Browsing by Author "Bretherton, Luke"

This dissertation explores the formational power of healthcare as revealed in the modern hospital, offering a constructive theological and moral response to two interrelated questions. First, how should the work of healthcare be described? Answering this question requires careful attention to distinct formations of patients and practitioners undergirded by tacit theological assumptions. Second, what moral responses are fitting for these descriptions of the work of healthcare? In contrast to the standard prescriptive approach in modern bioethics, the moral concerns and sources present in contexts of action must be articulated in order to enable prudential moral guidance. Through engaging the relationship between moral description and prescription in the modern hospital, this dissertation argues that the practice of healthcare should be ordered within an overarching moral and theological vision of hospitable bodily care.

In dialogue with writings in phenomenology, ethnography, and history, the dissertation excavates the theological, philosophical, and political assumptions that undergird different accounts of the work of healthcare in the hospital. Within this institution, bodily disruption is imagined and engaged in distinct ways, which form how patients and practitioners speak, perceive, and act. This formation is examined in three paradigmatic medical sites within the modern hospital: the surgical ward, the Intensive Care Unit, and the labor and delivery ward. Within them, the patient’s body is imagined and engaged as enemy, object, and friend. These medical imaginaries are made possible by the development within the modern hospital of distinct arrangements of discourses, practices, and practitioners, each undergirded by particular normative schema.

By articulating the moral sources and conflicts within the modern hospital, the project illuminates the moral theories of three prominent Christian bioethicists: James Childress, H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., and Stanley Hauerwas. I argue that Childress offers a just-war inspired bioethics fitting for conflictual encounters, and that Engelhardt’s position, as developed by Jeffrey Bishop, ultimately counsels separation in light of the objectification of the body that occurs in the modern hospital. In his writings, Hauerwas offers an account of care befitting the institution’s roots in practices of hospitality. By developing this moral vision through the work of Luke Bretherton, the dissertation articulates a postsecular approach to bioethics, one that seeks to work within and across robust moral communities to foster the conditions and possibilities of hospitable bodily care.

The project argues that the dominant modes of imagining and engaging the patient’s body in the modern hospital—as enemy and object—do not have to be fundamental. Instead, a constructive normative vision of hospitable bodily care can order the practice of healthcare within the modern hospital. The theological underpinnings of this overarching moral framework are provided through understanding the encounter between patient and practitioner as a Christologically charged event, as depicted in Matthew 25 and the work of St. Basil. This is developed further through a pneumatological account of healthcare. The project concludes by arguing for a theological construal of the practice of healthcare as a means of participating in the Spirit’s work of befriending flesh. Through acts of hospitable bodily care, patients and practitioners are formed into the image of Christ through the power of the Spirit.

What is consent? What does it mean, what is its use, and what good does it do? My dissertation turns these questions over and over, looking at the answers given by three different eras of western history: the Information Age up to the present, the Enlightenment up to the birth of the United States, and the Middle Ages up to the Reformation. The structure of my thought reverses the chronology of history, because I imagine my project as an excavation. Starting with a survey of the present landscape, I work downward to the depth of the past, recovering a form of consent buried in a language we have lost. Always conscious of our present context, my technique is what some call “metamodern,” meaning I freely adopt a posture that is, at turns, postmodern and premodern. After discussing the scope and method of my work in chapter one, I devote the second chapter to a study of our databased economy. Tech firms are extracting biometric and behavioral data, setting up asymmetrical power relations with a small but all-important choice architecture, the Agree button. I offer a survey of the logics behind its automation. The third chapter then picks up where the second leaves off. I draw from my own experience working in clinical research, where it was my job to “consent people.” The strange grammar of that phrase prompts a discussion about the history and practice of informed consent. This leads to the fourth chapter, where I turn to John Locke’s theory of the social contract. From Locke, we receive the basic principles regulating our use of consent today. But as I show in the next chapter, a very different paradigm lies beneath it, which is what I want to recover. Chapter five thus traces the evolutions of "consentire" from Aquinas to Luther, giving careful attention to language they received from Augustine. The sixth and final chapter then explores the Augustinian grammar in the visionary work of Dante and Catherine of Siena, whom I believe can teach us another way to be modern.

This project rereads the political thought of Augustine of Hippo in the Black Lives Matter era. In the last two decades, scholars of religion and politics made a striking return to the constructive resources of the Augustinian tradition to theorize citizenship, virtue, and the place of religion in public life. However, these scholars have not sufficiently attended to Augustine’s embrace of the position of the Christian slaveholder in light of the fact that the contemporary situation to which they apply his thought is itself the afterlife of slavery. The ghosts of slaves and masters live on, haunting the ongoing social meanings of blackness and whiteness in American life. To confront a racialized world, the Augustinian tradition must reckon with its own entanglements with the afterlife of the white Christian master. This reckoning demands a constructive encounter, at once timely and long overdue, between Augustine’s politics and the resources of modern Black thought. Drawing from these two intellectual traditions, this constructive religious ethics dissertation develops a critical account of the problem of the Christian master, even as it presses toward an alternative construal of key concepts of ethical life—agency, virtues, temporality—against and beyond the framework of mastery.

All things were created by Him and for Him:

Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Supra-Intelligence

Fascination with automation has captured the human imagination for thousands of years. As far back as 800 CE, when Baghdad was at its height as one of the world’s most cultured cities, its House of Wisdom produced a remarkable text, “The Book of Ingenious Devices.” In it were beautiful schematic drawings of machines years ahead of anything in Europe—clocks, hydraulic instruments, even a water-powered organ with swappable pin-cylinders that was effectively a programmable device.

The fascination with automation has come a long way since then. Technological advancements in the last seventy years have provided unprecedented opportunities for humans to explore not only automation, but now also the creation of intelligent and superintelligent machines. These machines promise to mimic human qualities and even supersede humanity in every manner of task and intelligence. The explosion of, and ready access to, information through the internet has proved to be challenging in some regards but has also eased other aspects of life. An example of this would be the way long-lost friends can be reunited through the click of a mouse. Similarly, news accompanied by pictures and videos is now readily available in real-time. These conveniences have also brought unintended consequences. Despite this newfound connectivity, social challenges such as loneliness and suicide are on the rise. Technology has also opened the door to problems such as cyberbullying, election manipulation, and fake news. Information, whether it be accurate or not, spreads across the world at unprecedented speeds, carrying with it change, sometimes for the better, but not always. This is all happening before the anticipated age of superintelligence.

This thesis examines the distinct nature of humanity and God in view of the emergence of superintelligence. Can we see this “new creation” as an addition to God’s creation of humans, angels, and Satan? If that be the case, then questions of ethics and theology need to be addressed. For instance, who gets to program these new superintelligent “beings?” As things stand today, the individuals and corporations with the deepest pockets are racing to be the first to produce superintelligent beings. The so-called “technology horse” has already bolted, with government policy struggling to keep up. Unseen in this race is the prophetic and ethical voice of the church, regarding the meaning of life, and what living in this new reality will look like.

More questions are raised than can be answered in this paper. How does the Church stay true to its message of hope in a world where robots will likely take over everyday jobs? Where will humanity find meaning and contentment? What are we to think about the idea of a basic universal wage? How will such a shift impact migrant and the poor? In this paper I establish a framework for the church to consider different aspects of these challenges, even as people are welcomed weekly into the community of faith.

This thesis represents extensive research into the philosophy and practice of safety engineering, paired with personal experiences as a professional in the technology industry who is also deeply committed to being a disciple of Christ. Primary works I have drawn from extensively include Hauerwas and Wells’ Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, and Jungian archetypes in comparing and contrasting biological beings to technological creations. The paper starts with creation accounts from Genesis and the Enuma Elish as a way of exploring the “being” category as it appears on this planet. Personal insights gained working in both enterprise and startup businesses, as well as in my own professional development, have contributed to this work and may be found throughout. This thesis represents a labor of love through which I have learned a great deal about my own profession and faith. However, it is my sincere hope that it will be much more. Through this dissertation I hope to see companies both big and small taking note of the ethical issues discussed here, even as they find themselves unleashing artificial intelligence in the marketplace. At the same time, I expect churches and religious organizations will benefit from this discussion and will, I hope, move to engage more deeply with culture and the marketplace as new opportunities and risks emerge from the implementation of artificial intelligence. If the observations that I have made and the recommendations that I have set forth can inspire even one person to carefully examine his or her identity in Christ, then this work will be successful beyond its original purpose as an academic work.

This dissertation explores the meaning and importance of migration and home for the Christian Life in the context of modernity and the colonial history of the Americas. In doing so, it offers a constructive theological proposal that addresses two interrelated questions. First, what does a truly flourishing human life look like in view of the realities of migration and home? That is to say, how are migration and home aspects of God's created order that are deformed by human sinfulness yet still caught up in the eschatological renewal of all things? Second, can Christianity, despite its role in the colonization of the Americas, offer a vision of migration and home that leads to the flourishing of all creatures? This dissertation addresses these questions by locating the realities and experiences of migration and home within the Triune drama of God's creative, reconciling, and redemptive work as enacted within the story of the Americas—its peoples, lands, and cultures, from the moment of colonization up to our current modern moment.This study makes a methodological contribution to the fields of Reformed and Latinx theology by engaging in a mode of ressourcement from the margins. In dialogue with the works of Karl Barth, George Tinker, Willie Jennings, and Latinx theologians, like Virgilio Elizondo and Ada María Isasi-Díaz, I demonstrate how Christianity's eschatological vision of all creation joined together in Christ by the Spirit provides an alternative to a colonial and modern vision of home grounded in the commodification of the land, the destruction of native cultures, and the segregation of peoples into racial and national enclosures. Moreover, I argue that the Virgin's appearance to Juan Diego at Tepeyac, Mexico in 1531 summons the Church to look for God's redemptive homecoming at the margins of society where the political, economic, and socio-cultural negotiations that displaced peoples make in order to make a home in the world become the site of the Spirit's reconciling and redeeming work in creation. The final chapter provides a theological account of what sociologist Paolo Boccagni describes as the "migration-home nexus" by arguing that a flourishing human life takes place at the nexus of migration and home and the forms of political, economic, and cultural negotiations and mestizaje that this nexus produces. I argue that through these, the Spirit works to transform creation into the eternal home of God. I conclude by drawing on the notion of ‘transplantation’ to describe wise ways of migrating and homing in anticipation of the Triune God's redemptive homecoming.

This dissertation explores the implications of the doctrine of providence for Christian life in the context of racialized modernity, offering a constructive theological response to two interrelated questions. First, how should Christians relate the doctrine of divine providence to the task of political judgment? That is, how should doctrinal accounts of the nature and shape of God’s ongoing activity in history between creation and eschaton inform attempts to come to specific judgments about what God is doing in and through particular historical events? Second, how has whiteness insinuated itself into and distorted Christian attempts to discern the movement of God in history? In short, the dissertation engages divine providence not simply as a doctrine, but as a hermeneutic—a theological lens through which to actively interpret the world in relationship to God—and, more specifically, as a hermeneutic with a problematic history of identifying God’s providential action with the interests and activities of white Christian peoples.

In dialogue with the writings of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Barth, and James Cone, the dissertation examines the role played by the doctrine of providence in both theological justifications (Hegel) and critiques (Barth, Cone) of modern theories about European progress, the superiority of Western civilization, and white racial supremacy. I argue that Hegel articulates his problematic vision of providence through an operation of Christological displacement, wherein the figure of European man replaces Jesus Christ as the human subject in relationship to whom world history and global humanity find order, meaning, and purpose. I then turn to Barth and Cone, interpreting their writings on providence and divine action as critiques of the theological problem on display in Hegel.

Through analysis of this conversation within modern Protestant theology about providence, politics, and race, I outline a set of conditions for contemporary theological reflection on these matters. These include commitments to the centrality of the incarnation of Jesus Christ for conceptualizing providence, to the creatureliness of human beings, and to the active work of the Holy Spirit. I also argue that contemporary engagements with the doctrine must address two problems which neither Hegel, Barth, nor Cone sufficiently resolve: the persistent masculinity of Christian accounts of providence and a competitive construal of the Spirit-Son relationship.

The final chapter formulates a constructive hermeneutic of providence in light of these conditions. I develop an account of divine providence as the two-fold work of the Holy Spirit in (1) making Jesus Christ present to creation between ascension and eschaton and (2) enabling human creaturely participation in Christ’s providential presence. Building on themes in womanist theology and contemporary pneumatology, I suggest that the work of the Spirit manifests in three characteristic activities in particular: the Spirit gives life to ordinary, overlooked, and oppressed material bodies; the Spirit joins, drawing those who would normally be strangers and enemies into intimate relationships; the Spirit anticipates the end of time in the midst of the present. By way of conclusion, I suggest how this hermeneutic of providence might help to shape particular judgments about where, how, and in whom the Spirit is making Christ present in the specific context of Durham, North Carolina in the second decade of the twenty-first century in light of the resurgence of thinly veiled white supremacist politics and the rapid gentrification of historic black communities facilitated by urban revitalization initiatives.

The scriptural witness has indications that it is acceptable to kill animals for food but also indicates that originally human beings were vegetarians and will be yet again when this world is claimed as part of God’s kingdom. This thesis offers a theological analysis of the practice of humans eating animals. Is it an accommodation of humanity’s fallenness after their expulsion from the Garden? Or is it part of God’s design for the world? An in-depth look at the whole of scripture is employed for arguing both sides. Additionally, the thesis offers comparative analysis of a variety of theological approaches to animal rights and animal welfare. The thesis considers scientific revelations about animal’s cognitive abilities for language and problem solving, as well as recent studies on animal grief in order to re-assess the underlying question of ethical relationship between animals and humans. The thesis argues that God has put humanity in a set of circumstances which are meant to encourage understanding of animals as part of its own growth. Specifically, human growth toward the role of being a stewards of creation, that is to say nurturers and not exploiters of God’s creatures. Fallenness is not the issue. But growth is. Thus the provision that allows humanity to kill and eat animals is afforded, while humans still require the ability to kill animals for their own sustenance. What awaits is a time when humanity and animals are in peaceful community with each other, with no death or violence in the world and a full realization of the image of God in humanity.

The scriptural witness has indications that it is acceptable to kill animals for food but also indicates that originally human beings were vegetarians and will be yet again when this world is claimed as part of God’s kingdom. This thesis offers a theological analysis of the practice of humans eating animals. Is it an accommodation of humanity’s fallenness after their expulsion from the Garden? Or is it part of God’s design for the world? An in-depth look at the whole of scripture is employed for arguing both sides. Additionally, the thesis offers comparative analysis of a variety of theological approaches to animal rights and animal welfare. The thesis considers scientific revelations about animal’s cognitive abilities for language and problem solving, as well as recent studies on animal grief in order to re-assess the underlying question of ethical relationship between animals and humans. The thesis argues that God has put humanity in a set of circumstances which are meant to encourage understanding of animals as part of its own growth. Specifically, human growth toward the role of being a stewards of creation, that is to say nurturers and not exploiters of God’s creatures. Fallenness is not the issue. But growth is. Thus the provision that allows humanity to kill and eat animals is afforded, while humans still require the ability to kill animals for their own sustenance. What awaits is a time when humanity and animals are in peaceful community with each other, with no death or violence in the world and a full realization of the image of God in humanity.

In response to God’s call to love neighbors, some Christians in the United States enter the social work profession. Yet, within a severely curtailed welfare system and the asymmetries of the professional helping relationship, moral hazards abound in discerning the shape of this love. Charged with supporting individuals and families meet their basic needs, social workers decide and act in conditions of insufficient recourses and unmanageable caseloads. Moreover, they frequently serve as gatekeepers to medical treatment, housing, or, paradigmatically, another’s children. Paternalism and exhaustion threaten. Drawing upon interviews with thirty-five Christian social workers in the American southeast, this dissertation traces their reasons for the work, their moral deliberations and judgments, their confessions of uncertainty and regret, and their prayers. In doing so, I offer a theological anthropology and phenomenology of moral agency pressed to its limits. I contend that at these limits, the human agent finds herself to be a creature dependent on God’s care for herself and for others, a confession often mediated by prayer. As a corollary, I illustrate how a properly Christian account of the moral life depends upon reconstituting a version of divine command theory situated in close relation with a prayer-infused practical reason.

At times, scripture shocks and puzzles. How might Christians understand scripture’s aporia and its embeddedness in modes of domination? Confessional accounts often seek to reduce textual problems to misreading. Conversely, approaches that center oppression tend to find the text incorrigibly repressive. Few approaches imagine the text as both problematic and generative. This dissertation steers both the postliberal recovery of figural reading and the liberationist attention to context alike away from excessively theoretical construals of how reading ought to work, and toward biographical accounts of the skills, virtues, and pitfalls that attend struggles to read scripture well amid profound moral difficulties. Attending to three case studies of individuals reading the Bible under conditions of suffering and loss I ask: when Christians are wounded in their reading, how can scripture also form them well? In what follows I provide an account of the wounds of scripture and its readers. These include the wounds within scripture (painful passages, passages that contradict others) and the wounds that Christians inflict on others through destructive readings. Applying the language of wounds (with its full Christological connotation) to scripture permits Christians to take seriously the difficulty of the Bible alongside its endless capacity, by the Spirit, to heal and transform. I argue that scripture’s capacity to form well amid these wounds is a matter not so much of hermeneutical procedure but of embodied response. Thus, while my first chapter lays out a conceptual account of wounds in scripture and its readers, the succeeding chapters display three practical case studies of individual readers. I attend to apocalypticism through the life of Anna Jansz, a sixteenth-century Anabaptist martyr; the complex relationship between slavery and the Bible in the autobiography of the nineteenth-century emancipated preacher John Jea; and the pain of scriptural accounts of election in the writings of the contemporary Palestinian Melkite Archbishop Elias Chacour. In all three cases the Spirit’s grace, manifest in biography and historical circumstance, tends to these wounds, bringing life out of death on the pattern of the wounds of Christ. This dissertation contributes to the field of scripture and ethics. Through attending to the enduring difficulty and redemptive possibility of scripture in the lives of particular readers, I hope to demonstrate that scripture’s difficulties cannot be resolved simply by hermeneutical procedure. Instead, reading scripture well requires the embodied response of a life.

Pursuing the good life today is costly. Contemporary conceptions of freedom, flourishing, and progress depend on using vast amounts of natural resources like coal and oil: Oil is used to drive to church, fabricate children's toys, and import food; coal illuminates school classrooms and powers ventilators. These things constitute our lives. Yet, at the sites where these resources are extracted, stored, processed, used, and wasted, people get sick and die young, babies are born with congenital defects, lands are appropriated, rivers and soils are polluted, and habitats are lost. The environmental harms produced by our resource-intensive economies are concentrated in places scholars call “environmental sacrifice zones.” This project in constructive religious ethics examines these dynamics and seeks to understand the conditions and possibilities of confessing God as the giver of life while securing our lives through participation in economies that sacrifice others’ lives and lands. How should Christians bear witness to God’s life-giving economy of creation and salvation in a world littered with sacrifice zones?

Resources to answer this normative question are derived from analyzing the creation care organization Restoring Eden’s response to several of coal’s sacrifice zones and bringing fieldwork-derived concepts into constructive dialogue with theology, theory, and critical nature-society studies. Through ethnographic research and an extended case study of Restoring Eden’s citizen science community health studies in coal’s sacrifice zones in Central Appalachia, Chicago, and Birmingham, this study brings the practical wisdom of practitioners into academic debates. Though many residents in these sacrifice zones believed their poor health resulted from living near coal mines, waste sites, and coal plants, there was no scientific data about the correlation between community health and proximity to coal industrial sites. This absence inhibited efforts to end the sacrifices. Restoring Eden partnered with scientists, residents, activists, and volunteers from Christian colleges to fill this gap by making the human costs of coal visible in numbers, charts, and graphs that were then published in health journals. Coal industry personnel and their allies launched a campaign to discredit the group’s findings, politically defang them, and endow a research institute to provide knowledge that would favor industry. I contend that this case reveals the degree to which effective, concerted environmental action to contest sacrifice zones depends on local environmental knowledges that bear authority in public deliberations over coal issues.

My descriptive argument is that Restoring Eden’s citizen science studies integrated faith, science, and environmental action through the concepts of creation, sacrifice, truth-telling, and witness. They responded to what they perceived as the false sacrifice of human and nonhuman creatures through developing a form of ecopolitical witness they called “citizen science as restorative truth-telling.” Their integration of empirical, moral, and theological meanings of witness shows how science could be practiced to love God, neighbors, and creation.

The study begins by describing how the Restoring Eden projects foregrounded environmental knowledge production as a site of environmental practical reasoning about how to transform sacrifice zones. It then argues that sacrifice zones should be understood as sites of conflict between rival political ecologies of sacrifice: an extractivist ecology of sacrifice that sustains “our” lives and lands by putting “their” lives and lands to death and a Christological ecology of sacrifice that loves falsely sacrificed creatures by inventing practices that enable sacrifice zones to be transformed into sacred zones. Finally, science is shown to be enmeshed in these rival ecologies, and a set of practices to democratize and pluralize environmental knowledge is proposed as an aid to concerted action in response to extractivism’s sacrifice zones. This account of ecopolitical witness is contrasted with the technocratic theory of action often manifested by a climate change framework: Ecopolitical witness ought to begin not with the hole in the sky but with the holes in the ground, in our societies, and in our hearts.

Guns hold a vexingly unique place in US American life. The United States has by far the highest rate of private firearm ownership and firearm-caused death among high-income nations in the world. Further, guns and conservative evangelical Protestantism stand in an intimate cultural relationship to each other in the United States. As such, the place of guns in US American life constitutes a wound that calls out for theological reflection and redress. This study aims to develop a Christian ethics of this issue.

Following the ethnographic turn in Christian theology and ethics, I develop my proposals out of two years of fieldwork carried out with evangelical Christian handgun owners in Durham, North Carolina and its environs, and the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham which organizes vigils at the sites of firearm-caused death in Durham. My project develops thick descriptions of these two orientations to guns in US American life, drawing upon phenomenology to characterize them as embodied orientations with distinctive temporal and spatial characteristics. In the first, my interlocutors engage in a mode of armed embodiment in which they aim to secure those bodies that present as vulnerable to them—their body, their family’s bodies, and their church’s body—through what I term a posture of care with a tool of violence. In the second, my interlocutors enact a mode of care for the victims of gun violence, the majority of whom are young men of color. If the first engage in a set of armed practices in the anticipation of violence, the latter attempt to craft a faithful response in its aftermath. In dialogue with the just war tradition, just peacemaking theory, and other theoretical frameworks of analysis, I draw upon this account to develop my Christian ethical proposals.

Chapter one gives an account of why just war and Christian pacifism are insufficient for developing a Christian ethics of the gun, turning instead to ethnography as a means of generating moral descriptions of the myriad ways that guns shape our common life. Chapter two turns to this descriptive task, issuing a thick description of Christian handgun ownership as I encountered it in the field. Chapter three draws upon a particular trajectory of the just war tradition in order to extend this descriptive account in a Christian ethical register, taking up the line of reflection—with reference to Augustine and Paul Ramsey—that sees justified violence as coterminous with love. Yet, through consideration of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, I show how just war fails to account for all of the morally relevant features of my interlocutors’ way of being in the world, particularly with regard to race.

Chapter four turns to the vigil ministry of the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham and just peacemaking theory. Through an account of the vigil and the mode of care enacted by vigil keepers, I show that the orientation of Christian handgun owners generates a myopia about who is made vulnerable by the vast presence of guns in our common life. I conclude by upholding the vigil as a practice of just peacemaking by which the victims of gun violence, those crucified by the gun, might begin to be cared for, and in which the place of the gun in US American life might begin to be imagined anew.

U.S. faith-based organizations (FBOs) founded by Christians have gained wide recognition and influence both nationally and internationally and have become, to a large extent, the de facto bearers of contemporary Christian mission in an increasingly post-denominational landscape. Yet the focus of this thesis is how FBOs suffer from a separation between missiology, ecclesiology, and theological reflection in ways that inhibit their participation in the mission of God, or missio Dei.

The thesis draws on history, sociology, and missiology to provide a critical framework for an inter-disciplinary analysis of FBOs that illuminates the problems they face and describes what is required for a recovery of faithful witness. The thesis begins with the emergence of FBOs as a uniquely Protestant story, locating their origins within the history of Protestant missions, the emergence of the voluntary society, and their evolution into humanitarianism and the problems which emerge out of that history. A move to sociological analysis situates contemporary FBOs within a wider social ecology of powerful forces that cause non-profits to behave like for-profit corporations, often giving themselves over to bureaucratic models shaped by a technological understanding of practice. The final move to missiology and ecclesiology makes the claim that the critical reference point for evaluation of the FBO is the flourishing of the practice of Christian missions.

This constructive missiology provides the basis for proposing marks of a faithful mission-type organization in the contemporary context which can sustain the practice of missions not primarily as humanitarian activism, but as participation in the missio Dei. The thesis re-narrates FBOs and the marks we should look for in FBOs by proposing several organizational disciplines that provide a response to the challenges facing the contemporary FBO. These marks are displayed through brief case studies from three FBOs: L'Arche International, the U.S. national organization InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and New Song Urban Ministries in Baltimore.