Practicing the Kingdom

Throughout her academic career, Christine D. Pohl has helped the church rediscover practices that used to be central to its life, like hospitality, community, and friendship. Perhaps best known for her groundbreaking Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, she has also contributed significantly to discussions on Christian community, feminism and the academy, and the practice of friendship. Yet behind this lies a lifetime of “lived theology” that informs her life and her work, both inside and outside the academy.
Containing biblical, systematic, and moral theology, these essays are scriptural and liturgical, multidisciplinary and missional. Several of them could be described as offering essays of “lived theology,” writing and reflecting from within years of action and contemplation. They build upon particularly fruitful aspects of Pohl’s work, through expansion, clarification, and occasional disagreement. A mix of scholars and practitioners, colleagues, former students, and friends, the contributors represent a wide variety of theoretical and practical expertise. This volume honors Pohl most when its readers choose to take the wisdom within its pages and embody that in life together.

Justin Bronson Barringer is an independent scholar living and working in Little Rock, Arkansas. He is a coeditor of three books and of The Business of Modern Life Series.


Maria Russell Kenney is Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary.

David P. Gushee is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University and chair in Christian social ethics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The elected past-president of both the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Christian Ethics, Gushee is the author or editor of twenty-nine books. He has an international reputation as one of the leading Christian moral thinkers of this era.