The idea that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote violence is part of the conventional wisdom of Western societies, and it underlies many of our institutions and policies, from limits on the public role of religion to efforts to promote liberal democracy in the Middle East. William T. Cavanaugh challenges this conventional wisdom by examining how the twin categories of religion and the secular are constructed. A growing body of scholarly work explores how the category 'religion' h...

Through the available patristic writings, Caesar and the Lamb focuses on the attitudes of the earliest Christians on war and military service. Kalantzis provides the reader with many new translations of pre-Constantinian texts and tells the story of the struggle of the earliest church to bear witness to the nations that enveloped them as they transformed the dominant narratives of citizenship, loyalty, freedom, power, and control. Kalantzis examines writings on war and military service in ...

What does it mean for the Christian doctrine of the Fall if there was no historical Adam? If humanity emerged from nonhuman primates—as genetic, biological, and archaeological evidence seems to suggest—then what are the implications for a Christian understanding of human origins, including the origin of sin?Evolution and the Fall gathers a multidisciplinary, ecumenical team of scholars to address these difficult questions and others like them from the perspectives of biolog...

In The Uses of Idolatry, William T. Cavanaugh offers a sustained and interdisciplinary argument that worship has not waned in our supposedly “secular” world. Rather, the target of worship has changed, migrating from the explicit worship of God to the implicit worship of things. Cavanaugh examines modern idolatries and the ways in which humans become dominated by our own creations. While Cavanaugh is critical of modern idolatries, his argument is also sympathetic, seeing in idolatr...

This volume differs from many quincentennial discussions of the Protestant Reformation--and ecumenical scholarship more generally--in that it shifts the focus from Europe and the West to the global South, where ecumenism's promises and challenges are quite different. In postcolonial and post-missionary Africa, the churches continue to expand, competition among denominations is lively, and Christian rivalry with Islam is often a reality. In Latin America, Protestants have severely eroded th...

An Eerdmans Reader in Contemporary Political Theology gathers some of the most significant and influential writings in political theology from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Given that the locus of Christianity is undeniably shifting to the global South, this volume uniquely integrates key voices from Africa, Asia, and Latin America with central texts from Europe and North America on such major subjects as church and state, gender and race, and Christendom and postcolon...

"The totalitarian state clearly intends to eliminate all those forms of organic community that rival the absolute loyalty of the individual to the state. This god is a jealous god. . . . Mrowczyński-Van Allen's diagnosis is therefore no less relevant after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And his proposed cure is no less salutary. He appeals to the work of Grossman and other voices from the East to oppose the idolatry of the deified self with the icon, which opens up a distance in which giving...

The idea that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote violence is part of the conventional wisdom of Western societies, and it underlies many of our institutions and policies, from limits on the public role of religion to efforts to promote liberal democracy in the Middle East. William T. Cavanaugh challenges this conventional wisdom by examining how the twin categories of religion and the secular are constructed. A growing body of scholarly work explores how the category 'religion' h...

Should Christians be for or against the free market? For or against globalization? How are we to live in a world of scarcity? William Cavanaugh uses Christian resources to incisively address basic economic matters -- the free market, consumer culture, globalization, and scarcity -- arguing that we should not just accept these as givens but should instead change the terms of the debate.Among other things, Cavanaugh discusses how God, in the Eucharist, forms us to consume and be consu...

The Catholic Church is the world's largest non-governmental provider of health care; more than a quarter of all the health care facilities in the world are under Catholic auspices. Those facilities, however, range from technologically sophisticated urban hospitals to small under-resourced rural clinics. Pope Francis has said, "Health care is not a luxury, it is for everyone," but the gap between health care for those with means to pay and those without continues to widen. This volume gathe...

Throughout his ministry, Jesus spoke frequently and unabashedly on the now-taboo subject of money. With nothing good to say to the rich, the New Testament--indeed the entire Bible--is far from positive towards the topic of personal wealth. And yet, we all seek material prosperity and comfort. How are Christians to square the words of their savior with the balances of their bank accounts, or more accurately, with their unquenchable desire for financial security? While the church has develop...

Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices come together in this volume to discuss both the wounds of colonial history and the opportunities for decolonization, reconciliation, and hope in the relationship between the church and Indigenous peoples across the Americas. Scholars and pastoral leaders from Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, the United States, and Canada, and Indigenous peoples of Mapuche, Chiquitano, Tzeltal Maya, Oglala Sioux, Mi'kmaw, and Anishinaabe-Ojibwe reflect on the possibility...