Editorial

The articles in this issue of Toronto Journal of Theology offer food for thought for a diverse range of interests. The first four articles involve dimensions of comparative or public theology. Reid Locklin invites us to consider a new way in which Christians engage Hinduism and other religions that does not take agape as a normative imposition but as part of a practice of virtue internal to Christianity. In his essay, Paul Jones wrestles with Ronald Thiemann’s form of engagement with public life through Thiemann’s understanding of Lutheran justification through the cross. Consideration of four modes of doing public theology in twenty-first-century Brazil provides the framework for Rudolf von Sinner’s article. For von Sinner, public theology remains a vital and relevant force in the Brazilian context. The work of Joseph Ogbonnaya takes on the topic of economic globalization. Engaging the thought of John Macmurray, he asks how the abstract conception of economic growth and workers as instrumental toward capital growth might be challenged by taking into account workers’ intrinsic value as human beings.

The second group of essays focuses on Christian theological issues. Kirk Essary puts Erasmus in imagined dialogue with Calvin over their respective views of Jesus’s anticipation of his own death. Peter Wyatt’s article examines the challenge and promise of trinitarian faith to modern liberal Protestant Christians and affirms the possibility of such engagement. Ray Paul Bitar considers the limits of epistemic reasoning about the problem of evil in two recent works of theology (Michael Rea’s Analytic Theology and Eleonore Stump’s Wandering in Darkness).

The final four contributors share an interest in religion and philosophy of religion. Using as a springboard the articles in the recent publication of Donald Wiebe’s Festschrift, Bryan Rennie offers a reconsideration of Wiebe’s distinction between the academic study of religion and the practice of theology. Myron Penner places theistic skepticisim in a broader epistemological framework of skepticism. John Mayer proffers some ideas about the influence of possible personal interests in shaping Foucault’s attitude of postmodern openness. The closing article of the issue by Klaas Kraay contrasts the emic and etic perspectives on implications of God’s existence on the study of religion.

If you are still not sated after reading these articles, there remain sixteen book reviews for you to digest. Or you might start with those as an appetizer to the main course; it remains the reader’s choice.