Suchergebnisse

Arriving in the remote Arnhem Land Aboriginal settlement of Oenpelli (Gunbalanya) in 1925, Alf and Mary Dyer aimed to bring Christ to a former buffalo shooting camp and an Aboriginal population many whites considered difficult to control. The Bible in Buffalo Country: Oenpelli Mission 1925–1931 represents a snapshot of the tumultuous first six years of the Church Missionary Society's mission at Oenpelli and the superintendency of Alfred Dyer between 1925 and 1931. Drawing together documentary and photographic sources with local community memory, a story emerges of miscommunication, sickness, constant logistical issues, and an Aboriginal community choosing when and how to engage with the newcomers to their land. This book provides a fascinating and detailed record of the primary sources of the mission, placed alongside the interpretation and insight of local Traditional Owners. Its contents include the historical and archaeological context of the primary source material, the vivid mission reports and correspondence, along with stunning photographs of the mission and relevant maps, and finally the oral history of Esther Manakgu, presenting Aboriginal memory of this complex era. The Bible in Buffalo Country emerged from community desire for access to the source documents of their own history and for their story to be known by the broader Australian public. It is intended for the benefit of communities in western Arnhem Land and is also a rich resource for historians of Aboriginal history (and other scholars in relevant disciplines).

Sexuality is an obsession of the Christian Church. It is one of the social behaviours that it has tried most to control amongst its flock and yet the Christian Church has failed to prevent the encroachment of modern attitudes towards sex and sexuality into the Church as an institution. The furore over the proposed appointment of an openly gay bishop in the Church of England is but the latest expression of this tension. However, this paper argues that this debate needs to be placed in a much broader context, namely, the hermeneutical problem of the authority of the Bible, which is itself only one part of a wider sociology of the Bible. The current debate on sexuality in the Church highlights the need for sociology to begin to apply its way of thinking to the Bible.

A variety of experimental and empirical research indicate that prosocial behavior is important for economic success. There are two sources of prosocial behavior: incentives and preferences. The latter, the willingness of individuals to "do their bit" for the group, we refer to as internalization, because we view it as something that a group can influence by appropriate investment. This implies that there is a trade-off between using incentives and internalization to encourage prosocial behavior. By examining this trade-off we shed light on the connection between social norms observed inside the laboratory and those observed outside in the field. For example, we show that a higher value of cooperation outside the laboratory may lower the use of incentives inside the laboratory even as it increases their usage outside. As an application we show that the model calibrated to experimental data makes reasonable out-of-sample quantitative forecasts.

Key questions for reading the Bible -- How to read scripture to make political decisions -- Essential biblical theological themes -- Nationalism, patriotism, and globalization -- Religious liberty -- War -- Abortion -- Criminal justice and capital punishment -- Immigration -- Same-sex marriage -- The environment -- Poverty -- Racism.

The American colonists who took up arms against the British fought in defense of the ''sacred cause of liberty.'' But it was not merely their cause but warfare itself that they believed was sacred. In Sacred Scripture, Sacred War, James P. Byrd shows that the Bible was a key text of the American Revolution.

Human trafficking causes untold suffering to millions throughout the world. From a Christian perspective it should go without saying that we ought to work towards the eradication of this evil. The Bible, however, which all Christian traditions recognize as normative for faith and practice, reflects an era in which slavery was regarded as the norm. This raises a question: can it have anything to say to the church about human trafficking, or should it be discarded as irrelevant and anachronistic? Drawing on history and literature to help us bridge the hermeneutical gap between the texts and our own age, this study presents an examination of key biblical material on slavery and prostitution. It suggests that the Bible does have much to say that can inform Christian responses to modern-day slavery in all its forms, including the sex industry into which so many victims of trafficking are sold

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Dedication -- Preface -- List of Contributors -- Abbreviations -- 1. Christianity and Violence -- 2. War in the Hebrew Bible: An Overview -- 3. Toward Shalom: Absorbing the Violence -- 4. Impulses toward Peace in a Country at War: The Book of Isaiah between Realism and Hope -- 5. Distinguishing Just War from Crusade: Is Regime Change a Just Cause for Just War? -- 6. Noncombatant Immunity and the War on Terrorism -- 7. Terrorism: What Is It and How Do We Deal with It? -- 8. Just Peacemaking Reduces Terrorism between Palestine and Israel -- Indexes

Reading stories can be an exercise in cross-cultural communication-and it can involve miscommunication. When we read texts belonging to other epochs, lands, peoples, and traditions, we need to know something about the "cultural scripts" which shaped the ways of thinking and the ways of speaking reflected in those texts. If these cultural scripts are to be made intelligible to us they must be explained in terms that the culture alien to us shares with our own. The set of simple and universal human concepts which has been discovered in recent decades through empirical linguistic investigations (cf. e.g., Wierzbicka 1996c; Goddard 1998; Goddard and Wierzbicka eds. 1994 and 2002), can play a useful role in this regard, as a kind of a universal conceptual lingua franca or a universal "cultural notation" (Hall 1976), which can help to minimize miscommunication and build cross-cultural bridges between readers and writers. As Bakhtin (1979: 257) put it, in speaking "we 'pour' our speech into ready-made forms of speech genres (.) These forms are given to us in the same way in which our native language is given". Accordingly, to understand ways of speaking which belong to a culture alien to us we must learn to "hear" them in their proper cultural context and with some knowledge of this culture's ready-made speech forms; in other words, we must try to understand the underlying cultural scripts. Mainstream Anglo culture, with its cherished traditions of rationality and empiricism, and with its emphasis on science and scientific discourse, values consistency, accuracy, logical formulations, absence of contradictions (on any level), absence of exaggeration, dispassionate reasoning, and so on. As I have discussed in my book What Did Jesus Mean? (2001), these are not the values of the culture of Hosea, or the culture of Jesus, just as they are not the values of the culture reflected in the stories of Sholom Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer. For the modern Anglo reader of the Bible, a cross-cultural commentary is not an optional extra, but a necessity. The cultural script model can be an effective tool for the purposes of cross-cultural understanding-in personal interaction, social life, business, politics, literature, and also in religion. In particular, it can be an effective tool for the interpretation of the Bible-as literature and as (for the believers) the Word of God.

Reading stories can be an exercise in cross-cultural communication-and it can involve miscommunication. When we read texts belonging to other epochs, lands, peoples, and traditions, we need to know something about the "cultural scripts" which shaped the ways of thinking and the ways of speaking reflected in those texts. If these cultural scripts are to be made intelligible to us they must be explained in terms that the culture alien to us shares with our own. The set of simple and universal human concepts which has been discovered in recent decades through empirical linguistic investigations (cf. e.g., Wierzbicka 1996c; Goddard 1998; Goddard and Wierzbicka eds. 1994 and 2002), can play a useful role in this regard, as a kind of a universal conceptual lingua franca or a universal "cultural notation" (Hall 1976), which can help to minimize miscommunication and build cross-cultural bridges between readers and writers. As Bakhtin (1979: 257) put it, in speaking "we 'pour' our speech into ready-made forms of speech genres (.) These forms are given to us in the same way in which our native language is given". Accordingly, to understand ways of speaking which belong to a culture alien to us we must learn to "hear" them in their proper cultural context and with some knowledge of this culture's ready-made speech forms; in other words, we must try to understand the underlying cultural scripts. Mainstream Anglo culture, with its cherished traditions of rationality and empiricism, and with its emphasis on science and scientific discourse, values consistency, accuracy, logical formulations, absence of contradictions (on any level), absence of exaggeration, dispassionate reasoning, and so on. As I have discussed in my book What Did Jesus Mean? (2001), these are not the values of the culture of Hosea, or the culture of Jesus, just as they are not the values of the culture reflected in the stories of Sholom Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer. For the modern Anglo reader of the Bible, a cross-cultural commentary is not an optional extra, but a necessity. The cultural script model can be an effective tool for the purposes of cross-cultural understanding-in personal interaction, social life, business, politics, literature, and also in religion. In particular, it can be an effective tool for the interpretation of the Bible-as literature and as (for the believers) the Word of God.