This book integrates secular literature such as psychology, sociology, management, and organization studies with Christian and spiritual biblical literature. This book explores the importance of human worth in our personal and professional lives through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates human and societal worth with Christian and spiritual worth. Moreover, the book highlights values that receive little or no attention in secular literature. Overall, this book shows readers how human worth is often manipulated and undermined within societal worth in contrast to Christian worth with implications for cultivating leadership and education. This book focuses more on the biblical texts rather than the theological differences. In addition, this book situates itself on common biblical interests across Christian church denominations worldwide rather than exploring more on the secular cultural differences. This book positions itself from a non-denominational and Western perspective with a focus on biblical texts, theology, and secular literature. Readers that would be interested in this book are scholars and students in religion, ethics, and spirituality.

Benno van den Toren and Kang-San Tan provide a global, intercultural model of apologetics as crosscultural dialogue and accountable witness. Filled with Scriptural examples and real-world experiences, this is a conversational, patient, holistic, and embodied guide to creating true dialogue in our multicultural, multifaith world.

Currently there are at least four major, identifiable perspectives on how people best understand and recover from religious abuse. Both secular and faith-based (Christian) adherents can be variously identified in each of these approaches. This book examines these viewpoints and evaluates their various strengths and limitations. It concludes that each perspective is helpful to the extent possible, given the limitations of its respective philosophic or theological assumptions. This book summarizes each viewpoint and suggests a larger contextual perspective, helpful to better understand involvement in and recovery from religiously abusive environments. The conclusion is an integration of the various conceptual frameworks, and a different model (SECURE) is described that includes essential principles and practical strategies necessary for recovery from religious abuse. Suggestions are made for future research and study both for academics with interest in the cultic studies and counseling fields, and for various people negatively affected by religious abuse and in need of recovery.

Looking Beneath the Surface explores Arab-Islamic and Western perspectives on medical ethical issues: genetic research and treatment, abortion, organ donation, and palliative sedation and euthanasia. The contributions in this volume discuss the state of the (medical) art, the role of laws, counseling, and spiritual counseling in the decision-making process. The different approaches to the ethical issues, ways of moral reasoning, become clear in these contributions, especially the role of tradition for Islam and the importance of autonomy for the West. Beneath the differences, however, the reader will also discover common values, such as the role of dignity and the value of life, and similar practices. Some of the main differences are sociocultural in nature, rather than religious as such. Well-known experts in the fields of medicine and ethics have contributed to this volume from different religious and secular backgrounds. The book offers a carefully written introduction and final chapter on intercultural comparisons. Looking Beneath the Surface is more than a collection of writings on issues in medical ethics: it helps the reader to compare different paradigms of accountability and moral reasoning.

This book addresses the relationship of Christianity and human rights—a relationship fraught with ambiguity. While human rights discourse arose in a Christian culture, it has sometimes stood in opposition to organized Christianity. Christianity has been a champion of human rights; on other occasions it has been a major violator of them. Contributors to this book explore both positive and negative views of human rights arising from Christian traditions. Among the issues discussed are the sources of ideas on human rights, Christian influences on international human rights covenants and conventions, Christian theology and human rights, the right to change religions, Roman Catholic perspectives, and Christian peace activism and human rights. Christian discourse is juxtaposed with the proposed Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the World's Religions, which is included.

Setting aside popular myths about secularism, this volume studies the perspectives of law, politics, religion, morality, and bioethics, reconfiguring the debate about religion and public life.

Human existence is marked by pain, limitation, disability, disease, suffering, and death. These facts of life and of death give ample grounds for characterizing much of the human condition as unfortunate. A core philosophical question is whether the circumstances are in addition unfair or unjust in the sense of justifying claims on the resources, time, and abilities of others. The temptation to use the languages of rights and of justice is und- standable. Faced with pain, disability, and death, it seems natural to complain that "someone should do something", "this is unfair", or "it just isn't fight that people should suffer this way". Yet it is one thing to complain about the unfairness of another's actions, and another thing to complain about the unfairness of biological or physical processes. If no one is to blame for one's illness, disability, or death, in what sense are one's unfortunate circumstances unfair or unjust? How can claims against others for aid and support arise if no one has caused the unfortunate state of affairs? To justify the languages of fights to health care or justice in health care requires showing why particular unfortunate circumstances are also unfair, in the sense of demanding the labors of others. It requires understanding as well the limits of property claims. After all, claims regarding justice in health care or about fights to health care limit the property fights of those whose resources will be used to provide care.

Uses literature to understand and remake our ethics regarding nonhuman animals, old human beings, disabled human beings, and cloned posthumans Literary Bioethics argues for literature as an untapped and essential site for the exploration of bioethics. Novels, Maren Tova Linett argues, present vividly imagined worlds in which certain values hold sway, casting new light onto those values; and the more plausible and well rendered readers find these imagined worlds, the more thoroughly we can evaluate the justice of those values. In an innovative set of readings, Linett thinks through the ethics of animal experimentation in H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, explores the elimination of aging in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, considers the valuation of disabled lives in Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, and questions the principles of humane farming through reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. By analyzing novels published at widely spaced intervals over the span of a century, Linett offers snapshots of how we confront questions of value. In some cases the fictions are swayed by dominant devaluations of nonnormative or nonhuman lives, while in other cases they confirm the value of such lives by resisting instrumental views of their worth—views that influence, explicitly or implicitly, many contemporary bioethical discussions, especially about the value of disabled and nonhuman lives. Literary Bioethics grapples with the most fundamental questions of how we value different kinds of lives, and questions what those in power ought to be permitted to do with those lives as we gain unprecedented levels of technological prowess.

The region that includes the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) faces a diverse set of cultural, political, and economic issues. Exploring the countries that are considered to be a part of the MENA region as well as comparing this region to the rest of the developing and developed world provides essential insight into the current state of the region as well and its future outlook. Comparative Political and Economic Perspectives on the MENA Region takes a critical approach to analyzing the socio-economic development of the MENA Region and the role of politics and various social issues in this development. Highlighting research-based perspectives from global leaders on topics such as decentralization, international affairs, the Arab Spring, foreign direct investment, and education in the Middle East and Northern Africa, this publication is designed for library reference section inclusion and meets the research needs of government officials, professionals specializing in international business, economists, researchers, and graduate-level students in the areas of economics, international politics, African and Middle Eastern studies, and regional development.