Published in paperback in 2020, John Shea's book is a timely and relevant text for scholars and practitioners yearning for a thicker description and concrete depiction of what it means to be and act in full humanness. Seeking to remedy “incomplete, immature, and inadequate” definitions of human and moral development in scholarship and teaching, Shea provides a holistic framework for naming human development's goal and process, one grounded in wholeness and relationality (ix).

For Shea, to be fully human is to be a moral, responsible, adult self. In full human expression, a developed human is an integral self-in-mutuality. A deeply relational and connected vision, Shea's entire project attempts to hold together these two features: integrity (individual wholeness) and mutuality (relatedness). Shea laments and exposes the harmful historical dichotomies between mind and body, reason and emotion, and self and other that characterizes developmental theory. Subsequently, he rejects the historical splits between morality and human development in defining what it means both to be and to act as an adult-moral being.

Shea contends that in “an integral self-in-mutuality, there is no ‘ethic of care’ that is not intimately connected to an ‘ethic of justice’” (81). A fully human person thereby acts in ways that are caring and just, which ultimately pursues peace. For Shea, peace is what is at stake in all discussions of adult-moral development. As such, peace is humanity in its developmental fullness.

This book is an accessible and approachable “phenomenology of the fully human” (xi). The book is organized to direct the reader through a clear development of Shea's argument. The first part of the book explores each element of the fully human: the structure (chapter 1), key characteristics (chapter 2), the fully human self-in-action (chapter 3), and the goal (chapter 4). Part 2 of the text explores the implications of Shea's project on “the helping professions” of education (chapter 5), psychotherapy (chapter 6), and spirituality (chapter 7).

Undoubtedly, Shea's history of teaching psychology, religion, human development, and care and counseling shapes his concerns that human and moral development resist the abstraction and disconnection so often found in culture and academia today. As such, Shea ends the book with “Practical Questions for Reflection and Dialogue,” a resource for praxis-oriented reflection to assist the reader in becoming fully human themselves.

Shea believes that developing ourselves (and then others) into integral-mutual selves will lead to a more just society (150). Though he alludes to problems of oppression and violence related to race, gender, religion, and sexuality, some may find attention to these matters limited, failing to address how these concerns have inhibited full humanity for some people more than others. In my own graduate-level teaching, I look forward to pairing Shea's text with others such as Vanessa Siddle-Walker and John Snarey's Racing Moral Formation (2004), which explores more fully the intersection of race and moral formation.

For educators and scholars who reject the split between human and moral development and the separation between ethics of care and justice, Shea's book is a helpful resource that exposes readers both to a wide array of topics (violence, peace studies, trauma) and to historically prominent thinkers in developmental scholarship (Noddings, Erikson, Freire, Goam). Ultimately, the book brings together the more humanizing of human-moral development trends as Shea constructs a vision of full humanity needed in the world today—defined, in the end, by how we treat one another.