the Christian Council of Zambia, the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia) have traditionally worked in close cooperation. The Catholics and the Christian Council were not consulted about Chiluba's declaration of Zambia as ‘Christian’ and have tended to regard the proclamation as unfortunate, at best; elements within the Evangelical Fellowship have been very supportive of Chiluba and his regime, most obviously because they saw the new dispensation as one offering them a share of political power. Corruption and mismanagement have continued lo characterise Zambia's political system, which has caused the declaration lo be viewed with widespread cynicism.