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Over the past generation, considerable historical attention has been given to evangelical Christians who attacked modern evolutionary theories. This book, by contrast, sheds light on the under-studied story of twentieth-century Christians who remained theologically conservative, but refused to take up arms against modern science—those who sought to show the compatibility of biblical Christianity and the conclusions of mainstream science, including evolution. It focuses on the middle decades of the twentieth century, the same period in which creationism became a movement within evangelicalism, and on two groups of evangelical scientists, the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) and the UK-based Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship (RSCF, today Christians in Science). Drawing on published and unpublished sources, including conference papers, interviews, and private correspondence, this book shows how these organizations pursued a reconciliation of science and theology that contradicted the fundamentalist ethos of the period and denied the claims that creationism entailed antievolutionism.

Contrary to Catholicism, Catholic social teaching, and the commitment to live out the mercy of Jesus Christ, today’s dominant global economic and cultural system, neoliberalism, demands that life be led as a series of sacrifices to the market. This book’s theological critique of neoliberalism begins with recent papal teaching against “economism,” proceeds into a historical and theoretical analysis of neoliberalism’s conception as a discourse in academia and the business community, its rise to global prominence through class warfare, its subtle redefining of human self-understanding via the notion of “human capital,” and its formation of an ethos of mercilessness. Central is treatment of four neoliberal-perpetuated and -exacerbated crises: environmental destruction, slum proliferation, mass incarceration, and mass deportation. This entails plumbing the sacrificial and racist depths of neoliberalism. The book offers an antineoliberal systematic theology founded on Trinitarian mercy, a neighbor anthropology and innkeeper ecclesiology, and a politics of mercy, or a civilizational program grounded in, yet reimagining, the traditional Catholic works of mercy. This coheres with a “playbook” for social transformation that uses the universal destination of goods and abolitionism to direct the corporal works of mercy against the neoliberal utopianism that brought enhanced ecological devastation, slum growth, mass imprisonment, and abuse of migrants. In concert with official Catholic teaching, the Gospel injunction to “be merciful,” and hopeful visions of various people of good will, Send Lazarus urges a robust antineoliberal and antiracist politics, which amounts to a joyous expression of Christic hope for abundant life.

This volume seeks to redress a gap in the study of Orthodox Christianity, which has largely remained gender blind. It engages women’s lifeworlds, practices, and experiences in relation to Orthodox Christianity in multiple, varied localities, discussing both contemporary and pre-1989 developments. The contributions in the volume critically engage the pluralist and changing character of Orthodox forms of institutional and social life in relation to gender by using feminist epistemologies and drawing on original ethnographic research to account for previously ignored themes, perspectives, knowledges, and experiences of women in Orthodox Christian contexts. The volume pushes out the understanding of Orthodox Christianity in new directions by looking at Orthodox women of diverse backgrounds in different settings: parishes, monasteries, the secular spaces of everyday life, and under shifting historical conditions and political regimes—and by offering new theoretical insights. The volume combines the depth of ethnographic analysis with geographical breadth. Employing various research approaches and methodologies, the contributions engage two major intertwined lines of analysis—continuity and transformation—in social practices, demographic trends, and larger material contexts at the intersection between gender, Orthodoxy, and locality. To be sure, continuity contains the seeds of change, and transformation emerges within seemingly rigid structures and practices, in defiance to claims—coming both from within and without Orthodox Christianity—that Orthodox Christianity is immutable and fixed in time.