In Christian bioethics, the call for a greater integration of social ethics and medical ethics is a popular refrain, yet lasting progress toward this goal has been elusive, in part due to the traditional emphasis on quandary cases in medical ethics. This article develops an alternative approach to moral discernment in health care, employing a theological interpretation of solidarity to promote greater social consciousness in ordinary health care decision making. This shifts the ethical analysis from abstract scenarios to everyday choices, elevating the moral significance of seemingly mundane concerns like antibiotic use and diet and exercise.

This article engages the debate around embodiment in the resurrected life, drawing from sources in disability theology, black theology, and womanist ethics. Do we retain “body marks,” as M. Shawn Copeland calls them in her consideration of the scars and wounds on black bodies? Or, as Nancy Eiesland and Amos Yong discuss it: do we retain our impairments as Christ did after his resurrection? I will describe the debate, highlight concern over continuity of identity, and use J. Kameron Carter’s work on theology and race to propose an alternative approach.

In the opinion of many, medical assistance in dying is advocated primarily by secular thinkers whereas Christians seem to be more skeptical. However, we conclude that Dutch euthanasia practice, the most liberal in the world, would not have been possible without the support of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands. We examine four sources that illustrate the nature and extent of that support: national surveys from 1970–2018, official church reports from 1972–2003, contributions to the public debate in the formative 1970s and 1980s made by protestant theologians and physicians, and a recent survey amongst Reformed pastors regarding their experiences with a parishioner’s euthanasia request. In the form of seven characteristics of Dutch Calvinism we explore the reasons for this early advocacy and try to understand why this support seems to be fading since the turn of the century.

This article argues that Catholic health care facilities should resist the emerging consensus in clinical ethics, which contends that patients suffering from intravenous drug use induced endocarditis should be denied multiple heart valve replacements. The article demonstrates that the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, as well as core concepts in the Christian moral tradition, such as human dignity, the preferential option for the poor, and the common good, reject this emerging consensus. Patients suffering from endocarditis who inject drugs should, in principle, be eligible for second, third, and even fourth valve replacements. While hospitals may protect and promote the common good by limiting access to multiple heart valve surgeries for this patient population, these limitations should emerge from evidence that such surgeries harm the common good of access to primary health care for all members of a community.

To follow Jesus’s command to love our neighbors in our neoliberal age, Christians must cultivate new theological and economic stories that urge practices of sufficiency—ways of living with “enough.” The neoliberal version of the United States’s origin story of the American Dream, built on individual responsibility and meritocracy, knows no end to monetary accumulation. And the ways neoliberal rationality colors the Christian creation story can reinforce the drive toward endless accumulation. There are ways of living and practicing Christian stories, however, that can cultivate the kind of communities that form people to know how to say “enough.” This article argues that there is no genuine community, service to others, or love of neighbor if Christians cannot live out of these new stories that cultivate an ethics of sufficiency. Economically privileged Christians cannot love our lower-income neighbors if we continue to participate in a rationality that encourages limitless economic acquisition.

The doctrine of the image of God is often regarded as grounding human dignity in something permanent and unchanging that transcends our attitudes and behaviors. Yet we persistently encounter the argument that particular human individuals or groups have acted so as to forfeit their moral standing as fellow humans. They are bestialized, categorized as non-human animals, lifting ordinary restraints on punishment. I examine the logic of this argument in John Locke, Thomas Aquinas, and contemporary felony disenfranchisement, showing how it involves slippage between the unobjectionable notion that specific rights may in particular circumstances be forfeited, and the deeply troubling claim that one’s moral standing as human can as such be forfeited. I argue that an apparently similar rhetoric of dehumanization employed by Frederick Douglass, in contrast, refrains from stripping the opponent of moral considerability.

In Catholic social thought (CST), work that is exploitative, immoral, or hopelessly monotonous can be labeled alienating: its performance makes the worker a stranger to her own, God-given human nature. CST traditionally understands sex work, which directs the human sexual faculties to ends other than the unitive and procreative, as a paradigmatic example of alienating work, and this paper will not disagree. Instead, I will show how accepting sex worker advocates’ claim that “sex work is work” reveals that while sex work is indeed alienating by CST’s standards, many forms of paid work available today are alienating in similar ways. Listening to sex worker advocates helps CST strengthen its critique of alienating work while acknowledging sex workers’ moral agency.

Modernity’s social betterment programs such as human rights depend upon a narrative of progress. Progress sustains the ideology that the problems of the non-Western and non-white world are caused by a lagging behind in time that prevents the embrace of the norms that deliver social progress and not by unjust structures of global political and economic power. Progress frames the problem of inequality as cultural rather than political. This occlusion of power means that human rights do not attempt to address important power differences between the Global North and the Global South. Because human rights discourse is undergirded by progress, material human rights frames and institutions actually prevent radical change and reproduce imperial domination. Human rights, therefore, cannot deliver on their promise of equality. This promise must instead be entrusted to an eschatological hope that rejects progress and is disruptive of ongoing oppressive power arrangements.

Biomedical technologies capable of sharply reducing or ending human aging, “radical life extension” (RLE), call for a Christian response. The authors featured in this article offer some preliminary thoughts. Common themes include: What kind of life counts as a “good life;” the limits, if any, of human freedom; the consequences of extended life on the human species and on the Earth; the meaning and value of finite and vulnerable embodied life; the experience of time; anthropological self-understanding; and human dignity. Notably, all four authors share serious concerns about RLE’s potential effects.

This essay argues that Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), one of Russia’s most creative religious philosophers, makes an important contribution to Christian social ethics by positing “blessing” as a central moral act. Drawing on Orthodox liturgical practices of blessing, Florensky redescribes reality; it is filled with God’s energies. Especially in letters from the gulag, after his arrest in 1933 for “counter-revolutionary” activity, Florensky calls forth the sacramental mystery of the natural world around the camps and of each person to whom he writes. In attending to them in their concrete particularity, he offers resistance to a totalitarian regime that would reduce them to raw, exploitable material.

A false sense of freedom is often blamed for gender nonconformity. Transgender and genderqueer persons are accused of manipulating their bodies according to their will and due to a mistaken sense of freedom. This paper challenges this assumption and suggests that it is cisgender persons who ought to adopt a posture of genuine Christian moral freedom, which requires taking risks, seeing that new possibilities of life exist, and recognizing truth in the experiences and bodies of transgender persons. The paper begins by surveying recent theological scholarship on gender fluidity and gender transitions, which offers robust resources but does not address moral freedom, and Catholic magisterial responses to “gender ideology,” which hinge on the assumption that radical autonomy is to blame. The paper then draws on James Gustafson’s rich description of Christian freedom, which he pairs with hope, to suggest that cisgender persons should adopt the posture of Christian freedom that transgender and genderqueer persons already live.

Epistemic questions about what constitutes the “human” are intrinsically tied to discussions of “identity” and the dynamic tensions between universal and relative constructions of the “self” versus the “other.” In this paper, putting the writings of Pope Francis on migration in conversation with Paul Ricoeur’s concept of solicitude, which takes into account the “suffering other,” and “nameless” or “anonymous” faces, and Kristin Heyer’s discussion of civic kinship with its emphasis on embracing human difference, I examine the relations between “identity,” “self” and “otherness,” and assess their implications for discussions of solidarity.

I specify both challenges and opportunities for integrating social scientific and theological accounts of “the human.” I first show that the interests of many theological ethicists lead them to engage social scientific studies. I then demonstrate that numerous social scientists caution against relying on their publications about the human since these results are of questionable generality and veracity. I next identify some research practices that are recommended by social scientists for restoring the credibility of their publication record. I also illustrate how theological ethicists can benefit from adopting these practices in their quest to provide a general and true account of the human. I conclude that theological anthropology is a rich locus for interdisciplinary engagement, though lasting work on this topic requires sacrificial commitment to the truth, honest willingness to scrutinize one’s sources, and patient attention to particularities.

The COVID-19 pandemic is critically analyzed as a social magnifying glass that exacerbates pre-existing unjust situations and contexts—locally, nationally, and internationally. Hence, to reflect ethically on the multiple challenges, which people face during this crisis, requires to address the social and political determinants of health. The essay articulates a systemic approach that examines, first, unjust structural dimensions (i.e., poverty, gender, and racism); and second, local and global practices in healthcare, with privileged attention given to structural dynamics, professionals, decisions, and institutional leadership. As a result, the ethics of global public health stresses how health is a shared, interconnected, and inclusive good that should be carefully protected and urgently promoted.

This essay asks: How do the realities of embodied trauma inflicted by racism interface with virtue theory? This question illuminates two lacunae in virtue theory. The first is attention to race. We argue that the contemporary academic virtue literature performs largely as a White space, failing to address virtue theory’s role in the social construction of race, ignoring the rich and vibrant resources on virtue ethics alive within the Black theological tradition that long antedates Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, and segregating the emerging literature on race and virtue from the broader discourse. The second is lack of attention to embodiment. More precisely, contemporary virtue theory, informed largely by Aristotle, Aquinas, and MacIntyre, has no conceptual space to theorize the body’s role acquiring and deploying virtue and vice. To explore this nexus, we draw on racial trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem, Katie Walker Grimes, and Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited to challenge contemporary virtue theory and open new possibilities for a robustly corporate, enfleshed theological virtue ethic.