THIS ESSAY MAKES AN ETHICAL CASE FOR UNBOUNDED BUT NOT UNLIMited economic growth. The preliminary case for such growth is its correlation with significant reductions in global poverty and the wealth that is created by economic growth. The essay then seeks to show that opposition to growth often rests on controversial assumptions about the nature of markets and productivity. I challenge these assumptions by presenting two important developments in economic theory: new growth theory, especially as related to the work of economist Paul Romer, and evolutionary economics, a trajectory that has evolved into "complexity economics." An ethic of "creative abundance" is presented as a framework from within which to evaluate the prescriptive claims of the essay.

IN CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND THE SIT-IN AND WAR AND THE CHRISTIAN CONscience, Paul Ramsey describes politics as a realm of "deferred repentance." Despite several troubling implications of this phrase, I believe the concept of repentance in his work provides an illuminating point of entry into a theological discussion of political judgment. I begin with the question of what Ramsey means by "deferred repentance" and proceed to a wider discussion of his theology of repentance and call for creative political reconstruction. This involves recognition of his debts to H. R. Niebuhr's war articles from the 1930s and '40s and his use of repentance as the determinative motif for a Christian response to war. I also examine the significance of the concept in Ramsey's debates in the 1960s and '70s over how the Vietnam War might be justified. He uses repentance in each of these engagements to demonstrate the reliance of all political judgments on a prior theological account of certain features of human interaction, namely, the contingency and temporality of created existence.

CONTEMPORARY MUSLIM SCHOLARS WHO SEEK TO RECONCILE GENDER egalitarian values with the premodern patriarchal Islamic tradition face a dilemma. Because the two values—gender egalitarianism and patriarchy—are fundamentally at odds with each other, scholars must choose one to privilege over the other. If the premodern Islamic tradition is privileged, then the ideal of gender egalitarianism is compromised. However, favoring gender egalitarian values at the expense of the premodern Islamic tradition leads to the loss of authority within the believing community. This essay explores the options available to Muslim scholars as they negotiate the egalitarian—authoritative dilemma in the context of the Qur'anic exegesis of the husbandly privilege to discipline wives in Qur'an 4:34.

THERE IS A RELATIVE DEARTH OF THEOLOGICAL CONTRIBUTION TO PRESENT-day discussion about the status of territorial borders. Secularist discourse tends to divide between "partialists" and "impartialists." Partialists work with an ideal of states as distinct cultural communities, which justifies priority for the interests of citizens over refugees. Impartialists work with an ideal of states as cosmopolitan agents, which takes into account equally the interests of citizens and refugees. The aim of this essay is to show how selected biblical texts help to rethink these categories and offer different, theologically informed ways of construing the meaning of borders. The need for an "ethic of answerability" is established and initial suggestions are given as to how this approach might be developed.

THIS ESSAY EXAMINES THE RELEVANCE FOR RELIGIOUS ETHICS OF BUDDHIST Abhidhamma texts, those dealing with the analysis and systematization of mental states arising in and examined by meditation practice. Developing recent scholarship on the prevalence and significance of interlocking lists in Buddhist canonical texts and commentaries, the Buddhist use of lists in the Abhidhamma constitutes a kind of narrative expression of moral development through the sequential occurrence of carefully defined mental states. Attention to this narrative dimension of the moral life, while related to other recent proposals about the place of narrative in religious ethics, offers a way to employ this underexamined genre of religious literature (lists) drawn from a comparative context (Buddhist and Christian ethics), in service of a more nuanced account of moral development.

ALL SCHOLARSHIP OCCURS IN CONTEXT, AND ACADEMIC SILOS—WHERE scholars interact with only a narrow circle of specialists like themselves—too often eclipse the biases of academic disciplines. This essay recommends interdisciplinary work by Christian ethicists, reviews some fruits available from substantive engagement with mainstream economics, and urges graduate programs in Christian ethics to encourage and enable students to do substantive coursework in another discipline to broaden and deepen Christian ethical engagement with contemporary moral problems.

THIS ESSAY EXPLORES THE IMPLICATIONS OF A NATURAL LAW ACCOUNT of marriage for the gay marriage controversy, starting from the concept of the natural law developed by scholastic jurists and theologians in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Certainly, the scholastics themselves unanimously condemned homosexual acts, and probably never entertained the possibility of same-sex marital unions. Yet this fact taken by itself does not mean that their overall concept of the natural law and the approach to marriage developed out of that concept must necessarily rule out gay marriages. We are the heirs of several centuries of further experiences with and reflection on marriage, and through this process our own conceptions of both marriage and sex itself have changed—leading to perspectives very different from the scholastics yet recognizably products of a trajectory of thought that they initiated. In this essay I argue that the scholastic concept of the natural law, when developed and applied within a contemporary context, does not rule out gay marriage but on the contrary gives us reasons to support the legal recognition of such unions.