Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler's newest book draws on their prolific academic writing in moral theology and their decades of teaching ethics in Creighton University's core curriculum. Designed for the undergraduate classroom but immersed in theological debates, their book offers today's students a way to see the Catholic moral tradition as a resource rather than an obstacle for living well.
A Generation Z audience is assumed throughout the text. This new cohort of students (b. 1997–2010) is racially and ethnically diverse, politically and socially progressive, and, according to many studies, even less religious than millennials. However, Salzman and Lawler cite a recent study highlighting Gen Z's commitment to social justice, interest in problem solving, and growing religiosity (xvii–xix). This reading of their audience leads them to assume an openness to learning about religion that they have likely also seen in their classrooms. They provide the basic introductory material this generation needs along with a progressive reading of the tradition that coheres with Gen Z's social and political identities. This lens shapes their focus on showing how the Catholic tradition broadly conceived can enhance readers’ existing moral commitments.
A coherent ethical theory and method are core to the text's effectiveness. The authors wisely help readers to see their own aversion to relativism (which “concludes to falsity of a judgement”) in chapter 1 and provide a coherent alternative in “perspectivism” (which “concludes to its partial, but adequate and reliable, truth” [90]). In each chapter, they insist on human dignity as an objective, universal value while acknowledging the weight of perspectives shaping diverging ethical conclusions. Perspectivism helps students see how to hold onto universal truths while taking account of diversity, pluralism, and an imperfect, evolving Catholic tradition. Chapters on virtues, norms, contexts, and conscience follow and, along with metaethical convictions, provide a foundation for analysis of issues.
The book's issues are helpfully drawn from sexual, medical, and social ethics, showing how blurry the lines between subdisciplines have become. The authors consider hook-up culture, homosexuality, and cohabitation; artificial nutrition and hydration (ANH) and artificial reproductive technologies (ART); and economic justice and climate change. The same metaethical theory and use of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral of sources (Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience) mark each chapter. Rather than surveying a range of positions, this text advances arguments, often those the authors have made elsewhere. Students learn not just what Catholic theological ethics is but how to argue a point of view.
The presentation of arguments on each issue is, however, also a limitation of the text. We learn that working for climate and economic justice is a Christian duty, and hook-up culture is unjust, but cohabitation, same-sex relationships, ART, and ANH can and should be accommodated, within certain limits. The magisterium is often the subject of critique in sexual and medical ethics, at least at the level of specific ethical norms. These positions are very much in the mainstream of academic Catholic theology and most undergraduates are likely to be sympathetic to them.
But this approach leaves out some things that are arguably part of a good Christian ethics course: the engagement of diverging positions within the tradition that are both strongly compelling (e.g., just war and pacifism), ethical issues in ordinary life that do not admit of easy answers (e.g., food justice) and intersectional analysis that shifts our gaze away from traditional issues and sources (e.g., to mass incarceration, domestic care, and sex and gender violence). A multiethnic, multiracial Gen Z might find issues like these (and a more diverse set of sources of moral wisdom and thinkers) more fruitful for the authentic ethical exploration they seek.
Still, there is an advantage to connecting young adults to the center of a moral tradition they might otherwise view as tangential to their lives. In a recent ethics course, a student of mine drew the class's attention to the phrase “We have been called to form consciences, not to replace them” (Amoris Laetitia §37). She did not know that the phrase was the subject of great controversy. A well-educated, progressive Gen Z-er, she was just struck by it. Salzman and Lawler wisely draw attention to Francis’ retrieval of the primacy of conscience in their introduction and their pivotal chapter on conscience. In their final chapter on Amoris Laetitia, they argue that here Francis provides a path for the renewal of theological ethics via centering “the discerning conscience of the moral knower” (337). They bet on Francis, and their contribution is bringing readers along with them to hope for a better church and a better world.
