William C. French

Returning to Creation: Moltmann's Eschatology Naturalized

Jiirgen Moltmann, in an important new work, God in Creation, emphasizes the critical theological and ethical significance of the doctrine of creation in an age capable of devastating the biosphere quickly through nuclear weapons or more slowly through unchecked industrial development and pollution. He creatively reworks his familiar and influential eschatological and Trinitarian positions by displaying how they may, and why they must, be integrated with a reemphasis on creation, nature, and human embodiment. This work was first presented as the Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh, 1984-85, and constitutes the second volume of a projected five-volume project entitled Messianic Theology, which began with the publication of The Trinity and the Kingdom. 1

In Harm’s Way in America: The Burden of Gun Violence

Gun violence in the USA annually accounts for vast suffering and death, yet many of us have become so habituated to it that we fail to grasp its scale or impact. It takes a heavy toll on American children, especially children in America’s inner cities. While its direct carnage is quite massive, its indirect impacts are quite pervasive as well. We, as a society, suffer decade after decade by failing to understand the range of impacts of our national policies of open firearm access that allow a spread of handguns and other firearms to proliferate across homes and communities throughout our country (Garbarino, 1999; Kopel, 1995; Prothrow-Smith, 1991). We lead the developed nations of the world in firearm homicides, and our children, families, and society at large pays a heavy price (Cook & Ludwig, 2000). In 1998, the City of Chicago, for example, in a lawsuit against some gun manufacturers and gun store operators sought to recover monies that the city incurred in 4 years of police, medical, and other municipal expenses required for addressing firearm violence. The costs borne by the city and its taxpayers were estimated at

Knowing where you are

433 million (Butterfield, 1998, 2002).

God and biosphere as superpowers

Although I have never been in combat or served in the military, like most other civilians I have grown up pulled by the gravitational fields of recent and long past wars. Combatants and direct civilian victims of war surely bear the bulk of the suffering and trauma, and the heaviest burden of memory. But it is a sad mark of modem warfare that its energies have grown so powerful that they infiltrate ordinary civilian experience.

Against Biospherical Egalitarianism

Voices imploring us to expand our understanding of national and global security concerns to include short‐ and long‐term ecological threats have increased in the last decade. Ecologists Norman Myers and Barry Commoner; Senator and now Vice‐President Al Gore; Yale historian Paul Kennedy; strategic analysts Lester Brown, Thomas F. Homer‐Dixon, and Jessica Tuchman Matthews; and educators like Patricia Mische have been leaders in developing this ecologically based concept of national security. This challenges the conventional approach, which, while acknowledging the importance of ecological problems, nevertheless subordinates them to national security and economic concerns when formulating national policies and spending priorities. Because the language of “national security” has held a privileged place in national policy debates, we can use the same terminology to help people see ecological threats with new eyes. Certainly ecothreats deserve recognition as national and global security threats. But more import...