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David Hollenbach

An astute case for Catholic engagement with human rights for all

Human rights should protect the dignity and well-being of all people. But in today’s deeply divided world, some argue that cultural differences and economic inequality undermine their universality.

In Human Rights in a Divided World, David Hollenbach offers a comprehensive and cohesive analysis of the challenges to human rights, suggesting that today’s global realities call for important developments rooted in Catholic ethics. This work of theological social ethics draws on a range of disciplines to address the question of whether or not human rights remain valid as universal standards for action in a multicultural, religiously pluralistic, and economically unequal world. Hollenbach provides a compelling account of the contribution that Catholic ethics and practice make to an unequal world. He applies the proposed understanding of human rights to several issues that are much debated today, including religious freedom, the rights of refugees and other forced migrants, economic rights in the face of significant inequality, and the rights of women.

Human Rights in a Divided World offers a clear path forward for the church in its engagement with politics and guidance for students of human rights as well as those working to advance them.

Georgetown University Press

Moral Traditions series

Human Rights in a Divided World: Catholicism as a Living Tradition

Elisabeth Rain Kincaid

A constructive model of engagement with unjust laws from the ground up

The current political atmosphere would suggest that law is imposed only from above, specifically by the chief executive acting upon some sort of perceived populist mandate. 

In Law from Below, Elisabeth Rain Kincaid argues that the theology of the early modern legal theorist and theologian, Francisco Suárez, SJ may be successfully retrieved to provide a constructive model of legal engagement for Christians today. Suárez’s theology was developed to combat an authoritarian view of law, suggesting that communities may work to change law from the ground up as they function within the legal system, not just outside it. Law from Below suggests that Suárez’s theory of law provides a theologically robust way to mount a counter-narrative to contemporary authoritarian theories of law, while still acknowledging the good in the rule of law and its imposition by a legislative authority. Suárez acknowledges the crucial contribution of citizens to improving law’s moral content, without removing the importance of law’s own authority or the role of the lawgiver.

Law from Below argues that the dialogue between legislators and the community provides Christian activists with a range of options for constructively engaging with law in order to have a positive impact on society.

Law from Below: How the Thought of Francisco Suárez, SJ, Can Renew Contemporary Legal Engagement

Nancy M. Rourke

An ecological model through which we can imagine Aquinas' vision of moral character

The images we use to think about moral character are powerful. They inform our understanding of the moral virtues and the ways in which moral character develops. However, this aspect of virtue ethics is rarely discussed.

In Ecological Moral Character, Nancy M. Rourke creates an ecological model through which we can form images of moral character. She integrates concepts of ecology with Aquinas' vision and describes the dynamics of a moral character in terms of the processes and functions that take place in an ecosystem. The virtues, the passions, the will, and the intellect, are also described in terms of this model.

Ecological Moral Character asks readers to choose deliberately the models we use to imagine moral character and offers this ecological virtue model as a vital framework for a period of environmental crisis.

Ecological Moral Character: A Catholic Model

D. Stephen Long

An expansion of the discipline of ethics demonstrates that Aquinas’s “infusing of virtue” makes better sense of the moral life than finding a method to guide action

While teaching ethics is universally applauded, how one goes about it is much more difficult and contested than is often recognized.

On Teaching and Learning Christian Ethics addresses what it means to teach and learn ethics through a thorough comparison of two ethicists, Henry Sidgwick and F. D. Maurice. Where Sidgwick understood ethics as developing a method for guiding voluntary action to what is right, Maurice maintained that ethics concerns life as a whole, and that requires placing it within a metaphysical and theological realm in which the good is much more definitive than right. This comparative history argues that Maurice’s use of Thomas Aquinas’s “infusing of virtue” makes better sense of the moral life of ordinary persons than the specialized, academic discipline Sidgwick bequeathed. Long expands the discipline of ethics through the central theme of his work: that moral life is a gift rather than an achievement. He provides a clear argument in favor of a more holistic approach to teaching ethics.

On Teaching and Learning Christian Ethics

Stephen M. Meawad

A contemporary model of spiritual struggle shifts the emphasis from virtue’s acquisition to its pursuit

Beyond Virtue Ethics offers a distinctive approach to virtue ethics, arguing not simply for the importance of “struggle” to virtue ethics, but that “struggle” itself is a manifestation of virtue. In doing this, Stephen M. Meawad offers a way of thinking about virtue not simply as a perfected state, but as a state that is to a greater or lesser degree a manifestation of the ideal itself, which is not attainable. Meawad affirms the concept of the unity of virtues—that is, the idea that a virtue is not a virtue unless united with other perfected virtues—which is found in God. Insofar as humans grow in unity with God, they too participate in the unity of virtues, although always to an imperfect extent. Meawad rejects a division between ethics and spirituality and provides two concrete examples of this suggested model. The first is the application of this model to the body and its implications for contemporary sexual ethics. The second is a reintegration of ethics and Scripture through the contemporary application of an ancient Patristic divine reading. This book establishes for readers a contemporary model of spiritual struggle, defining it as the exertion of effort in all conceivable dimensions—physical, emotional, psychological, and intellectual—with the intent to attain a semblance of, knowledge of, and intimacy with Jesus Christ.

Beyond Virtue Ethics: A Contemporary Ethic of Ancient Spiritual Struggle

William C. MattisonIII

A compelling analysis tying the work of Aquinas to contemporary literature on virtue

Despite heightened attention to virtue, contemporary philosophical and theological literature has failed to offer detailed analysis of how people attain and grow in the good habits we know as the virtues. Though popular literature provides instruction on attaining and growing in virtue, it lacks careful scholarly analysis of what exactly these good habits are in which we grow.

Growing in Virtue is the only comprehensive account of growth in virtue in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Mattison offers a robust account of habits, including what habits are, why they are needed, and what they supply once possessed. He draws on Aquinas to carefully delineate the commonalities and differences between natural (acquired) virtues and graced (infused) virtues. Along the way, Mattison discusses the distinction between disposition and habit; the role of “custom” in virtue formation; the nature of virtuous passions; the distinct contribution of the gifts of the Holy Spirit to graced life; explanations for persistent activity after the loss of virtue; and the possibility of coexistence of the infused and acquired virtues in the same person. 

For readers interested in virtue and morality from a philosophical perspective and scholars of theological ethics and moral theology in particular, Mattison offers compelling arguments from the work of Aquinas explicitly connected to contemporary scholarship in philosophical virtue ethics.

Growing in Virtue: Aquinas on Habit

Paul Scherz

The first examination of predictive technology from the perspective of Catholic theology

Probabilistic predictions of future risk govern much of society. In business and politics alike, institutional structures manage risk by controlling the behavior of consumers and citizens. New technologies comb through past data to predict and shape future action. Choosing between possible future paths can cause anxiety as every decision becomes a calculation to achieve the most optimal outcome. 

Tomorrow’s Troubles is the first book to use virtue ethics to analyze these pressing issues. Paul Scherz uses a theological analysis of risk and practical reason to show how risk-based decision theory reorients our relationships to the future through knowledge of possible dangers and foregone opportunities—and fosters a deceptive hope for total security. Scherz presents this view of temporality as problematic because it encourages a desire for stability through one’s own efforts instead of reliance on God. He also argues that the largest problem with predictive models is that they do not address individual reason and free will. Instead of dwelling on a future, we cannot control, we can use our past experiences and the Christian tradition to focus on discerning God’s will in the present. 

Tomorrow’s Troubles offers a thoughtful new framework that will help Christians benefit from the positive aspects of predictive technologies while recognizing God’s role in our lives and our futures.

Tomorrow's Troubles: Risk, Anxiety, and Prudence in an Age of Algorithmic Governance

Kate Jackson-Meyer

The first book to argue for the concept of tragic dilemmas in Christian ethics

Moral dilemmas arise when individuals are unable to fulfill all of their ethical obligations. Tragic dilemmas are moral dilemmas that involve great tragedy. The existence of moral and tragic dilemmas is debated in philosophy and often dismissed in theology based on the notion that there are effective strategies that completely solve hard ethical situations. Yet cases from real-life events in war and bioethics offer compelling evidence for the existence of tragic dilemmas. 

In Tragic Dilemmas in Christian Ethics, Jackson-Meyer expertly explores the thought of Augustine and Aquinas to show the limits of their treatment of hard cases, as well as where their thought can be built on and expanded in relation to tragic dilemmas. She recognizes and develops a new theological understanding of tragic dilemmas rooted in moral philosophy, contemporary case studies, and psychological literature on moral injury. Jackson-Meyer argues that in tragic dilemmas moral agents choose between conflicting nonnegotiable moral obligations rooted in Christian commitments to protect human life and the vulnerable. Personal culpability is mitigated due to constrained situations and society is also culpable when tragic dilemmas are a result of structural sin. In response, Jackson-Meyer implores Christian communities to offer individual and communal healing after tragic dilemmas and to acknowledge their own participation in injustice. 

Tragic Dilemmas in Christian Ethics offers practical strategies that Christian communities can use to provide healing to those who have acted in tragic dilemmas and to transform the unjust structures that often cause these tragedies.

Tragic Dilemmas in Christian Ethics

Karen Peterson-Iyer

A profound feminist Christian reframing of sexuality examines contemporary social practices and ethical sex

From the sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church to the US Supreme Court decision outlawing state-level bans on same-sex marriage, it has become clear that Catholics and other Christians cannot afford to downplay sex or rely on outdated normative understandings of its moral contours. Feminist theological approaches offer a way forward by considering not just what we should do in sexual spheres but also what sort of sexual people we should aspire to be.

In Reenvisioning Sexual Ethics, author Karen Peterson-Iyer adopts a feminist Christian anthropological framework to connect robust theological and ethical analysis to practical sexual issues, particularly those confronting college-aged and younger adults today. The book examines four divergent yet overlapping contemporary social practices and phenomena wherein sex plays a central role: “hookup” culture; “sexting”; sex work; and sex trafficking. Through these case studies, Peterson-Iyer shows that ethical sex is best demarcated not as a matter of chastity on the one hand and purely free consent on the other, but rather as ideally expressing the fullness of human agency, communicating the joy of shared pleasure, and conferring a deep sense of possibility and wholeness upon all participants.

This feminist Christian framework will help facilitate frank and profound discussions of sex, enabling young adults to define themselves and others not by hypersexualized and gendered social norms or attitudes but by their fundamental status as dignified and beloved by God.

Reenvisioning Sexual Ethics: A Feminist Christian Account

Jacob M. Kohlhaas

A breakthrough in the theology of parenthood, integrating Catholic social thought and social scientific studies of child well-being in order to offer a more diverse and inclusive interpretation

The Catholic Church has a long and diverse history of tolerating various child-rearing arrangements. The dominant Catholic framework for conceptualizing parenthood, however, is highly influenced by concerns over sexual ethics and gender norms. While sexual and reproductive ethics are important, the present consensus that theological consideration of parenthood necessarily hinges on these matters diverts attention from actual parenting practices in their social and cultural contexts. In reality, kinship and caregiving are often negotiated in complex ways.

In Beyond Biology, Jacob M. Kohlhaas uses a historical and interdisciplinary theological method that engages both analytically and appreciatively with tradition to sketch a broader Catholic anthropology of parenthood. Kohlhaas’s identification of interpretive options within the Catholic tradition creates room for meaningful, intellectually convincing, and theologically rich responses to challenges facing Catholic parents and families today.

By marshaling the diversity of the Christian tradition and exploring contemporary research in the social sciences and humanities, Kohlhaas frames a theological conversation on parenthood as parenthood—considering the needs and well-being of children as well as the potentials and capabilities of adult caregivers. In his discussion, Kohlhaas considers adoption and nonbiological parenthood, fathers as primary caregivers and nurturers, caregiving by siblings and grandparents, and communal parenting and coparenting beyond the spousal pair. In Kohlhaas’s view, conceptions of parenthood should be guided by the meaning of Christian kinship rooted in baptism as well as concern for the actual caregiving capacities of adults and the needs of children.

Beyond Biology: Rethinking Parenthood in the Catholic Tradition

Kate Ward

In a deeply unequal world, our economic status shapes our pursuit of virtue whether we have enough resources to live comfortably or struggle to survive

Our understanding of inequality as a moral problem is incomplete. It is not enough to say that inequality is caused by moral failing. We must also see that influence runs in both directions. Inequality harms people’s moral development.

In Wealth, Virtue, and Moral Luck, Kate Ward addresses the issue of inequality from the perspective of Christian virtue ethics, arguing that moral luck—our individual life circumstances—affects our ability to pursue virtue. Economic status functions as moral luck and impedes the ability of both the wealthy and the poor to pursue virtues such as prudence, justice, and temperance, and extreme inequality exacerbates the impact of wealth and poverty on virtue.

With these realities in mind, Ward shows how Christians and Christian communities should respond to the challenges inequality poses to virtue. Through working to change the structures that perpetuate extreme inequality—and through spiritual practices, including contentment, conversion, encountering others, and reminding ourselves of our ultimate dependence on God—Ward believes that we can create a world where all people can pursue and achieve virtue.

Wealth, Virtue, and Moral Luck: Christian Ethics in an Age of Inequality

Nichole M. Flores

How aesthetic religious experiences can create solidarity in marginalized communities

Latine Catholics have used Our Lady of Guadalupe as a symbol in democratic campaigns ranging from the Chicano movement and United Farm Workers’ movements to contemporary calls for just immigration reform. In diverse ways, these groups have used Guadalupe’s symbol and narrative to critique society’s basic structures—including law, policy, and institutions—while seeking to inspire broader participation and representation among marginalized peoples in US democracy. 

Yet, from the outside, Guadalupe’s symbol is illegible within a liberal political framework that seeks to protect society’s basic structures from religious encroachment by relegating religious speech, practices, and symbols to the background.

The Aesthetics of Solidarity argues for the capacity of Our Lady of Guadalupe—and similar religious symbols—to make democratic claims. Author Nichole M. Flores exposes the limitations of political liberalism’s aesthetic responses to religious difference, turning instead to Latine theological aesthetics and Catholic social thought to build a framework for interpreting religious symbols in our contemporary pluralistic and participatory democratic life. 

By offering a lived theology of Chicanx Catholics in Denver, Colorado, and their use of Guadalupe in the pursuit of justice in response to their neighbourhood's gentrification, this book provides an important framework for a community of interpretation where members stand in solidarity to respond to justice claims made from diverse religious and cultural communities.

The Aesthetics of Solidarity: Our Lady of Guadalupe and American Democracy

Christine Firer Hinze

Rethinking the means through which we can achieve economic well-being for all.

In this timely book, Christine Firer Hinze looks back at the influential teachings of priest-economist Monsignor John A. Ryan (1869-1945), who supported worker justice and defended a living wage for all Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. Advancing Ryan’s efforts to articulate a persuasive plan for social reform, Hinze advocates for an action-oriented livelihood agenda that situates US working families’ economic pursuits within a comprehensive commitment to sustainable “radical sufficiency” for all.

Documenting the daily lives and economic struggles of past and present US Catholic working-class families, Hinze explores the larger impulses and patterns—economic, cultural, political, moral, and spiritual—that affect the work these people perform in homes, in communities, and at paid jobs. Their story entwines with the larger history of the American dream and working people's pursuit of a dignified livelihood. Surveying this history with an eye to the dynamics of power and difference, Hinze rethinks Ryan’s ethics and Catholic social teaching to develop a new conception of a decent livelihood and its implications for contemporary policy and practice. The result is a critical Catholic economic ethic capable of addressing the situations of workers and families in the interdependent global economy of the twenty-first century.

Radical Sufficiency offers transformative strategies and strategic policy directions for achieving the radical Christian goal of dignified work and a good livelihood for all.

Radical Sufficiency: Work, Livelihood, and a US Catholic Economic Ethic

Daniel J. Daly

Winner of the 2022 Catholic Media Association Award in Theology

A new ethics for understanding the social forces that shape moral character.

It is easy to be vicious and difficult to be virtuous in today’s world, especially given that many of the social structures that connect and sustain us enable exploitation and disincentivize justice. There are others, though, that encourage virtue. 

In his book Daniel J. Daly uses the lens of virtue and vice to reimagine from the ground up a Catholic ethics that can better scrutinize the social forces that both affect our moral character and contribute to human well-being or human suffering.

Daly’s approach uses both traditional and contemporary sources, drawing on the works of Thomas Aquinas as well as incorporating theories such as critical realist social theory, to illustrate the nature and function of social structures and the factors that transform them. Daly’s ethics focus on the relationship between structure and agency and the different structures that enable and constrain an individual’s pursuit of the virtuous life. His approach defines with unique clarity the virtuous structures that facilitate a love of God, self, neighbor, and creation, and the vicious structures that cultivate hatred, intemperance, and indifference to suffering. In doing so, Daly creates a Catholic ethical framework for responding virtuously to the problems caused by global social systems, from poverty to climate change.

The Structures of Virtue and Vice

William R. O'Neill

An interpretation of human rights that centers on the rhetorical—and religious—power of testimony.

Jeremy Bentham described the idea of human rights as “rhetorical nonsense.” In Reimagining Human Rights, William O’Neill shows that the rhetorical aspect of human rights is in fact crucial. By examining how victims and their advocates embrace the rhetoric of human rights to tell their stories, he presents an interpretation of human rights “from below,” showing what victims of atrocity and advocates do with rights. 

Drawing on African writings that center around victims’ stories—including Desmond Tutu’s on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission—and modern Roman Catholic social teaching, O’Neill reconciles the false dichotomy between the individualistic perspective of the human rights theories of Immanuel Kant, Jürgen Habermas, and John Rawls and local or ethnocentric conceptions of the common good in Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty. He shows that the testimony of victims leads us to a new conception of the common good, based on rights as narrative grammar—that is, rights are not only a grammar of dissent against atrocity but let new stories be told.

O’Neill shows how the rhetoric of human rights can dismantle old narratives of power and advance new ones, reconstructing victim’s claims, often in a religious key, along the way. He then applies this new approach to three areas: race and mass incarceration in the United States, the politics of immigration and refugee policy, and ecological responsibility and our duties to the next generation.

Reimagining Human Rights: Religion and the Common Good

Conor M. Kelly

An ethical framework and vision of free time for social good—and how to achieve it. 

In the work-centric culture of today’s world, it is easy to view free time as indulging laziness or extravagance.Conor M. Kelly, however, argues that free time possesses enormous potential for good if exercised in accordance with theological ethics. 

By examining pursuits such as television, digital media use, sports, and travel from the perspective of Catholic solidarity, Kelly demonstrates how individuals can choose new free time activities or restructure current pursuits to be more relational and socially conscious. 

The first book to use the Catholic theological tradition to explore the importance of free time, The Fullness of Free Time addresses a crucial topic in the ethics of everyday life, providing a useful framework for scholars and students of moral theology, philosophy, and political theory, as well as anyone hoping to make their free time more meaningful.

The Fullness of Free Time: A Theological Account of Leisure and Recreation in the Moral Life

Daniel K. Finn

It is a serious mistake to think that all we need for a just world is properly-structured organizations. But it is equally wrong to believe that all we need are virtuous people. Social structures alter people's decisions through the influence of the restrictions and opportunities they present.

Does buying a shirt at the local department store create for you some responsibility for the workplace welfare of the women who sewed it half a planet away? Many people interested in justice have claimed so, but without identifying any causal link between consumer and producer, for the simple reason that no single consumer has any perceptible effect on any of those producers.

Finn uses a critical realist understanding of social structures to view both the positive and negative effects of the market as a social structure comprising a long chain of causal relations from consumer/clerk to factory manager/seamstress. This causal connection creates a consequent moral responsibility for consumers and society for the destructive effects that markets help to create. Clearly written and engaging, this book is a must-read for scholars involved with these moral issues.

Consumer Ethics in a Global Economy: How Buying Here Causes Injustice There

Christopher Steck

The book is the first of its kind to draw together in conversation the views of the early Church, contemporary biblical and theological scholarship, and post-conciliar teachings. Steck develops a comprehensive, Catholic theology of animals based on an in-depth exploration of Catholicism's fundamental doctrines—trinitarian theology, Christology, pneumatology, eschatology, and soteriology. All God's Animals makes two central claims. First, we can hope that God will include animals of the present age in the kingdom inaugurated by Christ. Second, because of this inclusion, our responses to animals should be guided by the values of the kingdom. As Christians await the final liberation of all creation, they are to be witnesses to God’s kingdom by embodying its ideals in their relations with animal life. Because the kingdom's fullness is yet to come and because our world remains marked by the wounds of sin, however, Christian treatment of animals will at times require acts that are at odds with the kingdom’s ideals (for example, those causing suffering and death). Steck examines each of these ideas and explores all of their complexities.

All God's Animals: A Catholic Theological Framework for Animal Ethics

The major humanitarian crises of recent years are well known: the Shoah, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Rwandan genocide, the massacre in Bosnia, and the tsunami in Southeast Asia, as well as the bloody conflicts in South Sudan, Syria, and Afghanistan. Millions have been killed and many millions more have been driven from their homes; the number of refugees and internally displaced persons has reached record levels. Could these crises have been prevented? Why do they continue to happen? This book seeks to understand how humanity itself is in crisis, and what we can do about it. 

Hollenbach draws on the values that have shaped major humanitarian initiatives over the past century and a half, such as the commitments of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, as well as the values of diverse religious traditions, including Catholicism, to examine the scope of our responsibilities and practical solutions to these global crises. He also explores the economic and political causes of these tragedies, and uncovers key moral issues for both policy-makers and for practitioners working in humanitarian agencies and faith communities.

Humanity in Crisis: Ethical and Religious Response to Refugees

Charles E. Curran

In Charles E. Curran’s latest book, Diverse Voices in Modern US Moral Theology, he presents the diverse voices of US Catholic moral theologians from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The book discusses eleven key individuals in the development and evolution of moral theology as well as the New Wine, New Wineskins movement. This diversity, which differs from the monolithic understanding of moral theology that prevailed until recently, comes from the diverse historical circumstances or Sitz im Leben of the authors. Each of these theologians developed her or his approach in light of these circumstances and in response to shifts in the three audiences of moral theology—the Church, the academy, and the broader society.

By exploring this diversity, Curran recognizes the deep divisions that exist within Catholic moral theology between the so-called “liberal” and “conservative” approaches and acknowledges the need for greater dialogue between them, providing a deeper understanding of the methods and approaches of these significant figures. 

This new book from a major figure in the field will be an important resource for students and scholars of US Catholic moral theology and for anyone seeking to understand the current state of moral theology in America today.

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