A cross-continental conversation about sin and shame with Marcia Blasi and Marit Trelstad

This is a cross-continental conversation about contextual understandings of sin and shame in the context of women in Latin America and Africa, and students in the United States. Marcia Blasi brings the experience of working with women throughout the world in her role in the Lutheran World Federation, and both authors work in Lutheran and feminist theologies. In particular, this interview highlights how individualized understandings of sin, often focused on morality and behavior, serve to shame women and reinforce notions of inferiority in patriarchal systems. In these systems, women are never doing enough for others and pride in one's self is not allowed. At the same time, social understandings of sin as systematic injustice serve to fight against these ideas of sin and the concomitant production of shame because they contextualize a person's actions within a broader culture and its expectations. The authors here seek to understand what real grace means and feels like for female-identifying people and how confession of sin would be altered if seen through the lens of women globally.     

BIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN

Abstract. The paper consists of an argument that goes as follows. Symbols and their elaboration into myths constitute Homo sapiens 's most primitive reading of the world and the relation of humans to that world. They are, in other words, primordial units of cultural information, emerging very early in human history, representing a significant achievement in the evolution of human self-consciousness and reflection. The classic myths of Fall and Original Sin, as well as the doctrines to which they gave rise, are further interpretations of this primordial information. The doctrinal traditions of the first four centuries of Christianity are surveyed. Three sets of data as interpreted by the biological sciences are offered as resources for understanding the biogenetic grounds of the experience that the symbols, myths, and doctrines of Fall and Original Sin seek to interpret. The conclusions to be drawn are that (1) the symbolic material is indeed commensurate with the scientific understandings, and (2) the scientific interpretations deepen our understanding of the symbols, while (3) the conversation between the symbols and the science once again raises certain perennial questions about human existence.     

THE THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF RALPH WENDELL BURHOE

Abstract. A central aim of Ralph Wendell Burhoe's scientific theology is to define and interpret the meaning of human existence in relation to “ultimate reality.” As such, it can be understood as an exercise in theological anthropology. For Burhoe, this ultimate reality is “nature,” understood as the total reality system which is studied by the sciences and which the sciences are showing to be the sole determiner of the way things are. This article discusses various aspects of Burhoe's theological anthropology, as well as its value and credibility, and raises questions concerning his understanding of the value of the individual and the problems of evil and human sinfulness.     

CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS: SKETCH TOWARD A RECONCILIATION

Abstract. Evolutionary ethics posits the evolution of dispositions to love self, kin, and friend. Christianity claims that God's ethical demand is to love one's neighbor. I argue that the distance between these two positions can be interpreted theologically as original sin, the disposition to disobey God's command and practice self-love and nepotism rather than neighbor-love. Original sin requires Incarnation and Atonement to unite God and humanity. The ancient doctrine of the Atonement as educative does not invoke the Fall. Its revival may help reconcile Christianity and evolutionary ethics.     

Promoting parent–infant responsiveness in families experiencing homelessness

My Baby's First Teacher is an intervention designed specifically for parents with infants staying in emergency homeless shelters. Infants are overrepresented in shelter populations and face considerable risk to their development, including mental health. We utilized a randomized controlled design across three family shelters to evaluate the program's effectiveness with 24 dyads assigned to the intervention compared to 21 dyads in care-as-usual. Dyads were randomized by round at each site to account for shelter effects. We used path analysis to illustrate change over time and in relation to intervention assignment.     

Christ as Chrism,Christ Given Away

This article develops the concept of Christ not as static body but as chrism for bodies. Christ as chrism travels in the matrix of relationality, on a vector toward the benefit of others. Conceptualizing christ as chrism potentially avoids both exclusionary and colonizing tendencies in Christian polity, and frames a Christian ethics that, while vulnerable and risky, marks the sanctity of the one giving Christ away.     

UNDERSTANDING PARENTING STRESS AND CHILDREN'S BEHAVIOR PROBLEMS AMONG HOMELESS,SUBSTANCE‐ABUSING MOTHERS

This article tested a model of parenting stress as a mediator between maternal depressive symptoms, emotion regulation, and child behavior problems using a sample of homeless, substance‐abusing mothers. Participants were 119 homeless mothers (ages 18–24 years) and their young children (ages 0–6 years). Mothers responded to questions about their depressive symptoms, emotion regulation, parenting stress, and child behavior problems. A path analysis showed that maternal depressive symptoms were positively associated with child behavior problems through increased parenting stress whereas maternal cognitive reappraisal was negatively associated with child behavior problems through decreased parenting stress. Moreover, maternal expressive suppression was negatively related to child externalizing problems. Findings support the parenting stress theory and highlight maternal parenting stress as a mechanism associated with homeless children's mental health risk. This study has significant implications for understanding the parenting processes underlying child's resilience in the context of homelessness and maternal substance use.     

The Lord's Prayer in Eastern Spirituality

This article first speaks briefly of prayer in general and its essence; and then discusses various kinds of prayer in the Orthodox Christian tradition, chief among which is personal prayer made in private, and liturgical prayer celebrated in church. There is also spontaneous prayer, less favored in Orthodoxy, where the model prayer is the Lord's Prayer. The main part of the article examines the petitions that make up the Lord's Prayer and the interpretation given to them by patristic writers. It concludes by affirming the unique character of the prayer, which can be regarded as the perfect summary of the Christian message.     

Exposing Mammon: Devotion to Money in a Market Society

Abstract : The recent financial crisis has exposed the extent to which the contemporary global economy is driven by credit. Yet credit is the obverse of debt, and where overspending threatens instability through an increasing debt spiral, austerity measures also threaten instability through reducing growth, also leading to an increasing debt spiral. Humanity is increasingly exposed to the force of money, which is created as debt with a given expiration date. Yet to place our credit or faith in the power of debt itself is to place faith in a world of shadows, in estimations of the value of things as perceived by others or market prices. Redemption from debt involves a restoration of our capacity to judge intrinsic values rather than mere prices.     

From Noosphere to Theosphere: Cyclotrons, Cyberspace, and Teilhard's Vision of Cosmic Love

Two theme–setting quotations introduce this essay—that of Yeats's falcon, deaf to the falconer's call, adrift in space above the blood–dimmed tide, counterpoised to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's call to abandon old nationalistic prejudices and build the earth. With primary references to the thought of Teilhard, along with, among others, to Ewert Cousins, Andrew M. Greeley, Karl Jaspers, Marshall McLuhan, Ilya Prigogine, Karl Rahner, Leonard Swidler, David Tracy, and Alfred North Whitehead, I argue that the most crucial intellectual paradigm shift of the twenty–first century will challenge humanity to take the turn from uncritical attachment to rigid absolutism or atomistic fragmentation toward a sense of open–ended, off–centered centeredness and fluid connections—from a static to a dynamic model of reality. Central to my argument is the Teilhardian reinterpretation of the Christian metaphors of creation, fall, incarnation, salvation, and the eschaton in the evolutionary terms of the emergence of cosmic consciousness from the chrysalis of the world of the past—from chaos to order, from biosphere via noosphere to theosphere. Facilitated by the exponential growth of populations, collaborative research, science, technology, and global communication (most dramatically manifested by the Internet), this emergent understanding of what it means to be human can, first, foster the awareness that in humanity evolution has become conscious of itself, and then, gradually, precipitate the formation of “the global village” (the mystical body of Christ), as respectful dialogue replaces diatribe and the dualistic pugilism of Samuel Huntington's “Clash of Civilizations” is gradually transformed into a nonadversarial mentality that values shared humanity and a common purpose. Thus, eons hence, empowered by love–energy, the transmutation of the human into the ultra–human can take the ultimate quantum leap into a yet higher dimension where spirit/energy is no longer in need of flesh/mass, and Earth can be safely left behind.