G. Edwards

This book analyses the wide-ranging changes occurring across Christian theology as religious environmental activists and advocates understand their part in ‘saving the planet’. As the planet’s climate changes, so are the theologies of the Christians working to address it. Amongst the Christian organisations taking bold action to tackle the climate crisis, creative theological ideas are emerging that motivate their critical environmentalist work. The volume describes the creative theological thought of six Christian organisations in the UK, including activist and campaigning groups, an international development agency, and Protestant and Catholic church dioceses. The authors identify significant emerging ecotheological themes within Christian environmentalism, including a greater emphasis on the immanence of God in creation, a more egalitarian view of the kinship of all creatures, the influence of notions of land and place from indigenous practice, an ethics of prophetic ministry alongside an ethics of stewardship, increased practice of mystical spirituality, and a broadening of eschatology. The chapters outline these views and consider their relevance for the future of climate theology. Changing Climate, Changing Religion is valuable reading for those across the humanities and social sciences interested in the crucial role that religions occupy in addressing the world’s environmental crises, and the creative theological thought that underpins it.

This paper argues for a re-enchantment of studies of contemporary climate change activism. We examine how religious beliefs relate to Christian participation in climate activism in local dioceses, international aid agencies and social movements. How are Christians in these contexts reinterpreting and communicating their theological beliefs in ways that mobilise religious communities for climate change activism? We engage with this question by critically employing a social movement framing perspective to discover the nature of the ‘interpretative work’ undertaken by Christian climate activists. Using survey data (n=319) and in-depth interviews (n=62) with Anglicans and Catholics, we argue that familiar ‘stewardship’ framings of Christian climate action are open to dispute. ‘Prophetic’ framings instead dominated in the political wing of Christian climate activism, providing theological support, moral impetus, and a distinct emotional inflection to Christian participation in political protest. We conclude that Christian activist groups effectively amplified existing beliefs in social justice to mobilise climate activism and bridge to groups like Extinction Rebellion. However, prophetic framings did not displace the dominance of an anthropocentric discourse on climate change. With Christians comprising about one third of the world’s population, it is of global significance to the environmental movement that in certain enclaves and across denominations, Christian beliefs are being reinterpreted in ways that can lead to mobilisation for political protest.

Late antique philosophers contributed remarkable defenses of benevolence toward animals. The two most notable examples of this are Plutarch and Porphyry, who argued that animals should not be killed and eaten. This chapter argues that these philosophers were motivated not so much by a feeling of moral sympathy toward animals as by the conviction that eating meat is bad for humans. Since the consumption of meat ties the soul to the body by providing pleasure, it is to be avoided by the philosopher. Thus the vegetarianism of these late ancient Platonists echoes concerns about embodiment already found in Plato himself. The chapter also touches on the issue of human-animal reincarnation.

Corporations are a social and legal construct. They cannot exist without limited liability and other protections deemed necessary for modern commercial activity. The original justification for corporations was to supply goods and services at a scale beyond local enterprise. This notion of serving the community has been lostand corporations’ duty is now seen as increasing shareholder value, which can reduce to funnelling wealth from society to the investor class. Given this modern business orthodoxy, in the absence of statutory directions otherwise, a company is obliged to prioritise commercial forces over ethical ones. Corporate social responsibility becomes an appeal to morality and is doomed to fail. It is open to the legislature to adjust the statutory regime. Serving the public interest can be made a purpose or an objective. By analogy with land law, the simplicity of embedding responsibilities as a condition of registration is contrasted with third-party regulation.

Living Magically is a book that has changed countless lives. In this lively and inspiring guide to the tools and techniques of metaphysics, Gill Edwards outlines a spiritually-based psychology for the times that we live in. Taking a practical self-help approach, Living Magically will help you to: Rediscover your inner wisdom; Break through your fears, blockages and limitations; Let go of the past and reach for the future; Grow through love and joy, rather than pain and struggle; Heal your inner child; 'Listen to the whispers' from your Higher Self; Make your dreams come true.

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar las convergencias, complementariedades y diferencias entre la noción de desarrollo humano de Amartya Sen y el PNUD con el pensamiento de Benedicto XVI y Francisco. Las distintas nociones de desarrollo humano incluyen la integralidad o multidimensionalidad de las personas, así como la inclusión y la sustentabilidad. Cada noción de desarrollo supone una visión del ser humano, de la libertad, de la responsabilidad y de la agencia. Se discute acerca de la relevancia de las instituciones, la eficiencia y la complejización de índices que consideren tanto lo social como lo ambiental. Finalmente, se postulan los aportes de la ética social cristiana a las políticas públicas en esta materia.

Wittgenstein explores learning through practice in the Philosophical Investigations by means of an extended analogy with games. However, does this concern with learning also necessarily extend to education, in our institutional understanding of the word? While Wittgenstein's examples of language learning and use are always shared or social, he does not discuss formal educational institutions as such. He does not wish to found a ‘school of thought’, and is suspicious of philosophy acting as a theory that can be applied to other areas of life. While Wittgenstein's focus on developing independent thinking was neither individualistic nor anti-institutional, it did, however, focus on developing the thinking of his students rather than theorising about how this could be applied on a large scale. An analysis of Hermann Hesse's novel, The Glass Bead Game will help us to pick up where Wittgenstein deliberately left off—thinking about how (or if) one can institutionalise learning methods that encourage thinking for oneself. These differences in the writers’ treatment of education will become evident in the differences between their game analogies. While language-games combat our ‘craving for generality’ in Philosophical Investigations, the Glass Bead Game represents this craving, and how it manifests itself throughout history in disciplines other than logic and philosophy of language. It also represents the potential for institutions to become insular, exclusive communities.

in the euthyphro, socrates tells euthyphro that Meletus is taking him to court for impiety.1 Upon hearing Euthyphro’s claim to have knowledge of piety, Socrates asks Euthyphro to take him on as a pupil, so that he might acquire knowledge of piety himself. Although this may seem unsurprising, given Socrates’s high regard for knowledge in other dialogues, the reason that Socrates gives for wishing to acquire knowledge, in this case, is bizarre—for he says it is because knowledge of piety will help him to secure his acquittal on charges of impiety.It is unclear, however, why Socrates believes that his learning what piety is should lead to the impiety charges against him being dropped, yet no one has ever made a..

In book 3 of On Abstinence from Animal Food, Porphyry is traditionally taken to argue that animals are rational and that it is, therefore, unjust to kill them for food. Since the vast majority of scholars endorse this interpretation, I call it ‘the consensus interpretation’. Yet, strangely enough, elsewhere in his corpus Porphyry claims that the non-human animals are irrational. Jonathan Barnes notices this discrepancy and suggests that an appeal to the distinction between specific and non-specific predication can resolve the problem. This paper explains Barnes’ solution, but argues that it must ultimately be rejected. It concludes with a brief survey of other approaches to the problem, and with an outline of the proposed solution, in which the consensus interpretation of On Abstinence is rejected in favour of a dialectical reading of Book 3. Porphyry, this piece suggests, may not have believed that animals were rational after all