The field of disability theology is an emerging area of theological enquiry that seeks to explore the relationship between our understandings of God and human beings in the light of the experience of human disability. When it comes to disability, the tendency within the pastoral and ethical literature has been to concentrate on issues around pastoral care and ethics. Here disability is seen as a pastoral or ethical issue with little or no concentrated attention paid to the theological implications. The focus is on ethical dilemmas, such as whether or not prenatal testing for disability is appropriate, or pastoral matters around how to make sure that churches are accessible to people in wheelchairs. There is of course nothing wrong with such approaches. We all need pastoral care and all of us need the tools to deal with complex ethical challenges. Disability theology acknowledges the importance of such things but seeks to push further into a broader range of theological issues, which includes but is not defined by the pastoral and the ethical.

Pacts or “social contracts” form the basis of sovereignty in many early modern theories of political authority, and in Pufendorf’s too. Most such theories treat the pact as the means by which a pre-existing right—for example, divine right, or the natural right of individuals grounded in their strength, reason, or property—is transferred to a sovereign on the condition that the right be protected, to be rescinded if it is not. For Pufendorf, however, there is no pre-existing right since the sovereignty pact creates a new right—the right to issue unchallengeable commands for the purposes of achieving social peace—by instituting two new moral personae: the citizen who obeys the sovereign in exchange for protection, and the sovereign invested with the right of absolute command to provide social peace. Since Pufendorf’s sovereignty is constituted not by a prior moral right, but rather by the capacity to exercise unchallengeable authority for the end of social peace, there is no naturally rightful form of government. Pufendorf thus takes a neutral and pluralistic view of the three traditional forms of government—monarchical, aristocratic and democratic—insofar as each is capable of exercising the capacity for sovereign rule.

According to scripture and the historic Christian creeds, God is almighty and the creator of all things, visible and invisible. This entails that the world is neither a brute fact nor without origin, meaning, and purpose. Rather, it is the work of a divine agency that creates and provides for creatures and orders them to their proper ends. That divine agency is not part of the world but is the transcendent yet immanent and continual source of the world’s existence. These claims arise from wonder and reflection on the contingency, fragility, beauty, and rational order of the world, contemplation of scripture, and the discernment of God’s revelation in and through creation. The Christian theology of creation and providence, having its roots in the Hebrew scriptures and ancient philosophy, was developed in relation to the Trinitarian doctrine of God, the incarnation of Christ, and the hope of redemption. It has been articulated in creative and critical conversation with many other traditions of enquiry into the origin, workings, and purpose of the cosmos, from ancient pagan creation myths to the modern natural sciences.

In providing a new foundation for natural law and thence political authority, Pufendorf engaged in a major and explicit reconstruction of the discipline. Scholastic natural law derived the law of nature from a prior nature held to contain norms for moral and civil conduct; for example, from a divine nature whose will imprinted the human will, or a rational nature that was supposed to guide the will, or from humanity’s supposedly sociable nature as the source of the key norm of sociality. Pufendorf’s radical intervention into this field lay in his declaration that since it had been “imposed” or instituted as a “moral entity” by God for unaccountable reasons, human nature was not itself normative, rationally or socially. Rather, as a set of given conducts and predispositions—seen most clearly humanity’s paradoxical need for co-operation in order to survive and its ineradicable proclivity to envy, malice and mutual predation—human nature supplied only the observable basis from which it was possible to deduce the natural law: that man should cultivate sociality as a disposition needed for security and social thriving. This formed the basis for political sovereignty as the unchallengeable deployment of civil power required to obtain social peace and security.

In his theory of the family, Pufendorf treats it as a complex society composed of three simple societies or associations: those between husband and wife (matrimony), parents and children (paternal society), and master and servant, or slave (societas herilis), which are united under the domestic rule of the paterfamilias, or head of the family. Given that Pufendorf holds all human beings – women no less than men – to be naturally equal in virtue of their humanity, that is, the common moral status that they acquire through their subjection to the law of nature, the question arises as to how he justifies authority in the private realm of the family: how does his patriarchal account of marriage, and his justification of servitude, or slavery, fit with the egalitarian premise of his natural law theory? In focusing on the role of pacts and consent in the founding of the various modes of domination within the family, the chapter highlights Pufendorf’s critical attitude to traditional justifications of authority, but also indicates the limits of the egalitarian premise of his natural law theory. The chapter ends with a comparison between the rule of the head of the family and supreme sovereignty in the state.

The person and work of the Holy Spirit are central to visions of the Christian doctrine of God, the Christian gospel, and the Christian life. This judgment is not simply based on a single biblical episode (such as the Pentecost narrative in Acts 2 or the Farewell Discourses of the Gospel of John). Rather, the centrality of the Spirit is grounded in the very logic of how the God of Christian confession, YHWH-Trinity, acts in the world and how this One goes on to be known and worshipped by followers of the Risen One. Christian initiation, the availability of grace, the remembrance of Jesus, the transformation of the heart, the eucharistic life of the church, the reading of Scripture, growth in holiness, the embodied mission of the people of God with “power” and “authority,” the sustained hope of living a cruciform existence in the eschatological “last days” – in short, every feature of God’s self-manifestation and work in the economy of salvation history is not just pneumatologically related but pneumatologically constituted and driven. Gordon Fee captures this sentiment well when he remarks of Paul’s pneumatology: “‘salvation in Christ’ not only begins by the Spirit, it is the ongoing work of the Spirit in every area and avenue of the Christian life.”1 The disciples of Jesus, then, are those called to be a people of the Spirit, ones who walk according to the Spirit and those who bear the gifts and fruit of the Spirit. As Kallistos Ware has so compellingly suggested, “The whole aim of the Christian life is to be a Spirit-bearer, to live in the Spirit of God, to breathe the Spirit of God.”2

Analytic theology is sometimes said to be a research programme in search of a definition. What is it? A complete answer to that question might helpfully give some account of how analytic theology came to be – before considering what it is – and we shall do that presently. However, it is in fact fairly easy to give a preliminary working definition of analytic theology: it is an approach to the theological task that utilises the tools and methods of analytic philosophy. This will need to be finessed as we progress. But it will serve as a place to begin.

In an essay exploring how Christian ethics became distinct from Christian doctrine, Stanley Hauerwas writes: “Once there was no Christian ethics simply because Christians could not distinguish between their beliefs and their behaviour. They assumed that their lives exemplified (or at least should exemplify) their doctrines in a manner that made a division between life and doctrine impossible.”1 We could write similarly of public theology: “Once there was no public theology simply because Christians could not distinguish between their beliefs and the public implications of those beliefs. It took particular social, historical, and intellectual circumstances for a division between ‘theology’ and ‘public theology’ to seem possible.” In other words, historically contingent reasons led to the emergence of “public theology” as a theological discourse beginning in the 1970s.

This chapter argues that generic distinctions between the essay and the novel have historically been difficult to preserve, with many of the supposedly identifying features of each genre applying in practice to the other. The author surveys work by writers including Milan Kundera, Robert Musil, Zadie Smith, and Virginia Woolf.

This chapter surveys the history of nature writing and the nature essay, from American Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller to more recent writers such as Barry Lopez, Amitav Ghosh, and Camille T. Dungy. The author examines the political and scientific aspects of nature writing and the genre’s response to changing conceptions of “nature.”