Christian ethicists writing about the church need to take the contributions of sociology of religion more clearly into account when they develop their theories. Using the work of Tex Sample and Robert Wuthnow, the author criticizes the image of the church as "colony" adopted by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, as well as the model of church as "discipleship of equals" supported by feminist biblical scholar Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza. Neither model of the church attends adequately to various sociological realities in the church, in particular, to the influences of class and social location on church communities and their members.

More than any other dimension of modern war, strategic use of air power has systematically violated the moral principle of non-combatant immunity to direct military attack that lies at the heart of the idea of just war. This paper will argue that new air weapons and tactics, such as those used in the Gulf War, mark a real change in that moral reality of war. Further, the paper explores directions in which weapons procurement, tactics, and military doctrine should continue to evolve if the military forces of the United States are to continue to improve their capabilities to conduct stragetic bombing campaigns in future wars within the limits of just war.

In this essay, I consider the rival liberal and communitarian accounts of justice emerging in complex, pluralist societies. I argue that we err in posing the question of human rights as a Hobson's choice between a formal, universal metanarrative, as envisioned in philosophical liberalism, or as a merely local, ethnocentric narrative of the western bourgeoisie, as in the communitarian critique. For human rights are best viewed rhetorically, as establishing the possibility of rationally persuasive argument across our varied narrative traditions. The essay concludes by attending to the role of religious belief in the public reason of a postmodern society.

Women's informal accounts of their experience, news reports, and psychological and endocrinological studies concur that maternal-infant relations are inevitably erotic, if not explicitly sexually charged. In a culture that both affirms pursuit of "natural" pleasure and condemns overt eroticism in any relationship between unequals, maternal erotic experience is problematic. This essay gathers insights from the literatures of psychoanalysis, naturalism, maternal practice, and victim advocacy, as well as the Christian theological ethics of Lisa Sowle Cahill, Christine E. Gudorf, and Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, to construct a tentative descriptive and prescriptive account of maternal eroticism.

The paper argues that while Schleiermacher intends to base Christian ethics on the Christian principle of a supra-rational knowledge of God's will communicated solely through Christ, and not available to human reason, Schleiermacher nevertheless borrows for his Christian ethics from his philosophical ethics. He is able to do this because his philosophical ethics, as distinct from Kant's, incorporates insights from religious feeling. Schleiermacher's Christian ethics, therefore, is more a theory of Christian, reformative action in the church and the state than a full-blown religious ethics.

This paper examines recent philosophical retrievals of the ancient idea of askesis and argues that they face a dilemma. On the one hand, these retrievals embrace certain assumptions often associated with "antitheory" and moral particularism in ethics; yet ancient forms of askesis were based on assumptions that most antitheorists would reject. After presenting a threefold critical typology of approaches to askesis—existential (Hadot), aesthetic (Foucault), and therapeutic (Nussbaum)—the paper demonstrates the limitations of each model and presents an alternative reflexive model, drawn in part from the work of Charles Taylor and Iris Murdoch, as a more adequate approach.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.