‘Empire’ has become an apt label to name the present horizon of global life and is associated with logic and practices which threaten human life in myriad ways. These reflections not only expose the true nature of empire, but suggest an alternative vision of flourishing wrought by God’s kingdom. In a creative and imaginative manner the contributions highlight new liberative possibilities for life through non-conventional Bible reading. The authors display a sensitive moral antenna for the oppressive manifestations of empire, and courageously intimate a new paradigm for Christian mission and public witness today.

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Care, Healing, and Human Well-Being within Interreligious Discourses is an edited, peer reviewed volume of global perspectives on interreligious approaches to healing and well-being by 23 academics and practitioners from five different faith practices and 13 different cultures. With chapters by counsellors, chaplains, religious thinkers and linguists, the multifaceted nature of the volume provides an expansive approach to spiritual care and counselling.

In order to understand the ways in which interreligious encounters can have an enriching effect on our humanity, the volume is divided into four sections that address: methodological questions surrounding spiritual caregiving, perspectives of different faith traditions on care and healing, the challenges to the praxis of care in diverse cultural and political settings and, finally, how spiritual care and healing can be carried out in public places such as the police, the military, and hospitals.

The book is an outgrowth of 25 years of experience within the Society for Interreligious Care and Counselling (SIPCC) to promote better understanding and practices of intercultural and interreligious spiritual caregiving.

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Higher education has not escaped the imperative of transformation which has marked the post-apartheid South African landscape. The nature of the changes at universities, however, is open to critique. Fundamental questions concerning the ideological moorings of knowledge and the politics of the curriculum have not yet been satisfactorily addressed. During the apartheid era, theology faculties played influential roles at traditional universities, and were often characterised by unsettling exclusion of non- Christian religions, non-Calvinist denominations and marginalised voices. This volume of essays evidences a process at the University of the Free State’s Faculty of Theology to reflect seriously about the need for transformation at the fundamental level, that is, of knowledge. The challenge for theology at a public university is framed in terms of epistemological transformation. A number of outstanding public intellectuals such as Jonathan Jansen, Crain Soudien and Lis Lange have been invited to present papers to clarify the conceptual challenge and what this might entail for theology. Well-known theologians such as Conrad Wethmar, Allan Boesak and Martin Prozesky reflect on the nature of theology and religion at universities amidst social exigencies. Two international theologians ? Harold Attridge from the prestigious Yale Divinity School and Bram van de Beek from the Free University of Amsterdam ? share their experiences of institutions that exemplify excellence and ecumenical openness. Theologians from the Departments of Practical Theology and Systematic Theology at the University of the Free State, writing from the ‘inside,’ articulate the challenges they envision for theology in a post-apartheid dispensation. The essays represent a variety of perspectives, but all attest to a commitment to re-think the nature and task of theology at a public university, accepting the challenge of knowledge and power, of plurality and otherness, and of restorative intellectual justice. These timely essays make a unique contribution to the discourses on transformation and on theology at a public university.

The drawing, Christ of the Breadlines, by Fritz Eichenberg (1953) probably says all that this book wants to say about being church. The church is a space in this world where heaven and earth reach out to each other. It is a space in the world, but not of the world, as it is touched by heaven. Christ is in the breadline, yet one can recognise Him as He stands out in the breadline. One can recognise him, because of the hallow that surrounds him. He is the incarnation within reality and through the incarnation the place within reality becomes holy, not sacred as in separated, but sanctified as differentiated offering an alternative within reality. He brings a space that is marked, not by the darkness and the vicious cycles of the world which dominate and enslave creation, such as poverty, but a space that breaks into this darkness with light as it is hallowed in hope. What more can the church hope for than to be allowed to be a space of hallowed hope in the vicious systems of death in a postmodern and post-Christian world? This book would like to propose that it does not really matter if you start with theory (Scripture and tradition) or with context and practice because theology is circular or spiral, and therefore there is no starting point as the two continually influences each other, or one could even say the one interprets the other. So for this book the best place to start is with where we are now ? the now of experience as this now of experience includes both theory and praxis.

There is no such thing as experience pure and simple, as experience is always interpreted-experience and the interpretation is done through the theory that has shaped and formed us. Thus, in this book we work with ?theory-laden practice?.