Celia Deane-Drummond, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, holds doctorates in both plant physiology and systematic theology. This dual academic background is evident in the present book in which she aims at a dialogue between what it means from a theological perspective to be a fully human person in Christ and what it means from a scientific perspective to be a human animal in comparison and contrast with other animal species. The chapters of the book, accordingly, are each divided into two parts: human reason and animal cognition, human freedom and animal agency, human morality and animal “virtue,” human language and animal nonverbal communication, and most fascinating of all from my perspective, human involvement in what Deane-Drummond calls “theo-drama” and niche construction on the part of all animal species. The basic point in each chapter is to make clear that other animal species, especially those with a functioning nervous system and brain, share feelings and many behavior traits with human beings even as they fall short of what is aimed at in the Christian way of life. Thus, in contrast to the way the term “theo-drama” is employed in the writings of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Deane-Drummond takes for granted the historical coevolution of human beings with other animal species within the cosmic process. The eschatological goal of this theo-drama is specified by Christian belief in the ultimate unification of all things in Christ, but the concrete details of how human beings and other animals have influenced one another's behavior and enjoyed one another's company “through millennia of evolutionary living in a common creaturely world” (3) are coming to light only in and through scientific research. The results are quite surprising. Not just human beings, for example, but likewise other animal species have learned the value of cooperation as opposed to competition within a shared social setting. A sense of fairness in dealing with others is not peculiar to human beings but is regularly found in the behavior of other animals toward one another. One even sees compassion of animals toward other animals in distress apart from kinship or blood relation. To guide her ongoing reflections on the similarities and differences between human behavior and the behavior of other animals, Deane-Drummond relies heavily on the work of Thomas Aquinas, “whose Aristotelian approach lends itself to a dialogue with contemporary biology, even if his knowledge of empirical studies has been superseded” (3).

By way of comment and critique on this closely argued and carefully researched book, I first warmly commend Deane-Drummond for pointedly raising the issue of the basic kinship between human beings and other animal species within the ongoing theo-drama of the cosmic process. Relationships, whether creative or destructive, ultimately define us as much as we define them. But, as I see it, Deane-Drummond's impressive work may not have the full impact that it ought to on non-Christians, given her almost exclusive focus on the Incarnation and other tenets of the Christian belief system for the interpretation of the deeper meaning of human life within the cosmic process. Could not the notion of theo-drama, for example, be somehow modified or expanded so as to be used to advantage in other religious traditions in dealing with inevitable differences of viewpoint within the fields of religion and science? Likewise, philosophically oriented individuals like myself may well question whether the relatively fixed worldview of Thomas Aquinas, with its emphasis on the laws of nature as derivative from the unchanging eternal law of God, is genuinely compatible with the evolutionary approach to reality characteristic of work in contemporary natural science. Admittedly, continued espousal of the classical worldview serves as a safeguard against consciously or unconsciously linking belief in ontological naturalism with the working presupposition of methodological naturalism within natural science. But why not instead aim at the development of a new evolutionary metaphysics that would be supportive of the methodology and truth-claims of both religion and science? Aquinas, after all, risked heavy criticism from more conservative peers in linking Christian revelation with Aristotle's philosophy of nature; but his Summa Theologiae eventually became synonymous with orthodoxy.