McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry 23 (2021–22)

The latest McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry is online, containing the below articles along with a goodly collection of book reviews.

Articles and reviews are available to download from here.

Stuart Blythe

Preaching as a Rhetorical Act: Practices and Possibilities with Reference to the Rev. Dr. John Gladstone (1921–2005)

Laura Reece Hogan

Poetry

Vilma Blenman

Poetry

David J. Fuller

Fault Lines in Evangelical Hermeneutics: Divergent Accounts of Patristic and Reformation-Era Interpretive Approaches in Recent Works by Carter and Provan

Earl R. Bunch Jr.

Will the Cosmos Be Destroyed and Re-created or Instead Renovated?

Stephen J. Bedard

Jesus, the Resurrection, and Disabilities in the Afterlife

Reviews

Lausanne Global Analysis 12, 2 (March 2023)

The latest issue of Lausanne Global Analysis, from The Lausanne Movement, is available online from here, including pdfs of individual articles as below.

The summaries are taken from the Issue Overview by Loun Ling Lee.

Dave Deuel

Taking Church to People with Disabilities: A New Initiative for the Lausanne Disability Concerns Network

To complement traditional mission, vocational disability professionals can play a unique role at home, at work, and in our neighborhood, bringing the love of Christ and spiritual care to people where they are and equipping them for ministry. ‘People with disabilities whom they serve through care can grow spiritually while they receive encouragement to find their own giftedness and calling.’

Xiaoli Yang

The Transformative Power of Deep Listening: (Re)Imagining in Global Mission

In order to bring healing and transformation through incarnational mission, we need ‘to cultivate the art of listening and (re)imagining’ through three key aspects: ‘the verbal, the body, and the silence’. Xiaoli Yang uses Chinese etymology and other cultural traditions to illustrate what it means to develop ‘a holistic embodiment of listening’. As exemplified by Christ’s incarnation, ‘indigenous and contextual mission must emerge out of a deep sense of listening and imagining in the local soil, both among ourselves and with those we serve cross-culturally.’

Paul Sungro Lee

Utilising Indigenous Cultural Traits for Cross-Cultural Missions: Missiological Applications

As ‘missionaries from the Majority World increasingly join the global workforce’… it is more advantageous for them ’to connect intimately with those of similar backgrounds in other Majority World nations where they are sent to minister’. They will be able to use their common ‘indigenous cultural attributes’ in their mission strategies.

Emmanuel Oumarou

Rethinking Contextualization in Cameroon: The Context-Emergence Approach for Cultural Understanding of the Gospel

Oumarou investigates the state of contextualization in Cameroon, adopting an approach he describes as the context-emergence approach. ‘This approach highlights the incarnational emergence of the expressions, forms, and practices of Christianity from inside a context’, in contrast to the context-insertion approach, which ‘allows the adaptation of foreign Christian thoughts and practices from the culture of a missionary in a host culture’.

Lausanne Global Analysis 10, 2 (March 2021)

The latest issue of Lausanne Global Analysis, from The Lausanne Movement, is available online from here, including pdfs of individual articles as below.

Gina A. Zurlo and Todd M. Johnson

Is Christianity Shrinking or Shifting?

Since November 2012 when our first LGA issue was published, Christianity has become even more truly global. The center of the church has shifted from the North to the South, and there’s a growing influence of non-western Christianity. Todd Johnson and Gina Zurlo, editors of the World Christian Encyclopedia, 3^rd edition, have written about what a truly global Christian family means in our first article, ‘Is Christianity Shrinking or Shifting?’

Steve Sang-Cheol Moon

Reaching Generation Z with the Gospel

There’s another demographic trend in recent years, and this is the rise of Generation Z. This is the youngest – and perhaps final – generation in our world to have distinctive characteristics. But who are the Gen Z-ers – and how can they be reached with the gospel? Steve Moon, Founder and CEO of Charis Institute for Intercultural Studies, suggests three concrete steps to help us progress from knowledge to action in his article, ‘Reaching Generation Z with the Gospel’.

CJ Davison & Richard Coleman

Racism and the Great Commission

Our next article, ‘Racism and the Great Commission’, is part one of two articles from the Lausanne YLGen Empower team. This article brings together a wide range of voices from across the world on the globally pressing topic of racism, and especially how it relates to the Great Commission.

Jenny James Taylor

The Holy Responsibility of Journalism

Unconscious biases, whether generational, racial, or vocational, impact the practice of journalism. But as a Christian journalist, Jenny Taylor uncovers the roots of journalism in the Christian values of freedom, justice, and truth in her article, ‘The Holy Responsibility of Journalism’. What would it look like to restore journalism ‘as a sacrament of all that we value’?

Dave Deuel

A Workplace for Mephibosheth

The final article in this 50^th issue of LGA is by Dave Deuel, Lausanne Catalyst for Disability Concerns and Academic Dean Emeritus for The Master’s Academy International. In ‘A Workplace for Mephibosheth’, he shows how only a small fraction of persons with disabilities globally are employed. How can we transform workplace culture – and the world – by employing those with disabilities?

Centre for Public Christianity (December 2014)

Among other items, the Centre for Public Christianity has posted a video interview with John Swinton on the distinction between ‘inclusion’ and real welcome for people with disabilities.

Also posted is the third and final installment of a podcast with John Dickson, in part profiling his forthcoming book, A Doubter’s Guide to the Bible: Inside History’s Bestseller for Believers and Skeptics.

Part I looked at creation, the ‘fall’, and how they explain the world in which we find ourselves. Part II provided a quick tour of the whole of the Old Testament, offering a few key concepts for understanding it as a unified story. Part III looks at the New Testament, from the Christmas story to account in Revelation of where everything is headed, and how it relates to the overarching story of the Bible.

Ethics in Brief Volume 19, Nos. 1 & 2 (2013)

Two issues from Volume 19 of Ethics in Brief, published by The Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics, are now available online:

Claire Hordern, ‘Defining Death: New Pathways to Consider’, Ethics in Brief 19, 1 (2013).

By drawing on recent neurological research this article challenges some prevailing medical assumptions about the definition of death and explores some of the philosophical contours of the brain death debate.

Benjamin S. Wall, ‘Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader: Theological Contributions to Disability Discourse’, Ethics in Brief 19, 2 (2013).

Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader, edited by Brian Brock and John Swinton, is an indispensable contribution not only to the field of disability studies but also to any contemporary attempt at engaging in serious anthropological, theological, and ethical discourse. This article provides a summary sketch of the book tracing some of the issues it addresses.

Christian Reflection on Disability

The latest issue of Christian Reflection, published by the Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University, is now available, this one devoted to ‘Disability’. The whole issue is available as a pdf here, and an accompanying Study Guide is available here. The main articles, with their abstracts, are as follows:

Robert B. Kruschwitz

Introduction

Disability is ‘tragically but redemptively fundamental’ to discipleship, Tom Reynolds notes, for it ‘opens up our vulnerability and dependence upon each other and God.’ How can we walk beside one another in friendship and learn from one another with our disabilities?

Amos Yong

Zacchaeus: Short and Un-Seen

Societal fears of disability often warp how we read the Bible. But the Zacchaeus story challenges the normate assumption that disability is a problem needing to be fixed or eliminated. All human beings can be accepted as children of Abraham regardless of their physical characteristics or capabilities.

John Swinton

Many Bodies, Many Worlds

Disability is a mode of human experience that challenges our norms and reshapes our most basic understanding of reality as we encounter the rich diversity of what it means to be a human being in God’s image.

Thomas E. Reynolds

The Cult of Normalcy

Against the cult of normalcy, disability foregrounds vulnerability as a fundamental condition of sharing life together. It reminds us that wholeness is not self-sufficiency, but is the genuine communion that results from sharing our vulnerable humanity with one another in light of God’s grace.

S. Kay Toombs

Jars of Clay: Disability in Intentional Christian Community

Living in an intentional Christian community offers a nurturing context in which it is possible to fully embrace the vulnerability that accompanies disability, to concretely enact our Christian beliefs with respect to the intrinsic worth of all human beings, and to affirm the value of all members of the community.

Terry W. York

The Twisted Form upon the Tree

Debra Dean Murphy

Worship Service

Heidi J. Hornik

Disability in Christian Art

Jason D. Whitt

Baptism and Profound Intellectual Disability

Is there room in the baptismal waters and at the Lord’s Supper table for persons with profound intellectual disability? For Christians who practice believers’ baptism, the question goes to the heart of what it means to be the Church and to welcome the giftedness of each person in our midst.

Brian Brock

The Lure of Eugenics

In contemporary society ‘prenatal care’ and ‘prenatal screening’ are taken to be synonyms, but they become antonyms in practice when the refusal to test is portrayed as unnecessarily risky and aborting a disabled child is portrayed as a relief.

Thomas H. Graves

Affirming God in the Midst of Disability

An encounter with personal disability brought Tom Graves to a perplexing impasse. As a philosopher of religion, how could he talk of God in words that were both true to his faith and honest with his disabled condition?

Heiki Peckruhn

Travelling in the Ark

With whom are we being human together? With whom are we living together into our potentialities? These questions of community and humanity, central to the L’Arche communities, are explored in four books reviewed here.

Jackie Mills-Fernald

Lowering Barriers for People with Disabilities

If the Church is a place where all are welcome regardless of ability, why is the disability population so poorly represented in our congregations? The resources reviewed here can help us lower the barriers that prevent people with disabilities from participating fully in the body of Christ.