When the author's daughter was hit by a car and remained unconscious for over seven months, she found that there were certain factors where traditional ethical theory was not sufficiently nuanced to guide her practical decision making in regard to her daughter's health care. This article concentrates on three of those factors. They are: (1) no reliable prognosis can be offered for many brain-injured individuals; (2) a patient's age and the relationship between the patient and the caregiver affect the context of caring; and (3) there are severe difficulties in obtaining and sustaining chronic care and accessing scarce resources.

Postmodern ecophilosophers argue that the wilderness idea, specifically the Euro-American conception of pristine nature derived from Muir and inscribed in the 1964 Wilderness Act, is ethnocentric, elitist, androcentric, and unjust. Although the value of existing wilderness areas is not questioned, the background assumptions and policy implications of the received wilderness concept are. This essay first reviews several postmodern critiques of and alternatives to the wilderness idea, and then examines the responses of two leading ecotheologians, Larry Rasmussen and Sallie McFague, to postmodern themes in contemporary ecophilosophy. It concludes by outlining what it might mean for a Christian environmental ethic to go wild.

The Atlanta Project (TAP) was a massive community empowerment program initiated by former President Jimmy Carter in 1990. TAP attempted to empower poor communities in Atlanta by building more inclusive communities of discourse in the public sphere. As such, TAP serves as a useful case study to test the explanatory power of Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action. The essay argues, first, that the relationship of communicative action and strategic action is exceedingly complex in actual organizational life. Institutions from the economic sector may model communicative action, just as voluntary organizations may employ shared labor as a means of building solidarity. Second, TAP's experience reveals that while religious discourse is not rational action, in some communities it may help engender the lifeworld solidarity that enables public discourse to take place. Finally, study of The Atlanta Project suggests that Habermas's concerns about the hegemony of expert cultures are well-founded. TAP found that lasting empowerment required the input of experts, but also that it needed to guard against their tendency to usurp decision-making power from local communities.

Stanley Hauerwas argues that Christian ethics has lost its theological voice because it has accommodated itself to the secular assumptions of modern philosophical ethics. What has led to this fateful accommodation, he argues, is that theology has sought to translate its insights into a nontheological idiom in order to remain publicly intelligible and relevant. My thesis is that Hauerwas rightly recognizes that a fateful accommodation has occurred but wrongly identifies what it is. The real accommodation is found not in theology's attempt to be publicly intelligible and credible but in its widespread acceptance of the modern denial of metaphysics.

Recent attempts by Christian ethicists to mine the tradition of Christian Platonism have overlooked seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth. Cudworth's significance lies in his creative extension of Christian Platonism in response to the early modern situation of religious conflict. He develops an account of autonomy as the self-rule of the "redoubled soul," while retaining a teleological account of the soul's final end as participation in God. Cudworth can help contemporary Christian ethicists imagine a way beyond pro-Enlightenment secular accounts of autonomy and anti-Enlightenment rejections of autonomy in the name of tradition.

Reinhold Niebuhr's critics rightly identify flaws in his anthropology, but err in assuming those flaws irreparably vitiate his larger proposal. In fact Niebuhr's work contains two different anthropologies, one problematically "modernist" and one Augustinian; we may use the latter to critique the former within the context of his larger program, thus retaining (and indeed sharpening) the basic theological-ethical project of Niebuhr's work. By doing so we move beyond Niebuhr's formulations in a way that incorporates his insights at the most basic level, thus showing how we might read putatively "modernist" thinkers back into the presumptively "premodern" traditions from which they spring.

While some of Anders Nygren's critics supplant agape with eros or philia, we may best correct the false simplicity of Nygren's account through a scriptural retrieval of agape itself. I suggest what this textual turn may impart by discussing agape in passages from Exodus, Leviticus, Hosea, Luke, and John. Agape in these texts reflects motivations as disparate as passionate desire, parental longing, committed dutifulness, and protective seclusion—depictions at odds with Nygren's atemporal portrayal of agape as unmotivated and spontaneous. We may be called at times to heed one of these scriptural strains more than another, but to say either that impassivity (Nygren) or any one of these motivations represents the apex of love is misleading. I suggest that we resist the urge to condense our intentionally enigmatic canon.

This essay examines Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich in light of the moral status of self-deception, particularly as defended on grounds of compassion. It argues that Tolstoy's powerful depiction of the interconnection of love and truthfulness reveals the spiritual and moral dangers of self-deception and particularly its destructive consequences for interpersonal love and friendship.

This article summarizes the claims of Owen Flanagan that psychology can make important criticisms of and viable contributions to both religious and philosophical ethics. Flanagan insists that both fields of ethics should pass the test of what he calls the Principle of Minimal Psychological Realism (PMPR). However, in order for Flanagan to escape naïve naturalism, his PMPR test should be used within a hermeneutic philosophy such as that of Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur's concepts of "diagnosis" and "distanciation" can help the moral theologian find a limited but important role for PMPR.

The challenge of joining a productive conversation between the human sciences and theological ethics is here given concrete form by a detailed consideration of Erich Neumann's attack on Christian ethics and his proposed alternative. Making the case that Christian ethics, the "old ethic," subverts consciousness, entails an unreliable conception of the psyche, and encumbers the personality with unbearable burdens, Neumann proposes a "new ethic" enlightened by depth psychology's study of the unconscious. Acknowledging that Neumann's critique deserves attention proportional to the truth of the psychological insights that propel it, the author also suggests that Neumann's proposed ethic may not differ from Christian ethics as dramatically as he insists.

Contemporary ethicists largely ignore the recent, revolutionary findings of psychodynamic psychology. The author argues that ethicists have been dissuaded from taking psychodynamic psychology seriously by (1) hostile attacks on the credibility of the psychodynamic paradigm, and (2) confusion about the contribution that clinical findings can make to ethics. With respect to these obstacles, the credibility of the psychodynamic paradigm is vouchsafed by a growing body of empirical studies that support the main psychodynamic hypotheses, particularly those of interest to ethicists. This new research points toward the need to expand the range of issues covered by contemporary ethics by retrieving and updating the ancient tradition of askesis, involving thought-exercises oriented towards cultivation of habits of mind conducive to acting morally in one's daily activities. The paper concludes by sketching several ways in which self-reflection may improve moral decision-making.

In the debate over Spanish treatment of the natives of the New World, both sides regularly invoked Aristotle on natural slaves. This paper argues that the interpretation of the Spanish Dominican Domingo de Soto displays a greater understanding of Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition of justice than that of Juan Gines de Sepúlveda, the Spanish Humanist. The paper goes on to argue that it is the humanist tradition itself that disposes Sepúlveda to misconstrue Aristotle and the tradition of political justice.

This article explores the multidimensional aspects of intra-Hispanic oppression by unmasking the socio-historical construction of machismo. Usually, traditionally disenfranchised groups construct well-defined categories as to who are the perpetrators and who are the victims of injustices. All too often, Hispanic ethicists tend to identify oppressive structures of the dominant Eurocentric culture while overlooking repression conducted within the Hispanic community. The author suggests that, within the marginalized space of the Latino/a community, there exist intra-structures of oppression along gender, race, and class lines, and that these require a type of analysis that moves beyond (what Edward Said terms) "the rhetoric of blame." One form of such analysis is developed here, as the author examines intra-Cuban sexism, racism, and classism.

This paper explores one of the major issues before transitional societies, the balance among truth, justice, and/or reconciliation. It focusses on the role of truth commissions, with an emphasis on the experience of South Africa. A central thesis of the paper is that establishing a shared truth that documents the causes, nature, and extent of severe and gross human rights abuses and/or collective violence under antecedent regimes is a prerequisite for achieving accountability, meaningful reconciliation, and a foundation for a common future. It develops and applies an approach to reconciliation based on and extending Donald Shriver's concept of "political forgiveness."