Church And Religious Other

This volume brings together the prestigious speakers at the inaugural Church in Our Times Lecture Series at Liverpool Hope, throughout the first 4 months of 2006, and invited contributors from and addressing wider international contexts – Africa, Sri Lanka, India and the United States.

The volume explores themes such as questions of ecclesial and religious identity in these post-modern times, the advent of neo-exclusivism, divisions within the contemporary Roman Catholic and Anglicans churches, inter-faith relations and dialogue, questions of sexuality and Christian ministry, contemporary understandings of ecclesial authority, teaching and tradition, the inter-relation between the church and the kingdom of God today, an Asian appraisal of Pope Benedict’s first sermon, inculturation and the rhetoric and reality of the notion of Church as Christianity’s most distinctive and defining feature and constructive proposals for ecumenical ways forward in the future.

The commonality and coherence of the papers, along with the manner in which a number of them together contribute towards making a cumulative case upon similar issues of concern for the ‘church in our times’, constitute a major strength of this collection. This volume will interest faculty and students engaged in the study of the contemporary church, ecumenism, global Christianity, secularity and inter-religious dialogue, as well as appealing to ministers and pastors as well as the general reader excited by the most pressing debates pertaining to the church in these times.

Introduction: Church and Religious Other: Essays on Truth, Unity and Diversity

Gerard Mannion: The Church and Religious ‘Other’: Dominus Iesus and the Hermeneutics of Ecclesial Identity in Postmodern Times

Tissa Balasuriya: An Asian Reflection upon the Inaugural Sermon of Pope Benedict XVI

John O’Brien: The Quest for a Pakistani Christian Identity

Paul M. Collins: The Quest for Indianness

Jane Redmont: African, Feminist, Ecumenical: The Ecclesiology of Mercy Amba Oduyoye

Ernst Conradie: The Whole Household of God (oikos) in an African Ecclesiological Perspective

Jenny Daggers: The Open Future: Church, Feminism and the Theology of Religions

Phyllis Zagano: Women and Church: Where Do We Go From Here?

Steven Shakespeare: A Community of the Question: Inclusive Ecclesiology

Mary McClintock Fulkerson: ‘Being Nice’ in Church

Steve Summers: The Eucharist: A Meal with Friends?

Mark Chapman: ‘“By Schism Rent Asunder, By Heresies Distressed”: Anglicanism and the Windsor Report’

George Pattison: Church: Law, Community and Witness

Bernard Hoose: Does the Church Need to Change?

David McLoughlin: The Church Theologian and the Kingdom of God an Uneasy Relationship?

Kenneth Wilson: Hoping to Learn: a New Approach to Ecclesiology

Jayne Hoose: Dialogue as Tradition

Nicholas Lash: The Church as a School of Wisdom

Paul D. Murray: Receptive Ecumenism: a New Way Forward

Afterword: Keith Ward: Church: the Distinctive and Definitive Idea of Christianity