Suchergebnisse

The Acts of the Apostles speaks often about the social work of the Church through recurring concepts such as koinonia, mercy, hospitality and philanthropy. This paper deals with the ways that the Book of Acts promotes harmony in conditions of diversity (such as religious, cultural, or political pluralism). Several texts will be compared and interpreted to draw a clear picture of the Church's call to serve the world and to witness Christian Faith in words and deeds. The world can be healed with the power of the Divine Word. This does not happen only by preaching and teaching, but also by acting and caring for the needed and the poor. The theological narrative of Acts shows how the Christian faith - the Way, as Luke likes to call it - grants a new understanding of reality and calls people to break the rules of worldly wisdom and to behave according to the wisdom of the Kingdom, where the principles of social relation are redefined through the lens of the Resurrection.

During his Antiochian Period, St John Chrysostom gave three homilies on the Letter to ‎Philemon, which reveal the Saint's standpoint from slavery, a deep-rooted institution in ‎Antioch and the Eastern Roman Empire of that period. The political system in the region was ‎changing into the Byzantine Era and Christianity was expanding progressively in the city. ‎However, it was not easy for Chrysostom to move his audience to foster the liberation of ‎slaves and to deal with all humankind with equity. A task that had been already difficult for ‎the Apostle Paul was still so for Saint John. Nowadays, several forms of slavery still blight ‎our global and local society, a fact that challenges Christians again to engage for freedom ‎and equity all over the world. This paper studies the three homilies searching for the Pauline ‎fundamentals as detected by Chrysostom in order to define modern patterns to fight against ‎all forms of slavery, including forced labor and human trafficking.‎

Being a Christian in the Middle East today is a hard task. The dramatic political changes over the past century have torn Christianity in parties that confuse religious and political causes. My contribution will investigate one of the most sensitive issues that touch the coexistence of religions in the Middle East: the idea of choice and the status of the Jewish people in Christian theology. This serious issue appeared in the beginnings of Christianity and belongs to the very core message of the New Testament. The most important texts about the continuity and discontinuity of the election of the Jews by God are certainly in Romans 9-11. From the infamous Holocaust and the proclamation of the modern state of Israel, there has been a lively discussion among scholars of the Bible in the West about Rom 9-11, about how to define the role of "Israel" in Christianity. In the context of Rom 9-11, there is a special paragraph about the choice of the people of God that has deeply marked Christianity: the image of the olive tree (Rom 11,16b-24). Here the Apostle illustrates his vision of God's people referring to this as an olive tree. This article will attempt to interpret this explanation of Paul, because it is the clearest and most didactic.