Social science is a moral science and economics is political economy. Questions about dogma or even faith shrink to insignificance in a world in which the very existence of humanity is threatened.
This paper asks what contribution the Protestant experience in the United States can make to the envisioning and shaping of a world order in the coming century. Part I describes three patterns that have emerged in this experience. Part II argues that the most fundamental Protestant principle requires that the economy be subordinated to broader human values in a way that is not now the case. Part III identifies other principles and considerations that should guide our quest for a new world order. Part IV sketches that system that seems most likely to implement these principles.
Eschatology is a line stretching out to the distant, possibly infinite, future. That is the horizon of hope, of possibility and becoming. Apocalyptic, on the other hand, is a detour, caused by an immediate crisis threatening whole societies.
Where is the church of Stanley Hauerwas’ theology that calls for a radical, nonviolent discipleship?
Probably the main influence of the church, one that can be malign or benign, is on the attitudes of people, especially its more active members. The author believes that in quite basic ways, the oldline Protestant denominations in this country are contributing positively to the attitudes that are now needed. He points to some of those attitudes, but suggests that if society continues to worship Wealth, it is hard to imagine how God can save the world.
The New Testament church could not escape the suspicion that it was a subversive movement, and its appeal was clearly to the socially restive poor. Its teaching was biased in favor of the poor. One is hard-pressed to find a good word about the rich, either in Jesus’ sayings or elsewhere in the New Testament literature.
There are academics affiliated with churches in China, both registered or unregistered, who perceive Christianity as the impetus for the greatness of Western science, politics, economy and freedom.
It is difficult, on theological grounds, to disagree with those who would discipline a politician who strays wantonly from church teaching on a key moral issue.
Seven myths about foreign aid are listed. Before we can sustain a commitment to reducing hunger and poverty around the world, we must debunk these myths.
Christianity, long identified as primarily a Western, European religion, is so no longer. It is now predominantly a religion of Africans, Asians and Latin Americans, and of the descendants of these regions who now live in the North Atlantic world.
The Church must act seriously as a public body, for in reading Isaiah, the Christian sees that God has redeemed history.
The divorce between the public and private spheres of life is painful and debilitating for both men and women. We have tended to view the home as the proper place of woman, where as in the public sphere, the role has been given exclusively to men. Especially in the church, new ways of looking at power and leadership are needed.
he 21st century will demand that we attend to what it means to be creatures, and to what is the true vocation and chief end of human beings.
A major Christian thinker of the 20th century examines the practical steps of Christian witness in today's world. Only through complete refusal to compromise with the forms and forces of our society can we recover the hope of human freedom.
For better than two decades the consensus in theology and ethics has been that we have no consensus. That is changing.
Occupying the middle of the spectrum, mainline believers can bridge the gap between secular liberals on the one side, who share their politics but not their faith, and caring but conservative religious believers on the other, who share their faith but not their politics.
Some forebears in the faith spent an uncommon amount of time in encounters with political leaders. In our time, we have a duty to maximize our effectiveness in influencing governmental decision-making. Ultimately the coming of God's Kingdom is in some way related to our sociopolitical achievements.
Sound teaching is what God wrests from us in the struggle for holiness and justice. The issue is to see how shalom is tied into the fight against drug addiction, carnage on our highways due to alcoholism, ecology, commercial sex, oppression of women, racism and the whole range of evils that fills our news on the airwaves and in print.
The author asks whether universal human rights will remain only unreachable ideals without religious underpinnings.
We have not worked out a vision of the social embodiment of Christian faith adequate to a post-Enlightenment world. Ironically, though today we possess more factual knowledge about humankind than ever before, we still have no universal symbols of what it means to be human.
The most important contribution of the churches, called for by those who newly look to it with hope, is to affirm the values of our tradition. But, it is important that these values be taken seriously, and that means that they inform individual and corporate life. The tension within the churches is between values based on caring and service and values based on the economic paradigm.
If Christians don’t get Christian amendments, anti-secular humanist court decisions, the right to write the textbooks or to post the Ten Commandments on the schoolhouse wall, that does not mean that Jews and Christians are silenced. No law keeps them from prime-time media, literary and intellectual life, the decision-making institutions of a free-enterprise economy -- board rooms, foundations, advertising -- or the public sector, including the gallery, the concert hall and the town forum.
When we look at the contemporary Latin American world, we see an oppressed people bearing an affliction as painful as that of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. They need our response. Only through concerted church, agency and individual leadership can that response be effective.
Review of a book by Laurie Garrett, one of the nation’s premier science writers and a specialist on HIV/AIDS. She explores the failure of public health systems in a selected group of nations and in global health groups such as the World Health Organization.
Douglas Hicks reviews three books on globalization. The faces of globalization that matter are not technology, economics, politics or rapid social changes. They are the 6 billion people who are affected by those factors. Globalization should neither be welcomed uncritically nor dismissed as wholly deleterious.
The author discusses Von Balthasar’s Christian humanism and suggests that it is a Christian spirituality, that Christian humanism is not Eurocentric but Christocentric.