Christine Gudorf, longtime member of the Catholic Theological Society of America and of the Society of Christian Ethics, has written yet another book. Although she is perhaps best known for academic projects such as Body, Sex, and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Ethics, her latest work has a different audience: the classroom. Complete with discussion questions and a glossary (which includes an entry for “the golden rule”), this new book has the difficult goal of exploring complex ethical questions from the perspective of multiple religious traditions—all in a way that is accessible to (largely) religiously illiterate students.
On one level, the book is certainly a success. One can do only so much in 250 pages, and the issues explored are well worth the effort. There is an excellent chapter on food ethics that highlights not only an issue of ever-increasing importance, but also important insights from the ancient practices (such as fasting) of our religious traditions. Similar contributions are made in important chapters on work/labor and clothing/body image. Those who want a text that deals with contemporary issues in bio- and health care-ethics, however, will need to look elsewhere.
One will also need to look elsewhere for a book that evenly engages the world's great religions. Gudorf is animated by questions surrounding Christianity, and these questions are raised disproportionately throughout the book. For instance, in the chapter on sex and marriage, she spends significant energy discussing issues that were important to intra-Catholic debates of the 1970s and 1980s, but these have questionable relevance for today's young people, especially those who are not Catholic or Christian.
Conspicuous by its absence is any sustained focus on the interrelated structural problems of the hook-up culture, pornography, and the explosion of sexually transmitted diseases. As in the cases of food, work, and clothing, ancient religious ideas and practices offer many important and helpful perspectives on these topics. This was a missed opportunity, given that contemporary culture is besieged at every turn by sexual images and practices as well as by social structures that distort and degrade human dignity—particularly in college and university life.
Gudorf is an expert in social ethics, which makes it all the more surprising that this book seems disconnected from the social-structural reality of its audience. In fact, it envisions its audience as extracting themselves from their social location to find a religion that “suits” them (11) and in which they can “find relevance” (12). It would certainly be problematic if students imagined that they could shop for a religion in the way they might shop for an apartment or undergraduate major. The human person is anything but a community-less consumer freely choosing between different religious options. What people find “suitable” or “relevant” is constantly being determined by social structures like global capitalism and the nation-state—not to mention our sinful and fallen natures. Missing from Gudorf's book is an engagement with the power of religious traditions to transform people so that their desires are redirected to be more in line with authentic human flourishing.
