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List of contents
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
About the author
David A. Torrance is a Mission Partner with Church Mission Society, working in theological education in Tanzania.
Summary
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.
Foreword
Articulates a distinctively Christian account of kinship, or ‘relatedness,’ by borrowing from social anthropology.
Additional text
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.
