Jacqueline E. Lapsley

The acclaimed Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics (DSE), written to respond to the movement among biblical scholars and ethicists to recover the Bible for moral formation, offered needed orientation and perspective on the vital relationship between Scripture and ethics. This book-by-book survey of the Old Testament features key articles from the DSE, bringing together a stellar list of contributors to introduce students to the use of the Old Testament for moral formation. It will serve as an excellent supplementary text. The stellar list of contributors includes Bruce Birch, Mark Boda, William Brown, Stephen Chapman, Daniel Harrington, and Dennis Olson.

Earth is changing in ways it hasn't for hundreds of thousands of years. At the same time, Christianity is breaking away from its millennium-long geographical and cultural center in the Euro-West. Its growth is in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, primarily in Pentecostal, evangelical, and independent churches. These dramatically changed planetary and ecclesial landscapes have led many to conclude that we need a new way of thinking about our collective existence: who are we and what is the nature of our responsibility in this deeply altered world? To address that question, biblical scholars Bruce C. Birch and Jacqueline E. Lapsley and Christian ethicists Larry L. Rasmussen and Cynthia Moe-Lobeda carry on "a new conversation" that engages how Christians are to understand the authority and use of Scripture, the basic elements of any full-bodied Christian ethic attuned to our circumstances, and the nature of our responsibility to our planetary neighbors and creation itself.

Many Christian feminists wonder if they can simultaneously maintain their commitment to principles of gender equality and their faith in the Scriptures, particularly the Old Testament. Writing in response to feminist biblical scholars who approach the Old Testament with a hermeneutic of suspicion, Jacqueline Lapsley offers Christian feminists strategies to hear the subtle ideas and voices of the less powerful within the Old Testament texts. Reading and interpreting a number of Old Testament narratives in which women are prominent, Lapsley considers how these stories may reflect God's word for us. In doing so, she demonstrates how the narrative often attempts to shape the moral response of the reader by revealing the intricacy and complexity of the moral world evoked. In this gentle shaping of the reader's ethical sensibilities, she argues, is where God may be whispering a word for us.

This text is an exegetical study of the tensions inherent in Ezekiel's understanding of the human moral self. The book explores the dynamics of these tensions, and efforts to resolve them in the text.