Evangelicals are relative newcomers at the table of North American Christian Ethics. This paper analyzes evangelical ethics as a diverse movement with varying ethical methodologies and moral convictions, but with several common commitments that hold it together as a "loosely-bound movement" within the contemporary religious and moral landscape. The paper first sketches the historical background of evangelicalism with some of its primary theological and sociological features. It then probes the movement's ethical thought in two areas: the popular shapers of evangelical ethics (since evangelicalism has always been a populist movement) and the academic ethicists. These analyses will demonstrate that evangelicalism is not the monolithic movement it is sometimes thought to be. The profile concludes with an analysis of the major commonalities shared by this diverse movement, namely its commitment to biblical authority as the ultimate source and norm of ethical reflection, and its commitment to the Christian moral life as a reflection of its piety and understanding of salvation.

This paper enlists the resources of Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy to argue that much of contemporary ethical discourse has become inarticulate about the idea of moral change qua change of consciousness. Tracing this inarticulacy to the eclipse of a notion of consciousness in three dominant forms of current moral discourse (liberal ethics, various forms of moral particularism, and postmodern ethics), the paper argues that these forms of ethics neglect the idea of moral change in favor of an emphasis on public and communal forms of moral language and moral reasoning. The paper's constructive thesis is that Murdoch's retrieval of the idea of consciousness, guided by a twofold notion of the good, provides critical resources for a recovery of the idea of moral change. In particular, her normative account of the work of moral imagination encourages moral agency in a cultural situation in which consciousness is increasingly formed by abstract systems and a global flow of images that are seemingly impervious to moral evaluation.

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.

How did Karl Barth understand ethical deliberation and what importance does his conception have for Christian ethics? These questions have been hotly contested. Some scholars find in Barth an occasionalism and/or intuitionism that leaves no room for ethical deliberation and has no relevance for Christian ethics. Other scholars find in him versions of casuistry or narrative ethics that have much relevance for Christian ethics. I argue that for Barth ethical deliberation involves an irreducible heterogeneity between the weighing of reasons or values that count for or against a possible course of action, on the one hand, and the act of testing these possible courses of action in encounter with the decision of God concerning them, on the other hand. I then show how casuistry and narrative play a necessary role in ethical deliberation but do not overcome its heterogeneity. Finally, I contrast Barth with superficially similar models of ethical deliberation and point out the theological rationale for his conception.

This essay illustrates the potential of religion to both oppress and empower women, focusing on the role of Buddhism in Thailand in relation to the trafficking of women for the sex industry. After describing a number of ways that traditional Thai Buddhist culture functions to legitimate the trafficking industry, and thereby deny the human rights of women involved in sexual slavery, I draw on the analogy of Christianity in relation to slavery in the ante-bellum American South to make the case that Buddhist teachings have the potential to oppose and condemn practices of sexual slavery as well as to justify and legitimate them. The essay concludes by discussing what are perhaps the most effective sources for empowering women involved in trafficking within the Thai Buddhist tradition.

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.

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.

While Christian ethics utilizes various frameworks and tools, Stanley Hauerwas contends that narrative, character, and community are the crucial ones. This paper utilizes these aspects of Christian ethics to analyze cyberspace, juxtaposing them with Sherry Turkle's (and others') ethnographic studies of cyberspace. It then argues that while Hauerwas's critique of liberal society applies more aptly to cyberspace, his critique contains its own difficulties and internal tensions. Nevertheless, the critique and its difficulties, especially the sectarian charge, provide insights for framing Christian ethics in cyberspace.