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In his Confessions Augustine recasts the Greco-Roman dialogue as a conversation with God. This repositioning of the premier pedagogical form of the ancient world Augustine takes as an implication of the Christian confession of God as a speaking God. Introducing Jewish forms of prayer into the Greco-Roman dialogue form transforms it in a manner that has implications for the teaching of Christian ethics today, in offering a theologically elaborated model of the formative and investigative power of conversation. Conversational learning is a practice in which finite creatures lovingly explore a creation that cannot be comprehended completely. Christians understand this formative and explorative conversation as a conversation with God, mediated by Scripture, which prepares its participants to model trust-building conversation in public.

The political theologian Amy Laura Hall has recently suggested that the proliferation of security cameras can be read as an index displaying the quality of a given community’s social fabric. The aim of the paper is to show why this is a plausible reading of the Christian tradition that also helpfully illuminates the various cultural phenomena in western societies that are collectively indicated by the label “surveillance.” The Swedish theologian Ola Sigurdson’s account of modern regimes of perception substantiates this latter claim. An alternative political proposal is then developed around an account of the divine gaze that differs from the panoptic gaze of modernity. This theological positioning of the trusting gaze as ontologically fundamental for human community is paired with an acceptance of the limits of human sight and the multivalence of human knowing. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of the gaze of the saints in training Christian vision to see beyond the characteristic ways of seeing and participating in the social organism characteristic of modern liberal surveillance societies. This conclusion implies, further, that one of the most important ways that the most denuding aspects of the surveillance society can be resisted is by drawing the gatekeepers who do the watching out in to public converse.

The argument defended in this book is easily summarized. Disability is an entity defined by groups of otherwise very different people who have gathered together in solidarity around views of their ...

Economic rationalities are a central component of the malignant social positioning of people with all sorts of disability and mental health issues today. The author traces the role of economic rationality in positioning some lives today as not really worth living. This widespread willingness of the general populace in Western liberal democracies to map their political relations in economic terms is historically novel in the West, and is one of the more noteworthy marks the transition points into, and out of, Christendom. The author examines the impact of the rise of the cultural settlement called Christendom for social outsiders, suggesting that they provide illuminating contrasts with some of the characteristic practices and moral assumptions of our contemporary Western liberal democracies. The conclusion of the article is that a society without a working account of mercy and forgiveness will find it difficult conceptually to explicate practices associated with valuing human lives that are consid...

This special edition of the Journal of Disability and Religion surveys the biblical scholarship that has engaged in a focused way with the issue of disability and considers how the field might deve...

The author offers a robustly theological account of compassion, highlighting its bodily nature. Divine mercy is presented as being conveyed through human bodies to remake and enliven both the human agent and recipient. Culminating in a story of a physically and mentally impaired runner, this account of mercy and compassion fleshes out God's mercy, which can be understood as flowing through human bodies in the context of sporting activities. A challenge is thus levied at modern secularized accounts of compassion and mercy, as well as many of the dominant values in contemporary sport—flawless athletic beauty, agonistic competition, and financial success—which have rendered simple acts of intercompetitive compassion and mercy nearly unintelligible.

In the biblical creation story human beings are depicted as beings ejected from the true home given to them in creation and entrapped in the dynamics of their flight from God. Franz Rosenzweig suggested that modern life is best understood as a type of chronic living death characterized by an animate but nevertheless sterile experience of loss. Following Eric Santner's presentation of this theme in Rosenzweig, this article will explore what it might mean to recover a sense of the goodness of place and particularity. I will examine Santner's suggestion that to become present to ‘place’ is to have undergone the ‘undeadening’ intervention of another person, who offers us an exit route in the midst of the tangle of our lived lives. I will then show how the main lines of his analysis both parallel and offer ways to sharpen important aspects of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's account in Creation and Fall of the dynamics of the Fall and the healing of creatures. Human beings are depicted by Bonhoeffer as in need of being transformed into creatures, a theological insight resting on a complex account of creation, and which I will suggest, in conclusion, is a particularly important theme of a Christian gospel that can speak to a world saturated by the desire to be elsewhere.

The next generation enterprise Xeon server processor maximum configuration supports 18 dual-threaded 64 bit Haswell cores, 45 MB L3 cache, 4 DDR4–2133 MHz memory channels, 40 8 GT/s PCIe lanes, and 40 9.6 GT/s QPI lanes. The processor has 5.56 B transistors on a 31.9 mm $\,\times\,$ 20.8 mm die in Intel's Hi-K metal-gate tri-gate 22 nm CMOS technology with 11 metal layers and achieves up to 33% performance boost. The design supports a wide range of configurations including thermal design power ranging from 55 to 160 W and frequencies ranging from 1.6 to 3.7 GHz. Key architectural innovations include the addition of AVX2 technology, DDR4, and fully integrated voltage regulators (FIVR) that enable per core p-states and uncore frequency scaling.

With her title, Stacy Clifford Simplician signals her disciplinary location as a political philosopher. The central concern of her book is the vexing problem of how people in democratic societies, ...

This book significantly deepens the contemporary discussion of the theology and practice of adopting children. Both interdisciplinary and international, the volume offers a unique and uniquely insightful vision of Christian adoption that unites practical and theoretical perspectives.

The proposal by Adam Smith that the market is a primal human reality has arguably been the most influential of the myths offered as a substitute for the authoritative story of Eden by the Enlightenment’s founding fathers. This essay examines how rival primal stories shape agents’ moral stances by directing attention, framing conceptual priorities and in situating stated and unstated analytical presuppositions in contemporary economic discourses. Contemporary scholars have recently emphasised that the root metaphor of Smith’s economic theory is original barter. Tracing this scholarship, I will show how this picture of the human economic agent grounds the central tenets of the emerging global economic order. This vision will, however, then be shown to contrast with both the biblical vision of human economic activity (Genesis 2), medieval and reformation theological appropriations of this vision, and the political and economic institutions that pre-modern Christendom developed to express their belief in a human responsibility to serve the divine sustenance of the human race. I will conclude by suggesting why the transition from Christendom to modern global capitalism demands a deeper than usual theological analysis of phenomena we usually refer to under the heading of globalisation, calling for reformulations of basic Christian and non-Christian presumptions about economic practice and ethics.

Mental disability exposes in an especially acute manner some important deficiencies in modern healthcare practices. This paper offers an account of the reasons why the deviation of the disabled from the statistical norm creates such problems for modern medical expertise. Contemporary medical science exhibits features of modern techniques and mindsets which are characteristic of late-modernity and deeply shape a wide range of human-creature interactions. I By fleshing out how this modern adherence to a suite of techniques shapes the configurations of medical knowledge a better understanding of the difficulties the mentally disabled face in modern healthcare settings will emerge. Substantiating this analysis by way of a recent empirical study the paper will propose some of the strategies for a caring resistance to these problems such an analysis might suggest to Christians today. The analysis as a whole indicates why solidarity with the disabled in the modern developed world draws Christians into various forms of political resistance to the powers of the age.

To excavate the different contemporary meanings of the term quality of life, this study queries the role of communication in diagnosis and treatment, especially of mentally disabled patients. It addresses the relative weightings given in medicine today to the stories told by patients about their health (the communicative aspect of the physician-patient relationship), to the body of the patient (the Hippocratic tradition of listening to the body), and the modern tradition of medicine as observing and altering bodily parts (the systemic view of health care). Empirical evidence is surveyed that indicates barriers to responsive healthcare delivery to people with severe learning difficulties are not simply infrastructural problems but are intrinsically related to the contemporary configuration of medical knowledge. The discussion concludes by indicating how—if the dilemmas generated by modern medical institutions are an artifact of the self-definition of the actors within them—the Christian tradition can be un...

This article responds to the reflections on Disability in the Christian Tradition that are collected in this journal issue, especially those of Amos Yong, Deborah Beth Creamer, Elizabeth Antus, Willie James Jennings, and John Goldingay. It discusses some of the metatheoretical issues at stake as these scholars attempt to allow thinkers from the past shape their own contemporary thinking, and it indicates some of the reasons why this type of engagement might be understood to play an important role in attempts to renew contemporary practice.

In 1 Cor. 9:25 Paul exhorts the Corinthian believers to strive like athletes for an eternal prize. This paper elucidates the communal horizon of the self-disciplining he enjoins, which overturns popular modern conceptions of individual fitness and performance training. Paul likewise defines the rewards of spiritual labour as aspects of participation in the communion of saints gathered by the gospel, disallowing a wholly post-temporal construal of the eternal reward which motivates Christian discipline. The paper concludes by raising questions about the theological status of modern sport, of theologies of sport, and of competition as a form of social organisation.

In Sign and Simulacrum Jean Baudrillard (1994) draws our attention to a peculiar problem faced by our modern social order—our tendency to communicate by way of hackneyed and repetitious social scri...

Contemporary disability theologians have increasingly lighted on 1 Corinthians chapter 12 as a classic biblical depiction of what is today known as an inclusive social model. This article traces theological attempts to define the concept of inclusion and advance that emerging consensus by offering a close reading of 1 Cor. chapter 12. St. Paul's famous “body life” chapter offers a conceptually rich and theologically sophisticated account of the spiritual gifts suggesting that every member of the church is to be understood as an active giver or conduit of divine love, a giving that is not reducible to any person's supposed physiological or intellectual deficiencies, nor the supposed gift of people with disabilities to serve as reminders that we are all destined to be dependent on others. The ecclesial discernment being proposed if Christians are to receive the gifts of all members of the Christian community depends on learning to look beyond the sociological and demographic certainties typically attached t...

I grew up in a Christian home on a dead end street. Around the corner was what we used to call a “home”—a group home for the mentally disabled sited in a typical residential house. Its residents didn’t seem to get out much, leaving only a thin residue of childhood memories. They shuffled by the end of our street in single file in the company of a single caregiver. These incongruous moments lodged in a child’s mind as spectral and discomforting reminders that the world is full of strange and unmentionable things. It was only in such public spaces that I ever rubbed shoulders with the mentally disabled, for this was the end of a long age in the developed West of hiding them away (Schweik, 2009). Such people were to be kept in “homes” and special schools and largely away from churches.

This article takes a Christian theological approach to autism to re-narrate the relationship of carers for individuals with autism. The discussion displays concrete ways that our care for those with autism is reshaped by being set within ontologies that privilege engaged self-investment, within a cultural context that rarely transcends its desire to study phenomenon through highly self-aware and disengaged description. Also presented is a phenomenological exploration of the challenges for carers by the experience of caring for those with autism, and the article concludes by entering a theological debate about how best to conceive our relationship to them.

Alzheimer's disease is characterized by amyloid-beta peptide (Abeta)-loaded plaques in the brain. Abeta is a cleavage fragment of amyloid-beta protein precursor (APP) and over production of APP may lead to amyloidogenesis. The regulatory region of the APP gene contains consensus sites recognized by the transcription factor, specificity protein 1 (SP1), which has been shown to be required for the regulation of APP and Abeta. To understand the role of SP1 in APP biogenesis, herein we have characterized the relative distribution and localization of SP1, APP, and Abeta in various brain regions of rodent and primate models using immunohistochemistry. We observed that overall distribution and cellular localization of SP1, APP, and Abeta are similar and neuronal in origin. Their distribution is abundant in various layers of neocortex, but restricted to the Purkinje cell layer of the cerebellum, and the pyramidal cell layer of hippocampus. These findings suggest that overproduction of Abeta in vivo may be associated with transcriptional pathways involving SP1 and the APP gene.

This paper outlines Hans Ulrich's reworking of the Lutheran doctrine of the estates. He conceives the estates as descriptions of the new patterns of social life that God has promised to found and secure. This emphasis on the divine activity of generating social order is an expression of Ulrich's agreement with common and familiar criticisms of the doctrine, and why he nevertheless believes it indispensable for an evangelical ethic. A construal of the traditional doctrine of the estates that is unique even in his native Lutheran context, it aims not at conservatism, but at a more thoroughly theological and therefore critical relationship to social order than rival theories much more inclined to revisionist rhetorical stances. In a contemporary context in which moral certainties and categories can be disputed at the most fundamental levels, Ulrich's theology seeks a form of theological reasoning that genuinely seeks the illumination of Christian beliefs about reality by taking other moral languages seriously.

By examining the range of factors pressing on medical professionals faced with a decision in a case of late-term abortion, it becomes apparent that the theological resources ruled out of bounds by the standard account can be considered an essential part of a truly liberating and properly supple moral account of medical decision-making. Close attention to the social, political and legal context of contemporary medicine reveals that the standard account of medical ethics, Principles of Biomedical Ethics by Beauchamp and Childress, despite its universalist aspirations, disempowers rather than empowers moral decision-making by medical professionals.

The postmodern critique has rendered traditional justifications of the practice of research incredible. Further, the status of theological research, in which ‘the discovery of new facts’ or the like is at best ambiguous as an aim, must be under question. This article argues that the aim of theological research is to discover what life lived as if theological claims were true might look like.

This paper elucidates Bonhoeffer's understanding of Christian ethics as a `way'. The concept is prominent in his unfinished exegesis of Psalm 119 and shapes his Ethics, written during the same time period. This reading of Bonhoeffer's ethics yields the claim that he gave a much more central role to biblical exegesis in his ethical framework than is typically granted. It concludes that much of the criticism of his concept of the mandates reveals not the weakness of the concept, but a misunderstanding of both his conception of Christian ethics as a way, and the importance of theological exegesis in his thought.