Discourse around religion in the public sphere, notably regarding the relationship between church and world, the dynamic intersectionality of tradition, authority, and experience, and claims about shared values and competing goods, has become even more politicized and contentious since 2016. Such shifts make the 2016 publication of Cathleen Kaveny's A Culture of Engagement: Law, Religion, and Morality all the more relevant, timely, and important. A collection of essays that originally appeared as singular pieces in the Catholic social commentary journal Commonweal, the essays in A Culture of Engagement are an erudite, yet accessible, bricolage that forge critical and constructive bridges between theological ethics, law, politics, and culture. Employing conceptual, analytical, jurisprudential, comparative, and normative lenses, Kaveny, both a theological ethicist and legal theorist, deftly contextualizes and unpacks a range of challenging moral issues in fifty-six substantive and succinct chapters. One of the reasons her writing is so compelling is that she exercises a consistent intellectual honesty and a deep form of intellectual solidarity, both of which undergird her efforts to move carefully and dialectically between perspectives—religious ethicists and legal theorists, progressive and conservative Catholics, and Catholics and Protestants and secular thinkers—in the hopes of enhancing the common good and improving the lives of ordinary people, whose stories and legal cases poignantly illuminate the moral and legal complexity of the human condition. With boldness and humility, Kaveny trenchantly unmasks morally disingenuous or legally dubious motives that foreclose dialogue or perpetuate the suffering of others, but she never abandons her hope in the prospects for dialogue. Kaveny's authentically interdisciplinary work more than achieves her stated goal of a writing a volume that “invites, encourages, and contributes to future conversations at the intersection of law, politics and culture” (18).Footnote ¹ I would argue that she accomplishes a more ambitious goal in the book: further establishing herself as one of the foremost and impactful scholars in the fields of law and religion, theological ethics, and law.

In this review essay, I describe the basic structure of the book and its contents. I do not undertake a detailed analysis of each of the fifty-six chapters, but I isolate specific arguments and connect them to current legal and ethical issues and methodological questions in law and religion. Though the essays in A Culture of Engagement were “written in real time” (68) enabling the reader to see Kaveny's reactions unfold in their immediate context, Kaveny also “revised many of the columns to make them less time-specific, as well as to provide more background or context when necessary” (18). I also draw upon other writings by Kaveny to situate A Culture of Engagement within her larger corpus. In significant ways, the essays in this book lay the groundwork for her three other recent and equally impressive books reviewed in this symposium: Law's Virtue,Footnote ² Prophecy without Contempt,Footnote ³ and Ethics at the Edges of Law.Footnote ⁴ Appeals to these other texts offer insights into the ways in which Kaveny has reiterated, deepened, or, occasionally, modified arguments developed in A Culture of Engagement.

In helpful introductory sections, both a general one for the book as a whole and specific ones for each of the five main sections of the book, Kaveny lays out the framework for the book and the rationale for a culture of engagement. She juxtaposes the culture of openness, characterized by the aggiornamento or updating of the church, optimism, and cooperative sensibilities “across religious, cultural, and national boundaries” (4) embraced by the Catholic Church during the Second Vatican Council, with the culture of identity, focused more on the resourcement or renewal of tradition, along with concerns for the distinctiveness of the church vis-à-vis the world, the cultivation of religious integrity, and the protection and preservation of a culture of life (advocated strongly under the papacy of Pope John Paul II). Both positions are anchored in theological, ecclesial, and ethical principles, but Kaveny asserts that they suffer from potential shortcomings related to political and cultural life. She notes that the culture of openness risks lapsing into an “uncritical assimilation of the broader social context” (6), whereas the culture of identity can “shift into adamant resistance to that context” (6). The origins and development of these positions and their concomitant disagreement are uniquely Catholic; however, they map in interesting ways to debates within Protestantism, for example, between the liberalism of Friedrich Schleiermacher and the neoorthodoxy of Karl Barth. In these worlds, Kaveny prefers Paul Ramsey as her Protestant guide. For Kaveny, the clash of the culture of openness and the culture of identity have engendered “cyclical reversals of approach to religion and culture” (6). Kaveny's diagnosis of these cyclical reversals insightfully lay bare many of our current challenges involving the eclipse of meaningful dialogue about culture, morality, and religion both in the public sphere and within our religious communities.

The path forward, Kaveny proposes, lies in a culture of engagement. She construes engagement as an “intrinsic mode of interaction” (7) that brings different perspectives, traditions, and discussions into a closeness that is mutually influential on those involved. Adopting Alasdair MacIntyre's conception of tradition (more on this below) and Pope Francis's culture of encounter (where the church is out in the streets), Kaveny argues that we need to acknowledge our embeddedness in communities and the ways in which we inhabit multiple identities. A culture of engagement is needed, for example, because “[w]e cannot stand completely outside either our American identity or our Roman Catholic identity. The best we can do is to achieve some critical distance in order to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of both identities” (9). The “best we can do” is a leitmotif of the book, reflecting Kaveny's pragmatic realism that abrogates facile solutions without relinquishing an aspirational telos of what life could be. Before concluding the main introduction with overviews of the five sections of the book, Kaveny offers a brief discussion of same-sex marriage and Obergefell v. Hodges to illustrate the need for a culture of engagement. Charting the differing perspectives (including jurists’ challenges to the decision that is now the law of the land), Kaveny emphasizes the communal dimension of marriage. She insists that a culture of engagement empowers participants in dialogue to be open to reframed questions. If participants would not become preoccupied with issues such as the moral status of homosexual acts but rather attend to “common challenges facing same-sex and opposite-sex couples, then conventional engagement may proceed in rich and unexpected ways” (14). Her book masterfully opens critical and imaginative spaces for moving beyond impasse to the “rich and unexpected” forms of dialogue.

In part one, “The Law as Teacher,” Kaveny explores the nature of law and its applications to issues such marriage, abortion, assisted suicide, immigration, death penalty, and torture. Engaging these formidable ethics issues in straightforward and nuanced ways, Kaveny argues for the pedagogical function of law in ways that inform her 2012 Law's Virtues, namely, the manner in which the law “shapes our political and moral values, including our response to other human beings” (21). Building on the virtuous properties of law embraced by Thomas Aquinas, she complements this vision with additional aspects of her culture of engagement: Pope Francis's “sensitivity to the actual situation of the people that the law purports to govern” (23) as well as “the significant moral pluralism that characterizes our liberal democracy” (23). It is in this triangulated space of moral values, lived experiences, and moral pluralism that—despite an ineluctable ambiguity and competition of goods—Kaveny operates to develop cogent analyses and pragmatic recommendations regarding the contested claims about a myriad of social and moral issues.

I find her jurisprudential assessment of criminal justice processes and procedures to be particularly instructive. Drawing on the work of John T. Noonan, Kaveny asserts in chapter one that judges must adhere to rules without—as Justice Cardozo did in Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad—“mechanically following that rule” (26). In advocating for the importance of rules and persons, particularly for judges to exercise “the imaginative capacity to identify with the parties before them when interpreting and applying the rules” (27), Kaveny offers an indictment of our criminal justice system that remains constrained by the strictures of mechanically following the rules. The Federal Sentencing Act of 1984 ushered in the era of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines and forms of determinate sentencing that have exponentially increased the prison population and restricted the capacity of judges to consider and “identify with the parties before them.” Uniformity and predictability were worthwhile goals of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, but they have been purchased at the price of judicial discretion (somewhat restored by Booker v. Washington), fairness in similar cases (somewhat redressed in the Fair Sentencing Act), and the proliferation of the prison industrial complex.Footnote ⁵ Kaveny's ethics of engagement invites critical judgments that involve the exercise of phronesis, or practical wisdom, to adjudicate rules and persons. She further envisions such possibilities in Ethics at the Edges of Law in the chapter on Catholic ethicist Margaret Farley. In framing debates about the admissibility of victim impact statements as clashes of compassion, Kaveny describes the need for “a very wise, perceptive, and self-reflective person [who] could sort through the competing currents of experience, victimhood, and compassion as they unfurl in a given case.”Footnote ⁶

These competing currents, which often precipitate polarization, impasses, and institutional breakdowns, do not forestall arriving at some common consensus about basic values. In her chapter on the war on habeas corpus, terror, and torture, for example, Kaveny admonishes us “to find a way to incorporate our fundamental values into the ongoing processing of suspects” (53). Drawing on fundamental values can serve as a bridge between a culture of identity and a culture of openness; it also does not preclude our advancing legal judgement. In a later chapter on the Bush administration's “Torture Memo,” Kaveny baldly denounces then Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee's “reasoning [as] not simply faulty, it is perverse. It exemplifies the sort of reasoning that has given us lawyers a bad name” (58). Kaveny's call for mediation coupled with exacting judgments is sorely needed both within academic and more mainstream circles.

In part two, “Religious Liberty and Its Limits,” Kaveny interrogates the contested claims involving religious liberty and their implications for the rule of law, the lives of individuals and religious communities, and the status of religious beliefs in public debates and legal contexts. Kaveny marshals the resources of law and religion: she seeks to disabuse a common approach in “jurisprudence [that], in my view, tends to frame religious beliefs as idiosyncratic and irrational” (68); yet, she also maintains that “more thorough reflection on and engagement with the structure and logic of many current Free Exercise Clause appeals can only benefit our discussion” (68). Though many of the essays in the second part principally address the Catholic Church's opposition to the contraceptive mandate, individual essays in the section, as well as Kaveny's overall, inclusive methodology, lift up broader concerns within an increasingly pluralistic society. Among these considerations, Kaveny points to the interests of vulnerable third parties and questions about cases “in which the vulnerability of a patient trumps or qualifies the conscience of a health care provider” (73). In analyzing such questions, Kaveny offers a frank response that reiterates her intellectual honesty and consistent calls for more sustained conversations, as when she posits, “I think we ought to protect the doctor who refuses to perform the abortion, but not the nurse who refuses the anesthesia to a woman in labor. Why? I'm not sure. I can identify some important theoretical questions, but I can't answer them fully. These questions need sustained attention from practitioners and scholars, including but not limited to Catholic theologians and lawyers” (73).

In evaluating the arguments of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) against the contraceptive mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, in several of the book's chapters, Kaveny offers sober, but not dispassionate, analysis of the USCCB's position. She finds the USCCB's criticisms to be “rooted in a mistaken assumption about how our law operates” (82). She further insists that suspicions about anti-religious motivations by the government are unfounded: “It is very important to me that President Obama and HHS are not anti-religious, given the enormous role that faith-based health care has played and will continue to play in this country” (87; original emphasis). A culture of engagement necessitates assessing the religious liberty claims of the USCCB and others with attention to broader contexts, including widely held perspectives on contraception (such as the view that contraception “reflects the moral consensus of the community”) (90). Such perspectives matter in relation to democratic processes of lawmaking and create inherent constraints on claims of religious freedom. Kaveny writes, “[o]n my view, however, [the Bishops] could not plausibly argue that the mandate as a general requirement is invalid law because it violates their religious freedom. No one's religious freedom can be so expansive that it allows them to dictate what the law will require for the entire community by circumventing the democratic process” (90).

A culture of engagement offers a range of mediating strategies for supporting the concurrent goals of full health care access and religious freedom. Kaveny advocates for attention to details, deliberative processes, and dialogue: “We need to get into the weeds and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the different legal options on the table to protect religious freedom while the government promotes access to contraception” (94). Such a strategy, she recognizes, is an arduous and complicated task that must “escape this circular pattern of strategic, political assertion and objection” (99). Kaveny works diligently through the relevant case law to expose the ways in which these circular patterns have impacted the debates about religious liberty. Whereas some opposing the contraceptive mandate have placed hope in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, Kaveny holds that the RFRA “is just an ordinary law” (102) that supports the stricter test involving the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution. Kaveny contends that United States v. Lee is an important case that does not support the USCCB's argument because it found that “religious liberty does not always trump the state's interest, even under the stricter test” (109). Kaveny favors the Lee decision and similar cases because they resonate with a culture of engagement within pluralistic society by balancing claims about religious freedom “against the rights and legitimate expectations of others” (116). Kaveny does not perceive such balance in cases such as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, where that decision “is, I fear, as arbitrary as it is partisan” (118).

Extending these reflections on questions of liberty, the rule of law, and the authority of tradition, I want to bring in current debates about legal precedent and partisanship. Kaveny presciently observes the foreshadowing symbolism of the 2014 Hobby Lobby case: “It is the future course of cases that makes me worry about the majority opinion—not the outcome in this particular case” (114). Since the publication of A Culture of Engagement, Neil Gorsuch (2017) and Brett Kavanaugh (2018) have been sworn in as associate justices of the Supreme Court. These appointments have tilted the court in a more conservative direction, and many have speculated that the Court will increasingly be willing to overturn stare decisis, the rule of precedent. Take the recent case of Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt, where a Justice Thomas-authored opinion overturned forty years of precedent (established in Nevada v. Hall) that held states lack sovereign immunity in each other's courts. In his dissenting opinion in the Hyatt case, Justice Breyer problematizes the majority's originalistFootnote ⁷ appeals to the founders concerning the importance of sovereign immunity and affirms the legal coherence of the Hall decision and its perduring status as precedent. Justice Breyer cautions against the temptation to overrule precedent, observing, “the law can retain the necessary stability only if this Court resists that temptation, overruling prior precedent only when the circumstances demand it.”Footnote ⁸ Moreover, in the penultimate sentence of his closing paragraph, Justice Breyer offers an additional warning that is cryptic, but intentional: “Today's decision can only cause one to wonder which cases the Court will overrule next.”Footnote ⁹ Many view the “next” as referring to Roe v. Wade.

How might Kaveny respond to the potential reversal of the precedent Roe? Kaveny's culture of engagement supports the common good and evolving standards of decency as well as legal-political structures that undergird the role of precedent within deliberative democracy. As we have seen with respect to her analysis of contraception (where it matters that the majority views contraception as contributing to the common good), Kaveny notes that state laws regarding the death penalty will influence national policies, legislation, and legal decisions: “If enough states abolish the death penalty, eventually the Constitution will catch up” (51). In the current context, several states have now passed heartbeat bills, which prohibit a woman from terminating a pregnancy when an ultrasound can detect a fetal heartbeat. Such laws neglect the Roe precedent and purport to represent moral consensus. However, Kaveny would likely denominate these heartbeat bills as effectuating a culture of identity in a way that glosses over the myriad factors, needs, and circumstances influencing abortion decisions. Though she cautions that Roe “failed to consider the dangers to democracy of separating ‘personhood’ from humanity” (33), she affirms that Roe-based decisions (such as the Gonzales v. Carhart decision that upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003) have been correctly made. In my judgment, some of the distinctive contributions of Kaveny's culture of engagement vis-à-vis the abortion debates emerge in her epistemological humility and commitments to a “workable compromise” (39) beyond the seemingly intractable binaries of life versus choice or women versus unborn children. Moreover, as an additional note on the more general question of legal precedent and its analogous relationship to religious tradition, Kaveny proposes in Ethics at the Edges of Law to model graduate theological education on the methods of legal education and legal reasoning:

By decentering the focus on “bottom-line positions,” there may be some progress on the culture-war debates that have emerged more frequently within the Bioethics Council (chapter 27), Catholic colleges and universities (chapter 32), and academic societies, such as the Catholic Theological Society of America (chapter 36).

In part three, “Conversations about Culture,” Kaveny examines a range of topics, including culture wars, mass shootings, murder-suicide, assisted suicide, and pop culture and Catholic colleges. In the introduction to the section, Kaveny sheds light on her methodology informed, in part, by Pope Francis and Augustine. The appeal to Pope Francis emerges out of Kaveny's concern for context, lived experience, and a culture of encounter that informs a culture of engagement. Kaveny views Augustine as offering a way of thinking beyond dualistically driven impasses. In Kaveny's judgment, “Augustinian insights provide a more fruitful basis for conversations about morality, law, and public policy in our pluralistic society” (122). Kaveny argues that these insights “allow for more nuanced judgments about other people and the situations they face” because they do “not shrink from addressing the complex and mixed motivations that drive human beings in their darkest hours” (124). To be sure, Augustine's analysis of the ordering of human love offers a model for evaluating mixed motivations, and the City of God provides an account of political life that embraces “various shades of gray” (158). Nevertheless, I am struck by Kaveny's appropriation of an Augustinian model as a mediating position, given Augustine's polemical engagement with others in his own context as well as his contested reception in our context. Has Kaveny sufficiently considered the concerns of feminist theologians and others regarding issues with Augustine's theories of women, sexuality, human agency, and other experiences and motivations that drive human beings?

In response to such concerns, Kaveny's nuanced methodology provides an inclusive and coherent framework that can accommodate both Augustinian and Thomistic sensibilities. In her view, the prophetic and the publicFootnote ¹¹ can coexist in ways that potentially render productive the impasse within religious groups and between religious and secular groups. Her essay on the new atheism, where she encourages readers to “forget about Christopher Hitchens and read Jeffrey Stout” (132), illustrates these broader sensibilities. Thinkers like Stout resonate with Kaveny's wider project because they seek to mediate between the separation of religion and democracy, that is, between a Rawlsian/Rortian view of religion as a conversation-stopper for democratic consensus and a Hauerwasian/MilbankianFootnote ¹² view of religion that neglects the importance of democracy for religious structures and beliefs.

The goal of Kaveny's mediation is to confront the culture wars by deescalating—not necessarily eliminating—the intensity of competing perspectives within our pluralistic democracy. It is not always the most controversial issues like abortion that are weaponized in the culture wars. Perhaps the reason that so many issues are weaponized, Kaveny muses, is because “[w]e Americans are attracted to dualistic views of the world” (156). As part of her culture of engagement, she wonders what it would take to move ProtestantsFootnote ¹³ and Catholics beyond this dualism toward, for example, an equal weighting of a culture of life and a culture of death. Dualism “occludes our awareness of our own sin and shortcomings,” “corrodes charity,” and “distorts our perception of reality” (157). In a poignant chapter about a Villanova professor who murdered her daughter with Down syndrome and then committed suicide, Kaveny laments the way a memorial became politicized: “The memorial was a grieving community's act of hope, and its prayer for some peace. It was not a political act. Yet it was immediately brandished as a weapon in the culture wars” (146).

Are we any closer to finding peace within the culture wars? Consider the impacts of white supremacy, police shootings, overt discrimination, privilege, and implicit bias that continue to weigh on race relations in the United States. Though Kaveny does not explicitly touch base on the topic of race in her essays, her methodological approach and nuanced reflections helpfully offer insights in our current crisis. Certainly, ideas about justice, fairness, respect, and pluralism that are central within her culture of engagement obviate against all forms of prejudice that inhibit the full flourishing of individuals and communities. For example, in one of her essays on the contraceptive mandate, Kaveny decries any one group, the American bishops, presuming to speak for people of different backgrounds: “In the United States, I think, justice includes a concern of fairness—we ask whether all people are being treated respectfully, not merely those who share our moral and religious viewpoints” (76). Such a Rawlsian sensibility about fairness and respect can engender tolerance and, perhaps, a deeper understanding of others.

Yet, similar to other scholars who have advanced critiques of Rawls,Footnote ¹⁴ Kaveny also understands that legal mechanisms and principles of fairness are themselves necessary, but not sufficient to effectuate transformation to a more socially just society. In briefly engaging the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Kaveny states that the most important factor in the Brown decision “was the moral insight that racial segregation in public schools could not be distinguished from a poisonous racism that cannot but infect the hearts and minds of schoolchildren, particularly black schoolchildren” (33). Such moral and extralegal factors can and must inform legal analyses that are part of larger networks and socio-political processes. Kaveny's methodological approach inviting such factors provides an important framework for ongoing work in law and religionFootnote ¹⁵ and for the actual experiences of persons in the public sphere.Footnote ¹⁶

In seeking to foster critical conversation between religious traditions and the broader culture, Kaveny appropriates the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. Preferring the analysis of tradition in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? to the infamous last paragraph of After Virtue, Kaveny sees benefits to MacIntyre's understanding of tradition “that includes far more than a set of moral rule books” (212).Footnote ¹⁷ She extrapolates MacIntyre's interest in the “bilingual skills” that enables persons in different traditions “to translate back and forth” and to “know which concepts and expressions escape translation” (8). In the book's conclusion, she locates MacIntyre's conception of tradition within the culture of engagement that she recommends: “a fully competent speaker of a language has a certain creative, poetic capacity … in order to develop the language's vocabulary and conceptual structure in order to address new situations and questions” (254). I find compelling Kaveny's retrieval of MacIntyre, though I do note that she does advance more critical assessments of MacIntyre in Prophecy without Contempt. One concern relates to MacIntyre's assumptions about the lack of divisiveness in religious traditions: “As demonstrated by both sociological studies and emerging controversies, many religious bodies in the West are plagued by divisions every bit as difficult and fractious as those that bedevil the wider society.”Footnote ¹⁸ Moreover, as part of that book's analysis of prophetic indictment as a strategy and moral chemotherapy for disrupting communal apathy and injustice, Kaveny perceives certain limitations in MacIntyre's account of moral reasoning: “As powerful as it is, MacIntyre's analysis fails to take due account of the fact that moral reasoning—and moral argument—do not exhaust the category of moral discourse in Western societies, even Western liberal democracies.”Footnote ¹⁹ Such concerns do not fundamentally undercut her appeal to MacIntyre in A Culture of Engagement, but they do raise some of the challenges to understandings of tradition like MacIntyre's that—as with Rawls—may lack the self-critical awareness to participate fully in an ethics of encounter and culture of engagement.

In part four, “Conversations about Belief,” Kaveny probes internal debates within the Catholic Church regarding conservative and progressive perspectives, the church's abuse scandal, departures from the church, and other matters. She is ever mindful of the wider implications of these debates vis-à-vis the wider Christian community and society, arguing that “[i]n the end, though, if we are going to be Catholic, we have to be catholic—we need to find ways of communicating with one another as members of the same Body of Christ, despite our differences” (169). Differences have always existed, but Kaveny traces the devastating effects of the doctrinal and political disagreements in the church. Political divisions “weakened the Catholic Church in England for centuries” (172); more recently, since Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968, there have been chilling ecclesiastical and theological climates. These realities potentially put into doubt Kaveny's more sanguine observation in another chapter that “[a] hundred years from now, no one will remember these political skirmishes around religious liberty” (181). Nevertheless, Kaveny does not abandon the objectives of a culture of engagement, notably the indispensable place of dialogue. In the case of contraception, she urges the magisterium to engage lay Catholics in dialogue: “So instead of ignoring Catholics who use contraception it would be better for the church to encourage them to articulate how their views can be seen as consistent with the deeper insights of the tradition” (184). Rereading and conversing can facilitate reframing questions and discovering common ground. As Kaveny writes later in a chapter on contraception, tensions between faith and reason can be negotiated in four main ways: “One dissolves the tension, one diminishes it, one denies it, and one attempts to reframe it. In my view, only the last one has any hope of moving us beyond the impasse” (220).

In reframing long-standing debates and confronting internal crises, Kaveny maintains vigilance for safeguarding the core value of human dignity. For example, in chapter 40, “How about NOT Firing Her? Moral Norms and Catholic School Teachers,” she critiques a Catholic middle school's decision to fire an unmarried teacher who had become pregnant. Building on the insights of Thomas Aquinas, later cited by Martin Luther King, Jr., from his Birmingham jail cell, that a law unequally burdening members of society is an act of violence, Kaveny affirms dignity and community as central to the church's mission. She makes the same point about a good society in chapter 54, on insurance, in observing, “[a] good society is one that honors the inherent dignity of all persons, no matter what their physical disability. The concepts at the center of healthcare reform need to be solidarity and vulnerability, not risk and its rational transfer” (245). These same convictions must be operative as the Catholic Church confronts its own unspeakable sins in the clergy sexual abuse scandal. Sensitive to the needs of victims but also aware that we need to hear the hard truths from perpetrators, Kaveny encourages mediating processes such as truth and reconciliation commissions and other restorative justice practices. Such discursive practices potentially offer constructive outcomes for victims and communities: “No one can usurp the right of victims to forgive—or not to forgive—their tormentors, even if their tormentors repent. Nonetheless, truth-and-reconciliation commissions have tried to create social conditions under which repentance and forgiveness may take root and grow in human hearts”Footnote ²⁰ (196–97). In a later chapter, she further envisions that protecting children and other victims and promoting inclusive, healing community will require more than just truth commissions: “It will also take the development of new ways of enabling believers to identify imaginatively and affectively with the church. We will need the contributions of artists and novelists, not merely those of lawyers and psychologists” (200). Including members of the community to help understand, imagine, and, potentially, restore—rather than exclusively relying on hierarchies, institutions, or professionals—offers ways to redress harms on personal and interpersonal levels.

In part five, “Cases and Controversies,” Kaveny revisits a number of thorny issues and cases involving contraception, abortion, cooperative evil, and health care. Kaveny here expands on earlier conversations about MacIntyre and the dynamic character of normative tradition as a “complex network of practices” (211). In a chapter on the consistent ethic of life, she interrogates the arguments and strategies of pro-lifers with an even-handedness. Whereas pro-choice advocates tend to overstate the distinction between the born and unborn, the “mistake” of the pro-life position is that it reinscribes this dualism but “assigns the mirror image values to those falling in each category” (217). In another chapter, addressing the question of when life begins, Kaveny again is less concerned about a definitive answer than with the substance and form of arguments developed by both sides. Appealing to Paul Ramsey (previewing the Ramseyian “wrestling with” that animates Ethics at the Edges of Law), she finds claims wanting on anthropological grounds: “[Germain] Grisez's attempt to preserve the claim that individuated human life begins at fertilization sacrifices too much of what we know about human nature—both from a Christian perspective and a scientific one” (224).

These anthropological concerns mean taking seriously the full range of human being and doing. Issues such as health care and criminal justice require us to think deeply and capaciously about social justice and the wider factors that create injustices. Following the tenets of Catholic social teaching, Kaveny observes, “[i]n Catholic teaching, sin—like redemption—has both a social and a personal dimension. So does redemption” (228). Kaveny's words are instructive as they militate against our preoccupation with individualism and affirm the redemptive potential of our shared lives together. In problematizing pro-death penalty positions such as Thomas Aquinas's in the book's penultimate chapter, Kaveny states that “[t]he difficulty with this argument, however, is that it fails to face the terrifying fact that these evildoers are part of our society” (248, original emphasis). Communal redemption remains possible but requires a firm and pragmatic realism. Within the moral ambiguities, we must strive for as much clarity as possible. In this sense, Kaveny boldly confronts the ambiguities present in Catholic health care directives: “Properly understood, Catholic moral teaching requires Catholic hospitals to try to save both mother and unborn child, and if that is not possible, doctors must save the patient that can be saved. In early pregnancy, that's the mother. The time has come for the Bishops’ Conference to revise the directives to make that crystal clear” (231). In another chapter on boycotts in pluralistic society, Kaveny offers carefully developed parameters on whether boycotts should be used to harness our moral objections and outrage: “We need to face the wrongdoing that the potential target is perpetuating or facilitating. But we also need to consider whether the boycott is likely to succeed. Finally, we need to consider the harm that our boycott may inflict upon innocent third parties, as well as upon the common good itself” (239).

Kaveny concludes the book with a note of optimism, having been “deeply encouraged in this project by Pope Francis” (259). Even Pope Francis has not been immune from caustic criticisms and other collateral consequences of the culture wars. Nevertheless, having laid out cogently an argument for a culture of engagement and its pragmatic strategies for fostering dialogue, Kaveny is justified in her optimism. Through readable, thought-provoking chapters on many of the most pressing ethical issues of our times, which have been clearly framed by introductory chapters and fortified with suggestions for further reading, Kaveny has invited a broad range of readers—from early and advanced undergraduate students to graduate students, specialists, and mainstream audiences—to join a crucially important conversation as part of a culture of engagement. By retreating into our identities and ideologies and failing to accept this challenge, we risk falling victim to the culture wars and other ignorant armies that clash by night.