What does it mean to be human in the aftermath of mass trauma and violence? When victims and perpetrators of gross human rights violations live in the same country, and sometimes as neighbors, what strategies can help individuals and communities deal with trauma in a way that restores dignity to victims and enables perpetrators to be accountable for their crimes? This essay explores these questions and discusses examples that illustrate attempts to create sites for listening, for moral reflection, and for initiating the difficult process of dialogue at community and individual levels after mass trauma and violence. It is argued that in the aftermath of historical trauma, restoring human bonds requires a new vocabulary of rehumanization. This new mode of being human calls for a "reparative humanism" that opens toward a horizon of an ethics of care for the sake of a transformed society. Examples drawn from two sources are discussed to explore the idea of an "ethics of care.'' First, insights from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa are discussed to show how the work of the TRC enabled dialogic spaces in which new subjectivities emerged in the encounter between victims/survivors and perpetrators. Second, the essay engages in a reinterpretation of Simon Wiesenthal's book The Sunflower as a story that continues to pose a challenge about how to reclaim a sense of being human in the aftermath of unspeakable crimes against humanity. The essay concludes with a critical reflection on Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of responsibility and suggests that it is a compelling vision in societies facing a violent and traumatic past.

The biblical love imperative—reframed as "Care for the aging other, as you care for your aging self"—is fundamental for an ethics of aging. Kantian, utilitarian, and eudaemonist theories assume an ageless, rational, active individual. Frail old age, however, comes with dependency and decay. An ethics of aging therefore needs to be relational and must account for the fear of aging. The elderly remind us that death is inescapable; the body, fallible; and self-esteem, transitory. The love command offers a relational ethics that overcomes the fear of aging and enables us to see that love for our aging self makes good elderly care possible.

Within the sources of black theology no narrative is more important than the Exodus. Its importance within the slave religion and the civil rights movement has made it foundational for understanding the nature of God, the work of Christ, and the purposes of humanity. However, the Sabbath, which is the Israelite response to the Exodus, has not been adopted as a part of the Exodus narrative. As such, it has been underutilized as a form of social ethical critique. A rediscovery of the Sabbath provides a meaningful way of reinforcing the extant concerns of black theology and providing avenues for new exploration and conversation. The purpose of this essay is to point out a few of those meaningful avenues and to argue for continued exploration of the theological and ethical possibilities presented by the Sabbath.

The uncritical appropriation of Eurocentric ethical paradigms can be detrimental to disenfranchised communities of color, especially the Hispanic community. This essay argues for an ethical methodology rooted in the hopelessness found within Latino/a marginalized communities. Advocating for an ethics para joder (screw with) disrupts a normative Eurocentric ethical discourse that at times normalizes and legitimizes "empire." The essay begins by casting a critical gaze at the academy before analyzing the overall social context in which Hispanics find themselves.

A narrow conception of who counts among the marginalized can blind ethicists to the precarious position of groups who function as middle agents between elites and the lower class. The imposition of middle agency on such groups is a form of oppression that leaves them vulnerable to abandonment and attack. In Rwanda, discourses emanating from colonialism, classism, and racism obscured the Tutsi as middle agents, despite white Catholics' dedication to the poor. By neglecting to recognize middle agency as a type of marginalization, missionaries contributed negatively to the genocide. Liberatory practices are recommended so that ethicists can expose and challenge the dynamics of middle agency and include all the marginalized in liberation strategies.

Scholars celebrate Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a "prophet of justice for the oppressed" who identified the need "to see the great events of world history from below." But few address the thorniest aspect of Bonhoeffer's ethics for the marginalized: the mandates or divine commissions in church, marriage, work, and government made concrete within certain orders of relationship and authority. Bonhoeffer's marriage mandate poses particular problems as it reinforces unjust social structures. Fortunately, striking similarities between Bonhoeffer's ethics and feminist thought—attention to concrete contexts, the role of emotion in moral reasoning, opposition to harmful dualisms, and emphasis on relationality—suggest that feminists are well-placed to critique and reconstruct Bonhoeffer's account. Construing the mandates as contexts for "genuine communities of argument" repurposes them to combat rather than condone injustice.

Eastern Orthodox theology affirms the liturgy as an anticipatory icon of God's reign that establishes a pattern of relationships by which Christians are called to live in and for the world. Taking at face value an Orthodox theological claim that the liturgy is the sole source for deriving ethical actions, Orthodox theologians typically address the question of female priesthood within the existing visual parameters of the liturgy in which men exercise authority. Given patterns addressed by both aspects of ritual theory and contemporary anthropology, the articulation of anthropologies that likewise limit the authority and capability of women is to be expected. However, these defenses of the exclusion of women from full participation in the liturgy, including sacramental ordination, are the result of a reductionistic view of the priesthood, the liturgy, and human persons. Neither Orthodox personalism, nor its ethical implications, nor a few rarely glimpsed snippets of the Orthodox tradition support such reductionism. Rather, recognition of the unique capabilities of women by the community and their welcome participation within the community encourages the joy that underlies the transformation of a people who live for the life of the world.

While Simone de Beauvoir's inaugural reflection in The Coming of Age depicting the aging experience as one of social marginalization and lament seemingly endures, a surprising source for offering hope to aging persons may be found in the theology of Karl Barth in congruence with W. H. Vanstone. This essay reconsiders the meaning of aging within a Christological interpretation that not only values the various life stages along with intergenerational relationships but also offers meaning for the embodiment of active and passive agency during the aging stage of life.

The practice of sending and receiving sexually explicit images via mobile phones ("sexting") has grown exponentially in recent years with the accessibility of cellular technology. This essay examines this practice, when conducted by teenagers, in light of a Christian feminist approach to justice. Without harmfully exhorting girls' sexual "purity", we must nevertheless develop a moral framework that challenges the practice of sexting while simultaneously empowering young women to claim primary control over their own sexual experience. For Christians, justice, addressed to sexting, must attend to sexual injustice even as it promotes genuine freedom, embodiment, mutuality and relational intimacy, and equality.

Solidarity is a key virtue in Christian family ethics. Emphasizing the institutional and practical dimensions of this principle, this essay claims that inter- and intrafamily solidarity are critical aspects of a Christian family ethics emanating from Latina/o theological anthropology and family practices. Interfamily solidarity, exemplified by the Latina/o family practice of extended communal family, emphasizes the integral dynamic between family solidarity and the common good. Intrafamily solidarity simultaneously critiques abusive dynamics in Latina/o families while asserting the necessary dialectic between individual and familial flourishing. This articulation of family solidarity asserts a robust role for extended communal families in fostering cooperation across difference in civic life.

Drawing on the final report of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission and on theology, this essay builds on Miroslav Volf's social Trinitarian account of reconciliation as embrace. Specifically, this essay argues for the necessity of various forms of justice in social and political reconciliation and against the priority of forgiveness in reconciliation argued for by Volf. The heart of this argument is a theological anthropology that claims that to be created in the image of a perichoretic God who is Trinity is necessarily to be interdependent beings. This interdependence is manifest in the interpersonal, social, and political relations that constitute and are constituted by individual humans and the institutions in which they live. Therefore, the creation and maintenance of just institutions is necessary for the formation of persons capable of practicing reconciliation, and for reconciled persons to live within.

This essay explores how it might be possible to recover a more pluralistic and therefore participatory understanding and exercise of the teaching office in the Christian Church by, first, briefly reflecting upon the historical backdrop to the emergence and development of the role of authoritative ecclesial teacher. Second, I identify some of the ecclesial fault lines and tensions that emerged in the modern and contemporary periods pertaining to teaching authority. Third, I raise the issue of the impact of such developments upon the manner in which Christian churches have sought to offer teachings on ethical issues in recent times. Fourth, I explore, via an ecclesiological analysis that is both a comparative and ecumenical in nature, three visions for retrieving a more participatory and life-giving understanding of the teaching office and practice of the teaching function for our times. The visions explored come from a Reformed, Roman Catholic, and ecumenical standpoint: respectively, those of Richard Robert Osmer, Richard R. Gaillardetz, and Willem Visser 't Hooft. The final section offers some brief conclusions about the potential for truly ecumenical collaboration in moral discernment in the light of such considerations.

This essay considers what it means to work within and attempt to retrieve aspects of a tradition of thought, in particular, the Christian tradition. Doing so places us in close proximity to certain conversation partners, but it does so without closing off possible enrichment from those who do not share our tradition. Perhaps the most critical issue involves freedom—that is, whether retrieving one's tradition undermines our own freedom or our recognition of God's. As an illustration of thinking within the Christian tradition, the essay then considers the concept of a person, attempting to distinguish it from the more recent language of personhood.

The dominant figure in Western Roman Catholic ethics is Thomas Aquinas, and Catholic tradition references a centralized magisterium. Nevertheless, Catholicism is internally pluralistic. After Vatican II, three models of theology and tradition emerged, all addressing gender equality: the Augustinian, neo-Thomistic, and neo-Franciscan. Latina, womanist, African, and Asian ethics of gender present more radical approaches to tradition—suggesting a Junian stream (Rom 16:7). Catholic ethical-political tradition is not defined by a specific cultural mediation, figure, or model but by a constellation of commitments shared by Catholic feminists: difference in unity, moral realism, social meliorism, human equality, preferential option for the poor, and interreligious dialogue.

In Jeffrey P. Bishop's The Anticipatory Corpse (2011) it is argued that the dead body has become epistemologically normative in contemporary medicine. In order to regain the communal bonds necessary for the responsive encounter with the other, medicine is in need of living traditions. This leads Bishop to question whether only theology can save medicine. The present essay takes up on this question with a reply from a Bonhoefferian anthropology, arguing for the embodied human being as being-there-with-others and shows how this is Christologically shaped. The broader aim of the essay is to contribute to the debate on embodiment in theological bioethics. The essay maintains a normative understanding of the corporeal reality of what it means to be human and yet argues that this must always be understood in connection with the responsive relation to the other.

This essay argues that in retrieving the new martyrs and confessors, the approximately two thousand people who suffered directly for their faith under Soviet communist oppression, the Russian Orthodox Church has made publicly available symbols and narratives that bear democratizing potential. The Church's "Icon of the New Martyrs and Confessors" can be interpreted as calling for broad representation of all parts of society in Church and political life, and freedom of the Church to represent its concerns to society without state interference. Although these two principles do not by themselves dictate a particular form of government, a liberal democracy may be their best guarantor. The Russian Orthodox Church therefore need not be seen as essentially antidemocratic. Its symbols and narratives of suffering can also be understood as authorizing democratic reform.

Jesus was a teacher. That's not all he was, but he was surely that. This essay examines Jesus as a moral teacher who selectively retrieved the moral traditions of apocalypse, wisdom, and Torah. He taught as a seer, a sage, and a scribe. Through a ludicrously anachronistic thought experiment—convening a first-century tenure review committee—it will become clear that the apocalyptic tradition was preeminent in Jesus's teaching, giving shape to how he employed the wisdom and legal traditions. Although the decision about Jesus's tenure is shown ultimately to rest in God's hands rather than any human office or institution, lessons are drawn from Jesus as a moral teacher for the vocation of all those who teach Christian ethics.

Benjamin Mays's The Negro's God as Reflected in His Literature outlined a tradition of African American God-talk from the eighteenth century. Mays identified a black social Christianity, what he called "the ethical approach," that recognized why oppressed people "emphasize the justice of God." In doing so, he hoped the book would motivate a new kind of politically informed black religious leadership. In the midst of writing The Negro's God, Mays traveled to India. This essay examines how the Indian independence movement and meeting Gandhi motivated and gave meaning to Mays's work.

Since women and girls compose more than 50 percent of the world’s population, feminist theology quite rightfully should be considered the most important and influential theological movement in our lifetimes. While it is certainly clear that feminism in religion and theology covers a broad spectrum of perspectives—Protestant and Catholic; conservative, progressive, and radical; female exclusive and male inclusive; straight or queer—feminist theology is not a monolithic theological school without differentiation either implicitly or explicitly. As a response to Lisa Sowle Cahill’s “Catholic Feminists and Traditions: Renewal, Reinvention, and Replacement,” this essay contends that Catholic feminist theology has common emphases with its various analogues but has its own inherent complexity and intrinsic debates that have to be reckoned with in order to guarantee that gender equality and sexual justice are realities in our time.

Thomas Aquinas describes the Christian as homo viator: the "human wayfarer" or pilgrim journeying through this world to the heavenly city. This journey is vulnerable to "worldly sin" or "worldliness": an excessive attachment to wealth, status, honors, prestige, and power. A major cause of apathy to the poor and the underprivileged, worldliness treats our identity as purely this-worldly and therefore shuts the door to eschatological hope through subtle forms of presumption and despair. Drawing upon Aquinas and other sources in the Western theological tradition, this essay argues that Christians should retrieve worldliness as a moral category to better understand threats to hope. As a remedy to worldliness, Elliot proposes hope's beatitude of poverty of spirit, suggesting that it both increases solidarity with the poor and helps one grow in the theological virtue of hope.