Considering Compassion

In light of the numerous challenges posed by globalization, living together as humanity on one planet needs to be reinvented in the twenty-first century. To create a new, peaceful, just, and sustainable world order is vital to the survival of us all. In this regard, humankind will have to expand the limited scope of its moral imagination beyond the borders of family, tribe, class, religion, nation, and culture. Will the cultivation of compassion, as scholars like Martha Nussbaum and Karen Armstrong, and religious leaders like the Dalai Lama maintain, contribute to a more just world? A global movement to cultivate and extend compassion beyond the immediate circle of concern may indeed find inspiration from many different religious traditions. The question at the heart of this book is whether the Christian legacy provides us with sources of moral imagination needed to guide us into the global era. Can the Christian practice of faith contribute to a more compassionate world? If so, how? And is it true that compassion is what we need, or do we need something else (justice, for example)? In Considering Compassion, colleagues from different theological disciplines at Stellenbosch, South Africa, and Groningen, Netherlands, take up these challenging questions from a variety of interdisciplinary angles.Considering Compassion is more than just an eye-catching title; it's a vital next step in thinking through the intersections of contemporary advocacy for compassion and pressing questions about life in an interconnected world. Wisely blending disciplines and helpfully exploring the implications of varied perspectives, this book--made all the more valuable by its mix of writers from the Global North and the Global South--makes good on its title's promise.--Mark Douglas, Professor of Christian EthicsFrits de Lange is Professor of Ethics at the Protestant Theological University, Groningen/Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is the author of Loving Later Life: An Ethics of Aging (2015).Juliana Claassens is Professor of Old Testament in the Faculty of Theology, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Her works include, Claiming Her Dignity: Female Resistance in the Old Testament (2016) and Mourner, Mother, Midwife: Reimagining God's Liberating Presence in the Old Testament (2012).