Christian Kinship: Family-Relatedness in Christian Practice and Moral Thought
Ebook
Ideas of kinship play a significant role in structuring everyday life, and yet kinship has been neglected in Christian ethics, moral philosophy and bioethics. Attention has been paid in these disciplines to the ethics of 'family,' but with little regard to the evidence that kinship varies widely from culture-to-culture, suggesting that it is, in fact, culturally constructed.
Surveying notions of shared substance (e.g. blood ties), house, gender and personhood, as theorised and practiced in the Christian tradition, Torrance critiques the special privileging of the 'blood tie'. In the place of European and American cultural assumptions to the contrary, it is kinship in Christ that is presented as the basis of a truly Christian account for social ties. Torrance also aims to stimulate the moral imagination to consider Christian kinship might be lived out in miniature, in everyday life.
Articulates a distinctively Christian account of kinship, or 'relatedness,' by borrowing from social anthropology.
Demonstrates that kinship does not, biologically, have to be a certain way, allowing a more confident examination of a wider range of possibilities
Assisting Christians to make sense of the confusing juxtaposition between Jesus' teaching about being brothers and sisters in Christ on the one hand, and the sense of obligations to existing loyalties on the other
Enables anthropologists of Christianity to make sense of the commitments of those they seek to describe ethnographically with respect to kinship
Introduction:
The Neglect of Kinship in Theological Ethics
Chapter 1:
What is Kinship?
Chapter 2:
Shedding Blood? Kinship and Substance
Chapter 3:
The Christian Household and the Reimagining of Kinship
Chapter 4:
Gendered Relatedness
Chapter 5:
Persons in Christ: Kinship by Baptism
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Christians – and not only Christians – have tended to think of kinship as simply 'natural'. Such a thought silences the radical and distinctive call of the Gospel. With this study, David Torrance offers an original, critical and constructive approach to the topic, and one which will allow that call to be heard afresh.
Christian ethics has too often been satisfied with an understanding of the family it has presumed to be universal. David Torrance's conceptually astute account of kinship, reflecting the recent turn to social anthropology in moral and systematic theology, is a fine demonstration of the rich theological rewards such interdisciplinary engagement can bring.
In this thorough, careful discussion, David Torrance considers theology and anthropology in relation to Christian kinship. Torrance shows that Christians are not limited only to nuclear families for living faithfully, but that an array of creative Christian communities not bound by procreation can also yield lives of faithful discipleship.
- Title: Christian Kinship: Family-Relatedness in Christian Practice and Moral Thought
- Author: David A. Torrance
- Publisher: T&T Clark
- Print Publication Date: 2023
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9780567699831, 9780567699800, 0567699803, 0567699838
- Resource ID: LLS:9780567699831
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-05-12T04:20:50Z
David A. Torrance is a Mission Partner with Church Mission Society, working in theological education in Tanzania.