Theology

These eleven essays originally delivered as the annual Louis J. Luzbetak Lectures at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago focus on the relationship between mission and culture. The authors include missiologists José M. de Mesa, Darrell L. Whiteman, Aylward Shorter, John Kirby, and Angelyn Dries, and anthropolgists Linda E. Thomas, Anthony J. Gittens, and Philip Gibbs, and theologians Gemma T. Cruz and Robert J. Schreiter.

Moving from Asia to Africa to North America, the essays probe the dynamics of the intersection of mission work and indigenous culture and demonstrate how essential it is for a missioner to have an in-depth understanding of the importance of culture.

Approximately fifteen referred essays on the theme of violence and the sacred in the twenty-first century. The plenary speakers include Shawn Copeland and James Logan (Earlham College), Todd Whitmore of Notre Dame, and Bill Cavanaugh (De Paul).

Key essays explore the nature of religious violence v. secular violence as well as violence against the violence and the violence of consumerism.

Commemorates the experience of Faith & Order in North America by collecting key presentations from the 50th anniversary conference, which study Faith &Order s past and present and offer a vision for ecumenism s future.

Philadelphia s community muralism movement is transforming the City of Brotherly Love into the Mural Capital of the World. This remarkable groundswell of public art includes some 2,800 wall-sized canvases in ghettos and on schools, on mosques and in jails, in courthouses and along overpasses. In If These Walls Could Talk, Maureen O Connell explores the theological and social significance of the movement. She calls attention to some of the most startling and powerful works it has produced and describes the narratives behind them. In doing so, O Connell illustrates the ways that the arts can help us think about and work through the seemingly inescapable problems of urban poverty and arrive at responses that are both creative and effective. This is a book on American religion. It incorporates ethnography to explore faith communities that have used larger-than-life religious imagery to proclaim in unprecedented public ways their self-understandings, memories of the past, and visions of the future. It also examines the way this art functions in larger public discourse about problems facing every city in America. But If These Walls Could Talk is also theological text. It considers the theological implications of this most democratic expression of public art, mindful of the three components of every mural: the pieces themselves, those who create them, and those who interpret them. It illuminates a kind of beauty that seeks after social change or, in other words, the largely unexplored relationship between theological aesthetics and ethics.