Author Description

Exclusion and Embrace grew out of a predicament, out of an attempt at making sense of the war that was raging in the former Yugoslavia. But to Miroslav Volf it soon became a larger issue of trying to address the question concerning various sorts of conflicts around the problem of identity. Life at the end of the twentieth century presents us with a disturbing reality. Otherness, the simple fact of being different in some way, has come to be defined as in and of itself evil. Miroslav Volf contends that if the healing word of the gospel is to be heard today, Christian theology must find ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other. Volf was startled by the realization of how the basic categories of liberation theology functioned, and so sought to explore alternative ways of thinking about the relationship of the Christian faith to the world of conflict. That's how the idea of embrace came to Volf's mind. Reaching back to the New Testament metaphor of salvation as reconciliation, Volf proposes the idea of embrace as a theological response to the problem of exclusion. - Publisher.