Although the environmental crisis has been recognized as an international threat, Christian attempts to reconcile their religious traditions and the earth are just beginning. 'Christian Faith and the Environment' challenges churches to take a stand for environmental concerns. Hill explores how twentieth-century theologians such as Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin have taught Christians to build bridges between Christianity and creation. Examining sacramental rites, church documents, and feminist theological insights on ecology, Hill outlines a Christian environmental spirituality and traces the ethical challenges posed by our new awareness of our environment.

Although the environmental crisis has been recognized as an international threat, Christian attempts to reconcile their religious traditions and the earth are just beginning. 'Christian Faith and the Environment' challenges churches to take a stand for environmental concerns. Hill explores how twentieth-century theologians such as Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin have taught Christians to build bridges between Christianity and creation. Examining sacramental rites, church documents, and feminist theological insights on ecology, Hill outlines a Christian environmental spirituality and traces the ethical challenges posed by our new awareness of our environment.

This book covers the contribution of Christianity in the care, stewardship, and management of the environment. It uses ideas from the logical position of a Christian, created in God’s image, redeemed by God, and given responsibility to subdue and keep the earth, arguing that a Christian has the responsibility and mandate to care for the environment. It shows that successful stewardship happens when a Christian is aware of God’s intention for creation, exerts effort to increase it, and is expected to give an account to God for their actions toward it. The book presents environmental concerns in Kenya as an opportunity for change, describing situations and why they could become opportunities for change. Seven worldviews are presented that discourage Christians who want to do environmental stewardship, and Christian theological doctrines are discussed that could be used to cause ecclesial participation in environmental stewardship. Finally, the book envisions a “Conserving Church” with specific activities the church can do to successfully influence people to do environmental stewardship.

At the beginning of Christian Faith, B. A. Gerrish reminds us that dogmatics involves critical transmission of the Christian heritage. The dogmatic theologian must interpret and assess the traditional beliefs of the church while also considering the new and changing conditions in which that tradition is being embodied. With that, Gerrish goes on to outline the various presuppositions and affirmations of the Christian faith before ultimately offering a powerful and compelling restatement of Christian faith for the twenty-first century. As part of his framework, Gerrish includes a critical comparison of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion and Schleiermacher's Christian Faith while still paying close attention to the great cloud of theological witnesses from across the spectrum of Christian traditions. Gerrish's book provides a robust and penetrating revisioning of Christian theology, one that is thoroughly grounded in the classical traditions of the church.

The book by Abjar Bakhou presents Medieval Christian author Gerasimus and his discussion with Islam. His aim was to show that Christian teachings are not irrational, but rather subtle and complex. As a Christian philosopher and theologian, Gerasimus used the experiences of those of the past to facilitate his own response to critics. However, two important differences separated him from earlier apologists, which demand his own insight and innovation. First, the new language of intellectual discourse was Arabic, which was not accommodating for expressing traditional Christian doctrine, and required the development of a vocabulary out of terms already heavily influenced by the Qur'anic worldview. Second, the new religion challenging Christianity was one of absolute monotheism, which shared neither a common scriptural nor cultural heritage, and rejected the very possibility of a Trinity and Incarnation. Although a common theme in early Christian apologetics was the refutation of Judaism, the debate generally centered on the interpretation of the Old Testament, showing that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. The Qur'an, while acknowledging Jesus as the Messiah, explicitly rejects the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity, and presents itself as the revelation, which supersedes all previous revelation. Thus, although Christians and Muslims share certain themes and figures (such as Creation and the Last Judgement, Abraham, Moses, Mary and Jesus), Muslims refuse evidence contrary to the Qur'an, leaving Christians without recourse to traditional scripture-based arguments. Gerasimus, as a Christian apologist and mutakallim, accepted these challenges and began the process of explaining and translating his faith in the new milieu to make it coherent and rational. In his treatise, Gerasimus reveals himself to be a full participant in this important period of intellectual history; he sets down the basic points of controversy and outlines a response to them in a form that would be an excellent introduction to Christian theology written for the Muslim environment. Gerasimus was also a mutakallim in his own right, the Christian counterpart to those Islamic scholars who sought to defend their faith through rational arguments. In an effort to argue the legitimacy of Christianity, Gerasimus attempts to create a common language that influences the meaning of terminology and concepts of intellectual development in Muslim - Christian debates. Such language would set the stage for centuries to come. This is certainly his greatest contribution.

This volume presents a wide-ranging selection from the writings of a leading contemporary philosophical theologian, Vincent Brümmer. In his many books and articles Brümmer has demonstrated how the tools of philosophical analysis are not only fruitful but also essential for dealing with the central issues of systematic theology. The title of this volume, Meaning and the Christian Faith, highlights two characteristic themes that recur throughout the many writings of Vincent Brümmer. Much of his work has been devoted to exploring the meaning of the Christian faith, and especially of its central claim that God is a personal being whose fellowship believers may enjoy. On the other hand, Brümmer has also shown that religious belief should not be understood as an explanatory theory but rather as a way in which believers understand the meaning of their lives and their experience of the world and direct their lives accordingly. Thus in the Christian tradition believers claim that their lives are meaningful because they seek to attain ultimate happiness in the love of God. In the introductory sections throughout this volume Vincent Brümmer describes how he came to pay attention to the various themes dealt with in his writings and explains why he came to deal with them in the ways he did.

The famed thinker and writer, C.S. Lewis, addressed issues that were paramount and pressing for religious persons in his time. In this volume, and in honor of Lewis, experts in their fields examine topics and challenges that face Christians living their faith today. Originally delivered as invited public lectures in a decade-long series--The Annual C.S. Lewis Legacy Lectures at Westminster College in Missouri--they include faith and reason, theological imagination, religion and ecology, the life and thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, antisemitism, Native American spirituality, science and religion, racism and poverty in the ministry and social action of Martin Luther King, Jr., misconceptions of Islam, religious pluralism, and religion and violence. The authors argue that these issues must be acknowledged and confronted in order for Christianity to remain, or to become relevant, in the current century.

Religious education in Nigeria is in a state of transformation, owing to the country's current pluralist nature among other factors. In the process, concepts of religion and education are revisited and reassessed in order to make them meaningful to mankind in his pluralist world. With this book, author Michael Okoh inaugurates a fundamental revision. He brings traditional African education and values alongside Christian ideals into dialogue with the "Western progressive learning approaches," paving new ways for religious education activity in Nigeria, particularly in Igboland. (Series: Tubingen Prospects on Pastoral Theology and Religious Pedagogics / Tubinger Perspektiven zur Pastoraltheologie und Religionspadagogik - Vol. 45)

Does evolution make faith superfluous? Part One of this book looks across the whole spectrum of biology—from molecules to ecosystems to human societies—and at the fossil history of life on earth, concluding that evolution is the only explanatory concept that makes sense of it all. Doesn’t this demolish the core Christian claim that God created the entire universe? Part Two explores whether God might instead embrace that universe with love and compassion, without micromanaging or interfering. Jesus bears witness to such a God in his kingdom teaching, calling Christians to follow his example of humility, serving others, and valuing what the world considers unimportant. This suggests paths of repentance and restraint that are urgently needed in a world facing rapid climate change and likely mass extinction.