This text, written by forty-seven scholars in the field, offers the reader an overview of major topics in Christian ethics. It is organized into three sections: Part 1: “Fonts, Grounds, and Sources of Christian Ethics”; part 2: “Approaches, Methods, and Voices in Christian Ethics”; and part 3: “Issues, Applications, and Twenty-First Century Agenda for Christian Ethics.” The last section addresses seven areas: politics and society; conflict, war, and peace; criminal justice; medicine and health care; economics; ecology; and sex, gender, marriage, and family. The introduction by Tobias Winright notes that the unifying framework of the work is that each author is asked to employ in some manner the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” of four sources for Christian ethics: scripture, tradition, reason, and experience in their task. One may wonder how this method can avoid simply duplicating what can be found in other standard texts of this kind. However, many sections note issues that often do not fit into existing paradigms or bring to mind situations in the public mind that remain inadequately considered in ethics. One is immediately plunged into the dilemmas of twenty-first-century ethics, searching for forgotten strands in the ethical tradition with which to respond, or seeking direction for creating new paths forward. The text is not just one of exposition of what has been, but contains critical thinking to spur future developments.

Classical questions are mixed with cultural critique. What is the ethical significance of emotion? What about a dominant culture that delegitimizes appropriate emotional response to suffering and abuse of power? (91). Is Christian ethics quandary ethics or does it attend to the controlling narrative within which one has learned to identify a moral question or topic? (105). Assumptions are questioned by new realities. Globally, the number of persons sixty-five years or older will exceed children younger than age five before 2050 (181). The United States has 4.4 percent of the world's population and houses 22 percent of its prisoners (249). Religious violence is on the rise because religion provides persons and groups threatened and humiliated by modernity and globalism with the resources to recast their struggle for identity and dignity as a “cosmic war” (209). Familiar terms are defined in light of new realities. Who is the Good Samaritan when mass atrocities occur? What is the nature of the responsibility to protect (212)? Do we remember that people in the Hebrew Scripture needed to be reminded that the “other” in their midst was not a danger to the homogeneous community (174)? What about the prison-industrial complex that can punish and incapacitate the most vulnerable sectors of the population (237)? Deep cultural questions are posed. Police reform without addressing police origins in governing class and race inequalities as sovereign powers—regardless of good wishes—will fail (273). Do we idolize medicine as the sole solution to human limitation (305)? Is the source of our real problem with death and dying that we wait until death to come to terms with human finitude (328)? Who profits from the provision of a self-generated subjectivity in a capitalist society (322)? Climate change is by far the most pressing human health crisis facing us (338). Can we learn anything from capitalism? Are there more incentives for passivity than critical thinking in our culture (364)? Who are the people in our world “outside the ark” (410)? Our bodies are more than human; they are sites of coexistence of multiple organisms without which we would be unable to survive (424). What counts as genuine sexual flourishing (439)?

In his comments that conclude the book, Andrea Vicini, SJ, reminds us we are doing ethics in a context different than past societies in which social fragmentation was not as possible as it is today (483). Here he indicates the real challenge of the text. How can we bring postmodern sensibilities to the ethical task, while also finding enough moral footing to stake normative claims that defend genuine human well-being (449)? For both the professional and the student, this resource is both accessible and key in pursuing this task.