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.