Reimagining the Moral Life honors the work of the paradigm of Roman Catholic feminist ethics, Lisa Sowle Cahill, while also providing a lovely compendium of Christian social ethics. Sowle Cahill's triune ethical hermeneutic of appreciation, suspicion, and praxis are applied with her four-part model of Catholic feminist ethics: Augustinian, Neo-Thomistic, Franciscan, and the uniquely Cahillian Junian. Maureen O'Connell and Mary M. Doyle Roche trace the development of Sowle Cahill's Junian feminism, a new hagiographical resource for human liberation. Junia is the apostle addressed by Paul in Romans 16, a woman who was prominent in the early church, obfuscated by the patriarchal church, and ultimately emerges as a person who defies categories of gender and sexuality to speak for the church.

Reimagining is organized in three parts. Part 1 contains essays on Sowle Cahill's contributions to the foundations of Christian ethics. Two overarching aspects of these essays are particularly helpful: the explication of Sowle Cahill's methods and the tracing of the genealogies that undergird her work. Even those of us who follow Sowle Cahill's work closely may forget the breadth of her mentees and interlockers, including Charles Curran, James Martin, SJ, and Martha Nussbaum. Part 2 of Reimagining explicates, details, and highlights some of the many topics that Sowle Cahill engages including war, peace, sexuality, family, and health care. Her unique contributions to bioethics, including the turn toward proportionality and away from personalism, bring the reader back to the trinity of appreciation, suspicion, and praxis. Virginia M. Ryan, Hoa Trung Dinh, SJ, and Stephanie C. Edwards rightly highlight Sowle Cahill's bridge building and “middle way,” in other words, her unique ethical methodologies of construction and deconstruction, as well as connection and suspicion. Part 3 touches on the future of Christian ethics led by Sowle Cahill's commitments to Christian social ethics in a global, public sphere.

Part 1 is the strongest section of the book. The clear explication and delineation of Sowle Cahill's unique methods is a great gift to those of us who “do” social ethics pedagogy and praxis. Part 2 is good, but as the book progresses there is less of an emphasis on the radical and prophet dimensions of Sowle Cahill's work and more situation of her corpus in the systematic Roman Catholic tradition. Vatican II appears over and over again, while liberation theology is barely given a nod, except for frequent references to Sowle Cahill's commitment to the preferential option for the poor. Theological Bioethics (Georgetown University Press, 2005) is one of the crown jewels of Sowle Cahill's corpus, as M. Therese Lysaught, cited by Autumn Alcott Ridenour in Reimaging, rightly names Lisa Sowle Cahill as “the forerunner for justice and the principles of Catholic Social Teaching within the field of bioethics” (172). This radical and essential connection between science and religion, as well as church and state, is to be celebrated and emphasized. Sowle Cahill's middle way is not a path of compromise, but of radical, prophetic dialogue between often polarized stakeholders.

This is not a book for undergraduates, unless they are in a course dedicated primarily to the work of Lisa Sowle Cahill. It is a book for their teachers. This book is a guide for those of us attempting to do Christian ethics with a feminist, liberationist, antiracist orientation. It is a loving and lovely summary of the teaching of Lisa Sowle Cahill, and we are indebted to her students and colleagues for this volume.