Description
A Thinker’s Guide to Sin: Talking about wrongdoing today
Edited by Neil Darragh
What are today’s boundaries between right and wrong?
Older models of sin as offending or disobeying God depend on an image of God that many people find unbelievable or repugnant. But talking about sin or wrongdoing is a way of naming the boundaries we want to set in our lives. It helps us to name the places which – in our better moments – we do not want to go and do not want the society we live in to take us.
The wide variety of contributors to this book challenge the reader to confront some deeply held attitudes and motivations that are present in our lives and they attempt to articulate as clearly as possible the varied contemporary understandings of sin.
Chapters
Prologue
Contemporary Shifts in the Understanding of Sin
1. The problem with talking about sin today (Neil Darragh)
2. Sin in a secular world (Chris J. Duthie-Jung)
3. ‘Ok, you tell me that it’s a sin, but I’d like to know why you think so…… Teaching sin to
adolescents in a Catholic school (Jenny McLaughlin)
4. Reinterpretation of sin at the Second Vatican Council 1962-65 (Ann Nolan)
5. Sin in the city: A St Matthew’s perspective (Glynn Cardy)
At the Roots of Sin and Wrongdoing
6. The beast that crouches at the door: betrayal and abandonment (Alice M. Sinnott)
7. ‘I have sinned against heaven and against you’: Sin as relational rupture in the teaching of
Jesus (Chris Marshall)
8. Growth and the sin of heedlessness (Maurice Andrew)
9. Flourishing or forgetting: ‘sin-talk’ and economics (John Salmon)
10. Cracked cisterns that can hold no water: idolatry today (Vincent J. Hunt)
11. If today you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts (Stuart Sellar)
The Grey Boundaries of Sin and Wrongdoing
12. Faultlines and other things (Mary Horn OP)
13. Illness and sin in the Hebrew scriptures – a sociological interpretation (Keith Stuart)
14. Sin: the mystery of being human (Mary Thorne)
15. The sin of an evolved humanity: violence, redemption and biopower (Nicola HoggardCreegan)
16. Is it a sin to break the law? Civil disobedience, civil resistance and sin (Peter Murnane)
17. “How many cyclists did I murder today?” Sin, guilt and obsessive behaviour (Andrew
Bradstock)
Naming the New Sins
18. From kissing to flying: towards justice (Diana Atkinson)
19. Women’s sexuality and sin: one woman’s story (Elizabeth Julian)
20. ‘…as we forgive them…’ or not: when forgiveness is inappropriate (Trish McBride)
21. “Joy has been put to shame”: insights from Joel for untangling life’s messes (Robyn
McPhail)
22. Unsustainable sin: is there hope for ecological conversion? (Mary Betz)
23. Sin and youth: old sin – new sin (Michael Hughes)
24. From wrongdoing to fullness of living: the journey of conversion (Helen Frances Bergin)
Epilogue
