Masculinity, sexuality, theology and child sexual abuse by personnel in Christian institutions

There growing recognition that a contributor to the repeat crises of child sexual abuse (CSA) by personnel in Christian institutions (PICIs), is the often gendered culture of Christian institutions themselves. This work explores theological discursive constructions of masculinity and sexuality and their implications for addressing CSA by PICIs. The perspectives discussed here are of PICIs who participated in a research project conducted in Australia. From these perspectives male gendered and sexual performance is constructed through discourse as both an explanation and solution to offending behaviour. Similarly, sexuality is viewed as God-given, heteronormative and legitimately expressed only within the bounds of marriage. This work draws on Foucault and feminist discourses as they relate to CSA by PICIs and institutional discourses. This work offers a perspective of PICIs that may not otherwise be heard in the common discourses of CSA in Christian Institutions.

On the symbiosis of law and truth in Christian theology: Reconciling universal and particular through the Pauline law of love

This article argues that the secular liberal and positivist foundations of the modern Western legal system render it violent. In particular, the liberal exclusion of faith and subjectivity in favour of abstract and universal reason in conjunction with its privileging of individual autonomy at the expense of the community leads to alienation of the individual from the community. Similarly, the positivist exclusion of faith and theology from law, with its enforced conformity to the posited law, also results in this violence of alienation. In response, this article proposes a new foundation for law, a natural law based in the truth of Trinitarian theology articulated by John Milbank. In the Trinity, the members exist as a perfect unity in diversity, providing a model for the reconciliation of the legal individual and community: the law of love. Through the law of love as the basic norm, individuals love their neighbours as themselves, reconciling the particular and the universal, and providing a community of peace rather than violence.

Book review: Politics and the media in twenty-first century Indonesia: Decade of democracy

This is the third (but first edited) volume in Sen and Hill’s corpus on Indonesian media. An anthology built from contributions to a 2006 workshop, it is necessarily more fragmented than the editors’ earlier monographs. While this fragmented character helps to evoke a fractured context, it also makes for unwieldiness...

The right fit: Christian Street House

Embracing the pleasures of constraint, this new house by James Russell Architect was designed to contextually inspired principles, creating a social and relaxed environment that suits the location’s subtropical way of life.

Civil service HRM reforms in a new democracy: The case of Bhutan

This research investigates Bhutan Civil Service Human Resource Management strategies, policies and practices, and their contribution to achieving the national goal of Gross National Happiness. The study finds that the HRM of the Bhutanese civil service is meeting its strategic objective of contributing to GNH. The civil service in Bhutan plays an important role in socio-economic development, influences private sector practices, strengthens good governance and provides continuity to the government. Participants in the study were government ministers and senior, highly experienced civil servants. A model of civil service HRM in Bhutan is developed.

Democracy, Participation, and Deliberation in China : The discussion about democratic centralism in the official Chinese press, 1978-1981

This study examines the Chinese press discussion about democratic centralism in 1978-1981 in newspapers, political journals and academic journals distributed nationwide. It is thus a study of intellectual trends during the Hua Guofeng period and of methods, strategies, and techniques of public political discussion of the time. In addition, this study presents democratic centralism as a comprehensive theory of democracy and evaluates this theory. It compares the Chinese theory of democratic centralism with Western traditions of democracy, not only with the standard liberal theory but also with traditions of participatory and deliberative democracy, in order to evaluate whether the Chinese theory of democratic centralism forms a legitimate theory of democracy. It shows that the Chinese theory comes close to participatory types of democracy and shares a conception of democracy as communication with the theory of deliberative democracy. Therefore, the Chinese experience provides some empirical evidence of the practicability of these traditions of democracy. Simultaneously, this study uses experiences of participatory democracies outside of China to explain some earlier findings about the Chinese practices. This dissertation also compares Chinese theory with some common Western theories and models of Chinese society as well as with Western understandings of Chinese political processes. It thus aims at opening more dialogue between Chinese and Western political theories and understandings about Chinese polity. This study belongs to scholarly traditions of the history of ideas, political philosophy, comparative politics, and China studies. The main finding of this study is that the Chinese theory of democratic centralism is essentially a theory about democracy, but whether its scrupulous practicing alone would be sufficient for making a country a democracy depends on which established definition of democracy one applies and on what kind of democratic deficits are seen as being acceptable within a truly democratic system. Nevertheless, since the Chinese theory of democratic centralism fits well with some established definitions of democracy and since democratic deficits are a reality in all actual democracies, the Chinese themselves are talking about democracy in terms acceptable to Western political philosophy as well.

Crime Justice and Social Democracy: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference, 9-10 July 2015

We are pleased to present these selected papers from the proceedings of the 3rd Crime, Justice and Social Democracy International Conference, held in July 2015 in Brisbane, Australia. Over 350 delegates attended the conference from 19 countries. The papers collected here reflect the diversity of topics and themes that were explored over three days. The Crime, Justice and Social Democracy International Conference aims to strengthen the intellectual and policy debates concerning links between justice, social democracy, and the reduction of harm and crime, through building more just and inclusive societies and proposing innovative justice responses. In 2015, attendees discussed these issues as they related to ideas of green criminology; indigenous justice; gender, sex and justice; punishment and society; and the emerging notion of ‘Southern criminology’. The need to build global connections to address these challenges is more evident than ever and the conference and these proceedings reflect a growing attention to interdisciplinary, novel, and interconnected responses to contemporary global challenges. Authors in these conference proceedings engaged with issues of online fraud, queer criminology and law, Indigenous incarceration, youth justice, incarceration in Brazil, and policing in Victoria, Australia, among others. The topics explored speak to the themes of the conference and demonstrate the range of challenges facing researchers of crime, harm, social democracy and social justice and the spaces of possibility that such research opens. Our thanks to the conference convenor, Dr Kelly Richards, for organising such a successful conference, and to all those presenters who subsequently submitted such excellent papers for review here. We would also particularly like to thank Jess Rodgers for their tireless editorial assistance, as well as the panel of international scholars who participated in the review process, often within tight timelines.

Confronting Confucian Understandings of the Christian Doctrine of Salvation : A systematic theological analysis of the basic problems in the Confucian-Christian dialogue

The aim of the present study is to analyze Confucian understandings of the Christian doctrine of salvation in order to find the basic problems in the Confucian-Christian dialogue. I will approach the task via a systematic theological analysis of four issues in order to limit the thesis to an appropriate size. They are analyzed in three chapters as follows: 1. The Confucian concept concerning the existence of God. Here I discuss mainly the issue of assimilation of the Christian concept of God to the concepts of Sovereign on High (Shangdi) and Heaven (Tian) in Confucianism. 2. The Confucian understanding of the object of salvation and its status in Christianity. 3. The Confucian understanding of the means of salvation in Christianity. Before beginning this analysis it is necessary to clarify the vast variety of controversies, arguments, ideas, opinions and comments expressed in the name of Confucianism; thus, clear distinctions among different schools of Confucianism are given in chapter 2. In the last chapter I will discuss the results of my research in this study by pointing out the basic problems that will appear in the analysis. The results of the present study provide conclusions in three related areas: the tacit differences in the ways of thinking between Confucians and Christians, the basic problems of the Confucian-Christian dialogue, and the affirmative elements in the dialogue. In addition to a summary, a bibliography and an index, there are also eight appendices, where I have introduced important background information for readers to understand the present study.

Christianity and Christian Identity in the Gospel of Philip (NHC II,3)

Previous scholarship has often maintained that the Gospel of Philip is a collection of Valentinian teachings. In the present study, however, the text is read as a whole and placed into a broader context by searching for parallels from other early Christian texts. Although the Valentinian Christian identity of the Gospel of Philip is not questioned, it is read alongside those texts traditionally labelled as "mainstream Christian". It is obvious from the account of Irenaeus that the boundaries between the Valentinians and other Christians were not as clear or fixed as he probably would have hoped. This study analyzes the Valentinian Christian Gospel of Philip from two points of view: how the text constructs the Christian identity and what kind of Christianity it exemplifies. Firstly, it is observed how the author of the Gospel of Philip places himself and his Christian readers among the early Christianities of the period by emphasizing the common history and Christian features but building especially on particular texts and traditions. Secondly, it is noted how the Christian nature of an individual develops according to the Gospel of Philip. The identity of an individual is built and strengthened through rituals, experiences and teaching. Thirdly, the categorizations, attributes, beliefs and behaviour associated on the one hand with the "insiders", the true Christians, and, on the other, with outsiders in the Gospel of Philip, are analyzed using social identity theory the insiders and outsiders are described through stereotyping in the text. Overall, the study implies that the Gospel of Philip strongly emphasizes spiritual progress and transformation. Rather than depicting the Valentinians as the perfect Christians, it underlines their need for constant change and improvement. Although the author seeks to clearly distinguish the insiders from the outsiders, the boundaries of the categories are in fact fluid in the Gospel of Philip. Outsiders can become insiders and the insiders are also in danger of falling out again.

Democratic Legitimacy and the Politics of Rights : A comparative analysis of the conceptual relationship between democracy and rights in contemporary political theories

Democratic Legitimacy and the Politics of Rights is a research in normative political theory, based on comparative analysis of contemporary democratic theories, classified roughly as conventional liberal, deliberative democratic and radical democratic. Its focus is on the conceptual relationship between alternative sources of democratic legitimacy: democratic inclusion and liberal rights. The relationship between rights and democracy is studied through the following questions: are rights to be seen as external constraints to democracy or as objects of democratic decision making processes? Are individual rights threatened by public participation in politics; do constitutionally protected rights limit the inclusiveness of democratic processes? Are liberal values such as individuality, autonomy and liberty; and democratic values such as equality, inclusion and popular sovereignty mutually conflictual or supportive? Analyzing feminist critique of liberal discourse, the dissertation also raises the question about Enlightenment ideals in current political debates: are the universal norms of liberal democracy inherently dependent on the rationalist grand narratives of modernity and incompatible with the ideal of diversity? Part I of the thesis introduces the sources of democratic legitimacy as presented in the alternative democratic models. Part II analyses how the relationship between rights and democracy is theorized in them. Part III contains arguments by feminists and radical democrats against the tenets of universalist liberal democratic models and responds to that critique by partly endorsing, partly rejecting it. The central argument promoted in the thesis is that while the deconstruction of modern rationalism indicates that rights are political constructions as opposed to externally given moral constraints to politics, this insight does not delegitimize the politics of universal rights as an inherent part of democratic institutions. The research indicates that democracy and universal individual rights are mutually interdependent rather than oppositional; and that democracy is more dependent on an unconditional protection of universal individual rights when it is conceived as inclusive, participatory and plural; as opposed to robust majoritarian rule. The central concepts are: liberalism, democracy, legitimacy, deliberation, inclusion, equality, diversity, conflict, public sphere, rights, individualism, universalism and contextuality. The authors discussed are e.g. John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Iris Young, Chantal Mouffe and Stephen Holmes. The research focuses on contemporary political theory, but the more classical work of John S. Mill, Benjamin Constant, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt is also included.

What is a “Christian” jurisprudence?

The term ‘jurisprudence’ is derived etymologically from the Latin juris, meaning law, and prudentia, meaning wisdom. So jurisprudence simply means the wisdom of the law, or, as it has come to mean in scholarly legal circles these days, the theory of law. It asks fundamental questions regarding the nature and definition of law. And so, the question I wish to pose to us today is what does a truly “Christian” theory of law look like? One that is faithful to, as taken from the conference brochure, the “historic Christian faith” in its “principles and practice”. To contextualise this question, I must give you a deceptively brief and superficial overview of prevailing theories of law – and for those of you who know more about the topic, I apologise for the crass nature of my summary – time prevents me from doing any more...