This essay lays out preliminary grounds for an alternative theological approach to animal ethics based on closer consideration of natural law theory and ethological reports of wild justice compared with dominant animal rights perspectives. It draws on Jean Porter's interpretation of scholastic natural law theory and on scientific narratives about the laws of nature to navigate the difficult territory between nature and reason in natural law. In Western societies, attempts to detach from our animal roots have fostered forms of legal provisions that treat animals as property rather than as living, social beings entangled with human societies.

This essay assesses the possibilities for poetic-liturgical compositions, such as requiems, to promote Christian public engagement when legal frameworks are perceived to be inadequate for securing justice. This essay addresses the perception that legal statutes and procedures failed to honor the personhood of two particular African American males and discusses how aesthetic responses have been used to counter the devaluing of their lives. One such response, Marilyn Nelson's poem Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem, questions the law's failure to protect an eighteenth-century enslaved man. Another requiem memorializes Michael Brown after the teen's killing by a police officer in 2014. This essay discusses these particular aesthetic responses and then evaluates the possibilities for the requiem as a Christian practice of civic engagement by appropriating Charles Mathewes's articulation of hopeful citizenship. In cases when the law is perceived to be complicit in devaluing African American personhood, liturgy can be a meaningful Christian response.

The following remarks were prepared as a response to Mary Ellen O'Connell's plenary address, "The Just War Tradition and International Law against War: The Myth of Discordant Doctrines," at the 2015 annual meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics. O'Connell's essay appears in this issue of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics (vol. 35, no. 2). After noting some points of agreement, the response discusses five main issues: the moral complexity of "peace," the consonance of a peremptory norm against aggression with just war thinking, the formative role of controversial political convictions in the interpretation of international law, the political defects of the current international legal system, and the efficacy of military intervention.

Powerful interest groups have responded to evidence of environmental or health risks by manufacturing doubt, partially through attacks on scientists. The current legal standard for the admissibility of scientific evidence in court enables such strategies for generating doubt. In the face of attacks on their reputations and careers, researchers working on public interest science need the courage to speak the truth despite risk, which Michel Foucault described as the virtue of parrhesia. Parrhesia is also a Christian virtue shown in the willingness to witness to truth in the face of risk because of one's confidence in God. This essay argues that Christianity possesses resources to form individuals in parrhesia in ways that support the dedication to scientific truth.

Most evangelical Christians have understood their faith, rooted in a high view of biblical authority, to be irreconcilable with "homosexuality." This has meant that devoted LGBT people raised as evangelical Christians must choose between their sexuality and their faith/religious community. This creates enormous psychic distress, turns LGBT Christians and their allies away from (evangelical) Christianity, and contributes to intense alienation between the gay community and evangelicals all over the world. But traditional evangelical attitudes on LGBT people and their relationships are beginning to change. This paper offers a description of the state of the conversation in the North American evangelical community on this issue, and summarizes my own normative proposal.

In recent years, scholars have increasingly emphasized the reliance of Adam Smith's moral theory on the virtues. This essay argues that Smith's account of the virtues differs from most virtue theories because his must be read through the construct of the impartial spectator. Smith's spectator bears what Emmanuel Levinas might call a "trace" ofthe transcendent and employs what Amartya Sen calls an "open impartiality," which is an impartiality not bound to any social group. As the essay explores how Smith deploys the virtues, it shows that his deeper concern is not with the virtues but with how people respond to the market, their neighbors, and the structure ofthe world. It shows how H. Richard Niebuhr's concept of responsibility can be a helpful lens for understanding Smith's moral and economic approaches.

The latest trend in ethics, sometimes dismissed as a fad, is the effort to connect ethics to empirical science. Two different versions of this "latest thing'' can be found in the work of Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene. Their projects are, at least partly, unwitting recoveries of eighteenth-century Christian moral sense theory. Such similarities need not worry Christian ethicists but should instead inspire a careful retrieval of sentimentalism. It provides much of what today's empirical ethicists hope to deliver without the pitfalls.