This book tests the explanatory and descriptive power of the doctrine of sin in relation to two concrete situations: sexual abuse of children and the holocaust. Taking seriously the explanatory power of secular discourses for analysing and regulating therapeutic action in relation to such situations, the book asks whether the theological language of sin can offer further illumination by speaking of God and the world together. Through its discussion of abuse and the holocaust, an engagement with Augustine, original sin and feminism, a fresh and sometimes surprising perspective is offered, both on the theology of sin and on the pathologies under consideration. The understanding of sin that emerges is centred on joyful worship of the trinitarian God. This essay is more systematic and more theological than most practical, pastoral or applied theology and more practical and concrete than most systematic or constructive theology. It is a genuinely concrete, systematic theology.

This article draws attention to the growing significance of religion in the policy and practice of British policing Á a development that has largely escaped academic notice. The authors suggest these developments are significant and worthy of careful scholarly attention, drawing on the disciplines and expertise of both criminology and theology and religious studies, to the mutual enrichment of both. Through such cross-disciplinary engagement a richer picture is possible in which the significance of religion in a number of areas of policing policy and practice may be both recognised and seen to be interrelated. One immediate consequence is suggested: a different context of interpretation for police engagement with faith communities for the purposes of counterterrorism Á the one area of policing where religion emerges as a theme in scholarly study. At the same time, it is suggested that engaging with policing might provide fertile grounding for vibrant discussions of the nature of the secular and of the place of religion in public life that enjoy significant currency in theology and religious studies and the social sciences, especially in Britain, the USA and Scandinavia. The authors draw on their own research on police engagement with faith communities in two metropolitan police service boroughs.

Traditionally the central trope in Christian theological anthropology, “the image of God” tends to function more as a noun than a verb. While that has grounded significant interplay between specific Christian formulations and the concepts of nontheological disciplines and cultural constructs, it facilitates the withdrawal of the image and of theological anthropology more broadly from the context of active relation with God. Rather than a static rendering of the image a more interactionist, dynamic, and relational view of “imaging God” is commended as a key anthropological term. Engaging with Psalm 8 suggests that, biblically, asking the anthropological question “What is humanity?” is tied to the answer to the theological question: who is God? This locates theological anthropology securely within the interactive context of being related to by God and suggests that theological anthropology might be a matter of performance rather than definition: actively imaging God.

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This book is an attempt to answer the question 'What is a person?'. Although the answer is given in largely theoretical terms, the author is concerned primarily with practice: what does it mean to live as a human person in community with others? What personal, social, and political practices are required by personal being? The central insight, that human identity is most productively understood in communicational terms, leads to an account of personhood which is both compassionate and which - at the same time - keeps sight of the particularity of each individual.