Fortress Press

ReEngaging ELCA Social Teaching on Abortion

Caryn D. Riswold (Author)

Riswold calls us to think together about the ELCA’s 1991 social statement on abortion. Our social, political, and legal context has changed drastically since this statement was written, but one thing remains the same: we as Lutherans are called to compassionate community. Riswold’s engaging prose invites readers into thoughtful conversation.

ReEngaging ELCA Social Teaching on The Church in Society

James M. Childs Jr. (Author), Roger A. Willer (Foreword by)

Childs contextualizes this foundational statement, helping us think creatively about how we are called to be the church today. Grounded in scripture and Lutheran theology, he charts the history of Lutheran public witness, deftly connecting it with our present. How are we guided to speak today? Exploring this book will spark generative conversation.

Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, Second Edition

M. Shawn Copeland (Author)

M. Shawn Copeland demonstrates how Black women's historical experience casts a different light on our theological ideas about being human. This new edition incorporates recent theological, historical, and political scholarship; engages with current social movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo; and presents a new chapter on the body.

The Politics of Faith: The Bible, Government, and Public Policy

Jerry L. Sumney (Author)

The Politics of Faith speaks to Christians and others who seek to discuss the role of the Bible in their decisions about civic politics. This book will help readers talk about how a deeper understanding of Scripture can affect how one votes and the kinds of policies one supports. Each chapter ends with a set of questions for discussion that both review what is in the chapter and provoke discussion about faithful action.

Faithful Economics: 25 Short Insights

Daniel K. Finn (Author)

Careful moral reflection and action are important across all of modern life, but they are especially critical in matters of economics. Faithful Economics is the ideal guide for navigating this complex arena and coming to a deeper understanding of how our faith and our economic lives intersect. The book is organized in twenty-five short lessons, each of which illuminates the issues, explains the questions, and leaves the reader with clarity and understanding.

Moral Issues and Christian Responses: Eighth Edition

Patricia Beattie Jung (Editor), L. Shannon Jung (Editor)

This popular anthology for the study of Christian ethics, now in its eighth edition, has been a mainstay of undergraduate courses for nearly thirty years...

N: My Encounter with Racism and the Forbidden Word in an American Classic

James Henry Harris (Author)

This book is about a Black man's experience of reading Mark Twain's classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the first time while in graduate school. It captures the author's emotional struggle with Twain's use of the racial epithet more than two hundred times in the text. In these pages, Harris challenges his instructor and classmates and inspires readers to redress the long history of American racism and white supremacy bound up with the N word.

Tribe: Why Do All Our Friends Look Just Like Us?

Sandra M. Unger (Author)

Tribe explores the issues of reciprocity in cross-race and cross-class relationships using stories, narrative, and sociological insights and perspectives derived from urban fieldwork and the author's own life. The volume examines the social and structural barriers to the formation of these kinds of relationships, as well as the transformations that can take place as these barriers are overcome.

Christian Social Teachings: A Reader in Christian Social Ethics from the Bible to the Present, Second Edition

George W. Forell (Editor), James M. Childs Jr. (Editor)

No question has been as persistently nettling as the proper relationship of Christians and the Christian church to political power, and the results...

Black Power and the American Myth: 50th Anniversary Edition

C T Vivian (Author)

C. T. Vivian asserts that the civil rights movement failed because it was built on certain myths about America:

- the myth that Americans will do what is right as soon as they know what is right.

- the myth that legislation leads to justice.

- the myth that America is an open society where any minority group can advance.

- the myth that an ethic of love forms the core of the American conscience.

Invisible: Theology and the Experience of Asian American Women

Grace Ji-Sun Kim (Author)

In Invisible, Grace Ji-Sun Kim examines encounters with racism, sexism, and xenophobia as she works toward ending Asian American women's invisibility. Speaking with the weight of her personal narrative, she proclaims that the histories, experiences, and voices of Asian American women must be rescued from obscurity. Speaking with the weight of a theologian, she powerfully paves the way for a theology of visibility that honors the voice and identity of these women.

Faith-Based Health Justice: Transforming Agendas of Faith Communities

Ville Päivänsalo (Editor), Ayesha Ahmad (Editor), George Zachariah (Editor), Mari Stenlund (Editor)

In Faith-Based Health Justice, scholars mine critical insights into the promotion of health justice across Christian and Islamic faith traditions and beyond. Contributors consider what health justice might mean today, if developed in accordance with faith traditions whose commandment to care for the poor, ill, and marginalized lies at the core of their theology. And what kind of transformation would be needed in the face of the health justice challenges today?

Marriage and Sexuality in Early Christianity

David G. Hunter (Editor)

Marriage and Sexuality in Early Christianity is part of Ad Fontes: Early Christian Sources, a series designed to present ancient Christian texts essential to an...

Comparative Religious Ethics: Everyday Decisions for Our Everyday Lives

Christine E. Gudorf (Author)

Gudorf's work focuses on everyday issues while drawing out ethical implications of each and demonstrating how different religious traditions prescribe rules for action.

A New Climate for Christology: Kenosis, Climate Change, and Befriending Nature

Sallie McFague (Author)

For decades, Sallie McFague lent her voice and theological imagination to advocating for the most important issues of our time. In this final book, finished before her death in 2019, McFague summarizes the work of a lifetime with a clear call to live in "such a way that all might flourish." The way, she argues, is the "kenotic interpretation of Christianity: the odd arrangement whereby in order to gain your life, you must lose it."

Black Suffering: Silent Pain, Hidden Hope

James Henry Harris (Author)

Black Suffering articulates suffering as an everyday reality of Black life and names suffering's many manifestations, both in history and in the present moment. Harris shows the practical impact of suffering upon church leaders as they seek to forge a path forward to address this troubling issue. Black Suffering is a call to consciousness, a work that begins a larger conversation for correcting the historical weight of suffering carried by Black people.

Athena to Barbie: Bodies, Archetypes, and Women's Search for Self

J. Lenore Wright (Author)

Athena to Barbie destabilizes a range of received social constructions of woman and expands the ways women conceive of themselves as female subjects. In the end, it inspires women's imagination about themselves, grounds that imagination in history by comparison, and empowers the lived lives of women. The book challenges the long-standing subordination of women and offers women fruitful, if still vexed, options to express female agency. It does all this in conversation with Christian tradition.

Black Hands, White House: Slave Labor and the Making of America

Renee K. Harrison (Author)

The book bears witness to the role enslaved, Black-bodied people played in building the US, its physical and fiscal infrastructure, and the nation's capital, and calls for a substantial monument on the National Mall to affirm and document their contributions. This book will impact lives by adding significantly to the burgeoning and in-depth conversations on racial disparity, race relations, history-making, reparations, and monument erection and removal.

Church and Empire

George Kalantzis (Editor), Maria E. Doerfler (Editor)

The history of the church's relationship with governing authorities unfolds from its beginnings at the intersection of apprehension and acceptance, collaboration and separation. This volume is dedicated to helping students chart this complex narrative through early Christian writings from the first six centuries of the Common Era. Church and Empire is part of Ad Fontes: Early Christian Sources, a series designed to present ancient Christian texts essential to an understanding of Christian theology, ecclesiology, and practice. 

Ethics: A Liberative Approach

Miguel A. De La Torre (Editor)

This survey text for religious ethics and theological ethics courses explores how ethical concepts defined as liberationist is presently manifest around the globe and within the United States.