This essay illustrates how insights gained from virtue ethics would reframe clergy ethics. By sketching virtue-oriented themes that have received scant attention in the current work on clergy ethics, I show how a virtue-informed clergy ethics focuses on moral growth and the everyday aspects of ministry instead of dilemmas and discrete actions. Those virtue-oriented themes include the role of prayer and friendship in the formation of the pastor's character, the refocusing of pastoral moral leadership on training parishioners for the Christian life, and the way virtue ethics changes what we perceive to be the central ethical issues of ministry and how we deliberate about them.

This essay analyzes Ernst Troeltsch's course lectures on "practical Christian ethics" held at the University of Heidelberg in 1911—12. The author situates these lectures within Troeltsch's wider teaching activity, assesses the reliability of the extant student notes which preserve them, explains the idiosyncratic meaning of a "practical" ethics within Troeltsch's total theological program, critically interprets the method and content of the lectures, and suggests in conclusion that Troeltsch's approach to the tension between the universal aspirations of, and the particular historical genesis of, religio-ethical traditions remains relevant, perhaps even instructive, for contemporary debates in religious and theological ethics.

In recent years, there has been a debate, centrally between James Turner Johnson and James F. Childress, on how to understand the just war tradition. The international arena has historically served as the context for demonstrating the normative and political utility of the just war tradition. Contemporary experience shows, however, that violence is not only a distant issue, but it is also a local, domestic problem. Investigation into contemporary police practice, a lacuna in Christian ethics, with regard to the justifiable use of force can help clarify which understanding of the just war tradition is preferable.

Emerging from the first successful cloning of a mammal, a sheep named "Dolly," is a critical but under-asked question: "Why do so many of us find this feat (and its potential application to human subjects) to be deeply disturbing?" This paper suggests that the answer rests not primarily in the theological and philosophical arguments most often heard against cloning but in the threat the act poses to our foundational "cosmological categories." Building upon theories introduced by Mary Douglas and Jeffrey Stout, the essay argues that Dolly becomes a "cabbit" in sheep's clothing—an outwardly innocuous entity which, like Stout's cat/rabbit, offends at a deep and visceral level. Like the cabbit, the cloned sheep and especially the cloned human are disturbing not because of the way they are produced nor by the physical threat they pose but because they challenge the very way we understand and organize our world.

During 1996-1997, between the OJ Simpson criminal and civil trials, the media needed a sensational topic. They discovered "Ebonics." The Oakland, California School Board's resolution declaring "Ebonics" a language triggered controversy and condemnation. This essay explores ethical implications for the pedagogical use of Ebonics from a Womanist perspective, as a vehicle of empowerment. After defining Womanist thought, I explore: (1) the history of Ebonics and the Oakland School Board's concerns; (2) the impact of Ebonics on student and teacher authority; (3) the hermeneutics and ethical issues surrounding Ebonics; and (4) how using Ebonics empowers or marginalizes teacher and student.

Feminist theologians and ethicists reject the normative nature of traditional gender roles as unjust, and as part of a sinful social order. In its place, they advocate mutuality and alternative anthropologies. Although I find much of this work compelling, I question its rejection of capitalism as endemic of the old sexual-political order. Capitalism is not monolithic, nor is it necessarily hostile to women. I advocate a stakeholder model of capitalism, which can more readily address the feminist critique. Such a model would reject both the rigid traditional family roles that denigrate women, and the radical individualism that undermines family.

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.