Thoughts on faith, culture, and public life.
Gloria Steinem on Jan. 15, 2013, in Pasadena, CA. A reflection on the legacy of Gloria Steinem By Rod Benson As a man, and as a Christian, I admired Gloria Steinem from a distance as one of the most influential feminist writers, organisers and public intellectuals of the modern era. From the 1960s onward, she helped …
Continue reading "Feminism, power and the politics of human dignity"
On reading one of my recent articles on reading Scripture in a climate emergency (Part 1), a friend raised a point many secular bystanders may well be asking: “I would have thought we were way past the point of needing to rely on biblical or ecological hermeneutics to help us understand the dimensions of the …
Continue reading "Why Christians don’t need proof texts for climate action"
Ecological hermeneutics in congregational life Biblical interpretation shapes Christian imagination long before it forges explicit ethical stances on public issues. How Christians understand what Scripture teaches about creation, human identity, salvation, possession, hope and responsibility influences how they inhabit the world. Ecological hermeneutics—the interpretation of texts with attention to the intrinsic value of Earth, the …
Continue reading "Reading Scripture in a Climate Emergency (Part 3)"
The question of how Christians ought to live has occupied believers since the earliest days of the church. The New Testament repeatedly links faith in Jesus Christ with transformed patterns of life, calling followers of the way of Jesus to love God, love their neighbours, pursue holiness, embody the character of Christ, and seek to …
Continue reading "Catholic and Protestant approaches to ethics"
Ethics is the disciplined study of how human beings ought to live. It asks enduring questions about right and wrong, justice and injustice, virtue and vice, duty and responsibility. More profoundly, ethics seeks to understand what constitutes a good life and what kind of persons and communities we should aspire to become. While every culture …
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