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Religions such as Catholicism and Islam are generators of substantial amounts of charitable donations and volunteer work, and they sustain themselves as organizations. How do they produce charitable public goods and their own religious club goods when they are open to extensive free-riding? We argue that mainstream religions facilitate club and public goods provision by using their community structures and theological belief systems to activate members' prosocial tendencies. The study is based on experiments with over 800 Catholics and Muslims in Dublin and Istanbul and on semi-structured interviews with over 200 Catholics and Muslims in Dublin, Istanbul, Milan, and Paris. The article also demonstrates the methodological advantages of combining field experiments with case study-based interviews.

Leadership takes a central role in the public affairs agenda. This article is a review of published works on leadership focusing on the concept of grace. It discusses the role of compassion and kindness in current leadership theory and practice and whether these attributes have value in sustainable models. Findings indicate that there is conceptual confusion regarding the definition of compassion and its application in leadership practices. Kindness is not discussed within the concept of compassion and kindness itself may be viewed as a weakness in contemporary selfselected leadership characteristics. The conclusions suggest there is disconnect between contemporary models of leadership and calls for sustainable ethical leadership in the spheres of public and business environments. Compassion and kindness remain in the side-lines yet the implications for future trust and commitment are neglected in times where discretionary effort of workers and volunteers is crucial to goal achievement.

Drawing a clear line between phenomenology and theology remains a challenging endeavor. This article has two parts: The first one argues that, from a methodological point of view, there is a need for a theo-phenomenology, a phenomenology which acknowledges religious faith as a given. The second part of the article tries to present the essence of religious call in Eastern Orthodox spirituality. Using ideas such as appeal and communion, divine grace, love, prayer, fidelity, apophatic intentionality, and a hyper-intelligible gaze before the Revelation, I will describe the phenomenon of religious call—God calling man and man calling God. The conclusion shows that religious call and answer are existential and theandric experiences, where one can work on askesis, the fidelity of thought, and mystical experience. Life in the Holy Spirit no longer distinguishes between call and answer for one who became a son of God by grace, faith, and good works.

John Wesley often referred to God's providence in his Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament and Concise History of England. Examining these two sources primarily, this article shows the importance of providence in Wesley's theology. It concludes that Wesley closely interrelated providence and grace, that he recognized the complexity of causes in events, and that he sought to balance divine sovereignty and human freedom. Wesley grounded providence primarily in God's wisdom rather than in divine ‘decrees’. Thus providence occupied the place in Wesley's theology that predestination did in Calvinism. Providence laced with grace is the larger structure of Wesley's theology.

This article examines John Wesley's engagement with patristic sources before bringing Wesley into dialogue with representative contemporary theologians. It argues that Wesley's fusion of traditions and focus upon holiness provides a helpful counterpoint to contemporary emphases. The first section considers Wesley's explicit use of the Church Fathers, considering particularly Ted Campbell's work and the methodological problems involved in such an enquiry. It is then argued that there is evidence of patristic influence upon Wesley's doctrines of prevenient grace and Christian perfection as part of a wider synthesis of eras and Christian traditions. Finally, the contemporary relevance of Wesley's approach is considered.

There is continuing debate over the place of the sacraments in early American Methodism and the extent to which the Methodists valued them. The Fluvanna Conference of 1779 is key to understanding early American Eucharistic piety. By analysing the American Methodists' writings, a sacramental piety that is primarily ecclesiological is discovered. This piety is congruent with one dimension of John Wesley's Eucharistic theology: that the sacraments are a marker of a true church. The American Methodists in 1779 sought the authority to administer the sacraments so they could have an independent church.

This article examines the stigma surrounding mental health, drawing out implications for Christian theological anthropology and ethics. As I argue, the stigma surrounding maternal madness engenders the sociocultural and religious veiling of affective and sexual difference within Western Christian milieu reflecting a heteropatriarchal framework for articulating the value of bodies, emotions, and control. In practice and theory, this framework places mothers with affective mood disorders outside of economies (structures and practices) of care and goodness. Such logic veils the ways in which maternal madness calls us to embrace the transformative power of grace as dis-ease through (a) welcoming unpredictability within God, self, and others; (b) resisting easy fixes; and (c) actively discerning the politics of emotion.

In his Magnum Opus introduction to The Monastery (1820), Scott retrospectively clarifies that the White Lady of Avanel — who plays a more active role in the novel's plot than any other supernatural agent in the Waverley Novels — was not intended to be a truly otherworldly figure; she was meant, instead, to be ‘connected with the family of Avenel by one of those mystic ties, which, in ancient times, were supposed to exist […] between the creatures of the elements and the children of men.’ She proved unpopular with readers and critics alike, and Scott dropped her from the book's sequel, The Abbot (1821). But what if the White Lady's true significance lies not in her specific narrative interventions, but rather in her role as an ideological mediator between the novel's Catholic and Protestant factions? In the first half of this article, I propose to account for Scott's remarkable creation with help from Slavoj Žižek, whose concept of the ‘vanishing mediator’ helps clarify the White Lady's structural function as an agent of historical change. I then turn to Bruno Latour's socio-anthropological theories to help reframe the novel's more wide-ranging representations of historical conflict. By re-describing The Monastery via Latour's recent rhetoric of ‘modes of existence’, each with its own set of truth-conditions, trajectories, and subject-effects, I aim to illuminate not only The Monastery's historical stakes but also its ongoing relevance for us in the early twenty-first century, as we continue to negotiate a variety of seemingly mutually incomprehensible forces and belief systems.