Maria Duffy describes Paul Ricoeur's narrative theory of memory and addresses central conceptual and methodological issues in his theory of forgiveness and reconciliation. As the many Truth Commissions around the world illustrate, revisiting the past has a positive benefit in steering history in a new direction after protracted violence. A second deeper strand in the book is the connection between Ricoeur and John Paul II. Both lived through the worst period of modern European history (Ricoeur a prisoner of war during WWII and John Paul, who suffered under the communist regime). Both have written on themes of memory and identity and share a mutual concern for the future of Europe and the preservation of the 'Christian' identity of the Continent as well as the promotion of peace and a civilization of love. The book brings together their shared vision, culminating in the award to Ricoeur by John Paul II of the Paul VI medal for theology.

The essays in Paul Ricoeur and the Hope of Higher Education: The Just University discuss diverse ways that Paul Ricoeur’s work provides hopeful insight and necessary provocation that should inform the task and mission of the modern university in the changing landscape of Higher Education. This volume gathers interdisciplinary scholars seeking to reestablish the place of justice as the central function of higher education in the twenty-first century. The contributors represent diverse backgrounds, including teachers, scholars, and administrators from R1 institutions, seminary and divinity schools as well as undergraduate teaching colleges. This collection, edited by Daniel Boscaljon and Jeffrey F. Keuss, offers critical and practical visions for the renewal of higher education. The first part of the book provides an internal examination of the university system and details how Ricoeur’s thinking assists on pragmatics from syllabus design to final exams to daily teaching. The second portion of the book examines the Just University’s role as a social institution within the broader cultural world and looks at how Ricoeur’s description of values informs how the university works relative to religious belief, prisons, and rural poverty.

Reading Religious Ritual with Ricoeur: Between Fragility and Hope creates a dialogue between Ricœur’s hermeneutic philosophy and the interpretation of human ritual practices, especially as such practices are manifested within the context of Christian liturgy. In the first part of the book, Christina M. Gschwandtner shows that Ricœur’s account of religion would be deepened if it were to take into account not only the biblical texts but also forms of liturgical expression and ritual actions. She challenges Ricœur’s early reading of the symbol and second naïveté, broadens his interpretation of biblical texts and faith to consider religious actions more fully, and suggests that ritual can enhance human capacities. The second part of the book employs Ricœur’s hermeneutics in order to shed light on the analysis of liturgy, demonstrating that his accounts of truth, of the world of the text, of religious language, of the imagination, and of the formation of identity are all eminently applicable to liturgical experience. Reading Religious Ritual with Ricoeur shows that one of the most significant themes in Ricœur’s work—the tension between fragility and hope—is especially helpful for understanding what liturgy does and how it functions. Seeing how liturgy and ritual configure fragility and hope also enriches Ricœur’s account of the role and function of religion in human experience.

Performing Southeast Asia: Performance, Politics and the Contemporary is an important reconsideration of the histories and practices of theatre and performance in a fluid and dynamic region that is also experiencing an overarching politics of complexity, precarity and populist authoritarian tendencies. In a substantial introductory essay and essays by leading scholars, activists and practitioners working inside the region, the book explores fundamental questions for the arts. The book asks how theatre contributes to and/or addresses the political condition in the contemporary moment, how does it represent the complexity of experiences in peoples’ daily lives and how does theatre engage in forms of political activism and enable a diversity of voices to flourish. The book shows how, in an age of increasingly violent politics, political institutions become sites for bad actors and propaganda. Forces of biopolitics, neo-liberalism and religious and ethnic nationalism intersect in unpredictable ways with decolonial practices – all of which the book argues are forces that define the contemporary moment. Indeed, by putting the focus on contemporary politics in the region alongside the diversity of practices in contemporary theatre, we see a substantial reformation of the idea of the contemporary moment, not as a cosmopolitan and elite artistic practice but as a multivalent agent of change in both aesthetic and political terms. With its focus on community activism and the creative possibilities of the performing arts the region, Performing Southeast Asia, is a timely intervention that brings us to a new understanding of how contemporary Southeast Asia has become a site of contest, struggle and reinvention of the relations between the arts and society. Peter Eckersall The Graduate Center City University of New York Performing Southeast Asia – with chapters concerned with how regional theatres seek contextually-grounded, yet post-national(istic) forms; how history and tradition shape but do not hold down contemporary theatre; and how, in the editors’ words, such artistic encounters could result in theatres ‘that do not merely attend to matters of cultural heritage, tradition or history, but instead engage overtly with theatre and performance in the contemporary’ – contributes to the possibility of understanding what options for an artistically transubstantiated now-ness may be: to the possibility, that is, of what might be called a ‘Present-Tense Theatre’. C. J. W.-L. Wee Professor of English Nanyang Technological University Performing Southeast Asia examines contemporary performance practices and their relationship with politics and governance in Southeast Asia in the twenty-first century. In a region haunted historically by strongman politics, authoritarianism and militarism, religious tension and ethnic strife, the chapters reveal how contemporary theatre and performances in the present reflect yet challenge dominant socio-political discourses. The authors analyse works of political commitment and conviction, created and performed by Southeast Asian artists, as modes and platforms of reaction and resistance to the shifting political climates that inform contemporary life in urban Southeast Asia. The discussions center on issues of state hegemonies and biopolitics, finance and sponsorship, social liberalism and conservatism, the relevance of history and tradition, and globalisation and cultural practice. These diverse yet related concerns converge on an examination of the efficacies of theatre and performance as means of political intervention and transformation that point to alternative embodiments of political consciousness through which artists propose critical options for rethinking the state, citizenship, identity and belonging in a time of seismic socio-political change. The editors also reframe an understanding of ‘the contemporary’ not simply as a temporal adjective but, in the context of present Southeast Asia, as a geopolitical condition that shapes artistic and performance practices.

The Bloomsbury Guide to Pastoral Care provides a framework for reflection on pastoral care practice and identifies frontier learning from the new and challenging practical contexts which are important in pastoral care research today. In this collection of essays from leading practitioner-scholars, Bernadette Flanagan and Sharon Thornton set out core principles underpinning professional identity and the practice of pastoral care in rapidly changing social settings. Such pastoral challenges as, developing compassionate and effective companioning to those who have suffered trauma, torture, catastrophic events, social disintegration, the moral wounds of war and cultural dislocation are treated with insight and deep care. The new frontiers of pastoral care in more familiar circumstances such as family, health settings where patients facing life-challenging medical events and multi-cultural communities are also explored. With contributions from Kevin Egan, Michael O'Sullivan SJ, Rita Nakashima Brock and Julia Prinz VDMF, The Bloomsbury Guide to Pastoral Care is an essential reference for the theory and practice of pastoral care.

How can one believe in a God of love amid all the evil and suffering found in the world? How does one do theology 'after Auschwitz', while vast numbers of people still have to endure violent oppression every day? This book seeks to address such questions from a standpoint informed by life in Africa, which in the face of extraordinary difficulties bears witness to Gospel hope by demonstrating forgiveness in action and promoting reconciliation. The work unfolds in two parts. In the first part, a description of the misery that characterises much of life in Africa in the recent past opens up to a theological consideration of the underlying causes and of God's response to them. In the second part, the joy which is so characteristic of life in Africa even in places of immense suffering sets the scene for detailed reflections on liturgy, memory, forgiveness and hope.

This book deals with contested and topical matters. Biblical hermeneutics has always been contested – how to read and understand Biblical passages. Things become even more contested when such passages are read inter-culturally; they become even more contested when the words are about contested personal and social issues, like Jesus’ words on forgiveness in Matthew 18. Empirical studies like this show how deeply contested such readings truly are in the context of South African churches, with their painful histories of division and conflict. Future academic work will, therefore, benefit from the creative and careful methodological approach developed in this study. However, this book offers much more than academic promise – precisely because of the theme, so topical today and without doubt topical for a long time to come and in many other places in our contemporary world as well. Forster offers resources for reading and conversation for everyone concerned with public life today. This is public theology in action, showing how faith matters – without prescribing answers, but rather by invitation to join an informed discussion." - Dirk J Smit, The Rimmer and Ruth deVries Professor of Reformed Theology and Public Life, Princeton Theological Seminary

Too often Buddhism has been subjected to the Procrustean box of western thought, whereby it is stretched to fit fixed categories or had essential aspects lopped off to accommodate vastly different cultural norms and aims. After several generations of scholarly discussion in English-speaking communities, it is time to move to the next hermeneutical stage. Buddhist philosophy must be liberated from the confines of a quasi-religious stereotype and judged on its own merits. Hence this work will approach Chinese Buddhism as a philosophical tradition in its own right, not as an historical after-thought nor as an occasion for comparative discussions that assume the west alone sets the standards for or is the origin of philosophy and its methodologies. Viewed within their own context, Chinese Buddhist philosophers have much to contribute to a wide range of philosophical concerns, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion, even though Western divisions of philosophy may not exhaust the rich contents of Chinese Buddhist philosophy. .

Describes how memory is structured, in culture, civic identity and religion – and addresses central issues in Ricoeur's theory of forgiveness and reconciliation.