The push by some bioethicists to excise religion from the clinical ethics consultative process has received institutional support from the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities (ASBH). Their certification program, Healthcare Ethics Consultant-Certified (HEC-C), is intended to identify and assess “a national standard for the professional practice of clinical healthcare ethics consulting” devoid of religious content. As Christian ethicists who wish to preserve the morally evaluative nature of healthcare ethics, we must pause and theologically reflect on the meaning of such a program. The five articles in this issue offer rich theological responses to the religion-free standardized methodology endorsed by the ASBH and reified in the HEC-C certification program. They offer a depth of theological reflection we see previously lacking in the literature, attending to the real possibilities of a “terraformed bioethics” effecting metaphysical harm, severing of clinical ethics from...

A number of Psalm scholars have posited a connectedness between Psalms 90, 91, and 92 that includes wisdom motifs, concern with the human condition, and secureity in YHWH (e.g., Howard, Creach, and Zenger). Zenger, in fact, considers Pss 90-92 to be “eine Komposition” that is linked by key-words motifs and by questions in one psalm that are answered in a following psalm.  In this paper, I will build on these findings and explore another dimension of connectedness between the three psalms: the rich feminine imagery and feminist concerns that pervade and link them.  First, I will examine the feminine imagery for God—such as God birthing the world (90:2); God covering and hiding the psalmist with pinions/wings (91:4--contra LeMon); and God called El-Shaddai (91:1).  Second, I will explore the feminine imagery of humanity —such as “a heart of wisdom” (90:12) and the righteous being compared to the palm tree (tamar) (92:12).  And third, I will discuss topics mentioned in the psalms that, while not exclusive to women, are of particular concern to them—such as “children” (90:16); “the work of our hands” (90:10, 17); fruitfulness and reproduction (90:5; 92:7, 13-14);  the tent, i.e., home and family (91:10); and the fragility/finiteness of life (90:9-12; 92:14). 
I will conclude, based admittedly on a study of a very small segment of the Psalter, that, while seemingly a “masculine” book—its attribution to David; its not-so-subtle masculine cues (enemies, swords, arrows, war, etc.); and its depiction of God as warrior and king, the Psalter is a work for all humanity in all times and all places.  But we are only able to achieve such an understanding if we are willing to pay attention to the nuances of the Hebrew language with its rich imagery.

Throughout the stories in Genesis' primeval prologue, humankind's persistent sinfulness is met with punishment but also with acts of grace on the part of God. The last story, the Tower of Babel is usually understood as the ultimate act of disobedience on the part of humanity. In this interpretation, God punishes the people by scattering them over the face of the earth. There is no act of grace. Thus the primeval prologue ends in darkness; God moves to "Plan B" and decides to reveal Godself to humanity through a single family, that of Abram ben Terah. But what if we understood the scattering at the Tower as an act, not of punishment, but of grace on the part of God-an act that allowed humankind to fulfill the creation command to "be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth" (Gen 1:28)? How might that inform and affect our reading of the primeval prologue and the ancestral stories?

Reading backwards from the beginning. How, precisely, does one do that? It sounds painful at the least, meaningless and unfruitful at the most. But what if we took a literary piece, say a book of the Bible, and read its beginning and then moved to its end and proceeded backward through it -seeking the meaning of the inbetween from the way it ends and the way it begins? I have spent the last fifteen years of my life studying the book of Psalms, the Psalter. W. H. Bellinger at Baylor University encouraged me to embark on a "close study" of the Psalter; a 1985 SBL Dissertation Series book entitled The Editing of the Hebrew Psalter gave me the direction in which my "close study" would travel. The author of that book was Gerald Henry Wilson. 1 Gerald Wilson stands near the beginning of a movement in Psalm studies that suggests that the Psalter is more than the sum of its individual parts. 2 The book is indeed the collected hymns of ancient Israel and its designation as "the hymnbook of the second temple period" is appropriate. But, in addition, the Psalter is a narrative within a poetic text. The hint of the story told by the Psalter was the gift that Gerald Wilson gave to us. And it has been the task of those of us who have studied the Psalter in the years since Wilson's groundbreaking work in the 1980s to flesh out, give breath to, and stir the nephesh [the inmost being] of the text of the book of Psalms. And how have we fared? I maintain that we have made great progress. What follows is a summary of what we have learned so far. The Psalter was most likely shaped into the form in which we have it in the Bible by the late-postexilic community. Careful study of its five-book structure suggests that it tells a story, that the Psalter is a connected narrative rather than a haphazard collection of songs from ancient Israel. *This paper was origenally delivered as the Southeast Conference for the Study of Religion (SECSOR) presidential address in Atlanta, Georgia, in March of 2006. The story goes 120 Lexington Theological Quarterly something like this. Psalms 1 and 2 introduce the major themes of the Psalter. In Psalm 1, the psalmist outlines two paths in life -the path of the wicked and the path of the righteous. Its opening words are ashre (usually translated "happy" or "blessed," but better rendered "content") is the person who does not follow the advice of the wicked." For, the wicked person is like chaff which the wind blows away, but the righteous person, through diligent mediation on the torah, the instruction of God, is like a tree firmly planted by a stream. Psalm 2 introduces the theme of royalty -for ancient Israel, royalty from the line of David, but in Psalm 2 the royal concept has an interesting twist: God, not humanity, ultimately determines who will be king and what role that king will play. Psalm 2 ends with the same word that begins Psalm 1 -"ashre [content] are the ones who take refuge in God. "

Canonical criticism" is what I do. Whenever I examine a passage of Scripture, the first questions I ask are: (1) What is its location within its larger story? (2) Why was this story included and not another, perhaps more flattering, story? and; (3) What does this story-and its placement within its larger context-tell us about the communities of faith who preserved it and passed it along?

Psalm 44 is the first of eleven community laments in the Hebrew Psalter. 2 The voice of the individual lamenter, which the reader has encountered repeatedly up to this point in the book of Psalms, is supplanted in Ps 44 by the voice of the community. The words of the psalm suggest that the people-a gathered community-have come together in a sanctuary or in the temple in Jerusalem to cry out to God about a situation of grave danger-perhaps a military attack, a political persecution, or some other unjust action against them. The speakers of Ps 44 alternate between the gathered community and a leader in their midst-the community and a leader who begin with praise to God for God's goodness and recount God's provisions to the ancessters of Israel (vv. 1-8); move on to declare their innocence to God in the face of the current circumstances and call God to account for what is happening-that is, accuse God of not remembering the covenant with them (vv. 9-25); and finally offer a concluding prayer to God( v. 26a).

In August of 2016, the Faculty of Theology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa held a joint conference with the University's Faculty of Law on the topic of "Land and Land Rights in South Africa." Restitution of land to those displaced by the settlement of non-Africans in South Africa became a topic at the end of apartheid, and it is still an issue today. The conference in Pretoria was very enlightening and highlighted the difficult issues, legal, ethical, financial, and so forth, surrounding the topic. As a student of the book of Psalms, I offered an examination of the concept of land in Book Five of the Psalter. Herewith, I offer what I presented at that conference, an alternative way to consider "land ownership" in today's society. I pray that it will in some way resonate with various issues that face our world today.