Lisa Sowle

This volume directs attention to the teaching of Jesus; it introduces the question of how the imagination has to work in order to retrieve the teaching of Jesus and apply it to actual life in our day. Teachers and preachers are engaged in this work all the time, but upon examination it involves a process that bears reflection. We live in a world that is so different from the world in which Jesus taught that many ask about its practicability relative to our complex everyday lives. The volume turns to three authors who work at this, have thought through present-day theory of interpretation, and respond to basic questions that explain the adjustments that allow us to apply Jesus’ teaching to our dilemmas with interpretation that remain faithful to the content that he proposed. Sandra Schneiders turns to modern hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation, and explains what is going on in the human mind that allows us to say that present-day interpretation, while different from Jesus because our ＂worlds＂ are different, corresponds to what Jesus communicated in the past relative to his world. William Spohn pushes the same idea further to concrete examples of how analogy, sameness and difference together, both binds the imagination to Jesus and frees us to see new relevance for Jesus’ actual teaching. And Lisa Sowle Cahill takes the spirit of the other two into the social order to show how Jesus’ teaching has a real relevance for the highly complex societies in which we live today. The logics of these three authors offer models for what is going on in all of the Past Light on Present Life volumes as they represent different historical periods and distinct themes in Western Christian spirituality.

Alfred Pach (Edited By)
Alfred Pach III is an Associate Professor of Medical Sciences and Global Health at the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and an MDiv in Psychology and Religion from Union Theological Seminary.

Amanda Avila Kaminski (Edited By)
Amanda Avila Kaminski is an Assistant Professor of Theology at Texas Lutheran University, where she also serves as Director of the program in Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship. She has written extensively in the area of Christian spirituality.

Roger Haight (Edited By)
Roger Haight, a Visiting Professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, has written several books in the area of fundamental theology. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he is a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America.