Many environmentalists believe that the ethos of capitalism is a primary cause of environmental degradation, arguing that only a fundamental shift away from the materialism and competition of the marketplace will allow humans to live within the earth's carrying capacity. A different strand of contemporary thought, free market environmentalism, argues the opposite: private ownership, individual choice, and the creative forces of human ingenuity are the best available means to solve ecological problems. This essay considers how Christian ecological ethics should respond to free market environmentalism, identifying its moral claims and the theoretical questions it poses to our field while also critiquing the shortcomings that accompany its economic view of human nature and character. We advocate a pragmatic approach that engages in a mutually educative dialogue toward the shared goal of protecting the earth and all its inhabitants.

Prudence, for Thomas Aquinas, is an intellectual virtue that requires coincident moral virtue for its sustainability. As such, prudence displays a way of living in which intellect, desire, and emotion are harmoniously integrated. This account resonates strongly with the aims of mindfulness practices within contemporary psychology and with the "interpersonal neurobiology" of Daniel Siegel, for whom health is understood as a context-responsive and narrative integration of cognition, emotion, and embodied experience that promotes and allows for stable self-identity and fulfilling interpersonal relationships. Similarly, prudence for Aquinas is an integrative virtue, integrating intellect and will, theory and context, action and agent, reason and emotion, past and future, the individual and his or her community, and the proximate and ultimate ends of human life. Contemporary mindfulness practices are at their best a school for prudence, and thus they shed an interesting light on Aquinas's account. In turn, Aquinas's account of prudence offers theological parameters for Christian participation in contemporary mindfulness practices.

Why is racism so tenacious? Drawing from recent methodological innovations in the study of racism, this essay explores the appeal of racism and the erotics of race within the imagination. The slippery nature of racism, and its ability to alter its manifestations with ease and hide behind various disavowals, facilitates the racialization of both religious thought and social institutions.

Traditional terms for theology of work, including co-creation and vocation, tend to overvalue work, abetting the alienating conditions of postindustrial labor. To develop a theology that can help workers make sense of work's expansion, abstractness, and precarity, this essay proposes a postindustrial ethic of selective detachment from work. The Benedictine tradition offers a model. According to the Benedictine Rule, monastic work is important as a penitential practice but is strictly circumscribed, with prescriptions to forestall overinvestment in work. By detaching themselves from work, monastics cannot place labor ahead of prayer. In the medieval economy, monastic labor demonstrated work's role in sanctification. Today, the Benedictine Rule demonstrates the need for worldly ascetical practices that will limit work so it does not inhibit someone seeking holiness.

Three figures in the American Reformed tradition—the novelist Marilynne Robinson, the theocentric ethicist James Gustafson, and the biocentric poet Robinson Jeffers—treat the perception of beauty as the framework of moral discernment in ways that seem particularly significant for ecological ethics. Their work makes vividly concrete dimensions of Calvin's theology of creation that have been the subject of increasing theological attention over the past twenty-five years. By focusing on receptivity to natural beauty, their approach suggests a reorientation of the Christian ecological conversation that would root responsibility in grateful awe rather than stewardship, and would substitute graced responsiveness for obligation. This shift away from duty, sacrifice, and self-denial has the prophetic potential to inspire life-way changes that have been hard to effect through caustic critiques of wasteful materialism or exhortations to just regard for generations as yet unborn.

In Calvin's doctrine of sanctification and in recent work on children's moral formation within developmental psychology, we find a surprising convergence. In both cases, moral formation or transformation takes place within the context of a parent's (divine or human) loving and unconditional commitment to a child. Although Reformed doctrines of sanctification have struggled to articulate how the graced change of sanctification is intelligible as a human process, a comparison between these two approaches shows that sanctification is both intelligible to the moral agent and a genuinely human process. This comparison also highlights affective social acceptance as a condition for moral agency that is infrequently addressed in theoretical accounts of moral formation.

While he was archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, the scholar and theologian Rowan Williams faced divisive controversy over ethical issues such as human sexuality, women's ordination, and the treatment of religious minorities. This essay presents a selective retrieval of Williams's approach to communal disagreement as an important contribution of the Anglican tradition to the future of Christian ethics. Williams's concept of ethical discernment as an exercise in "recognition" offers a way for communities to approach differences as fostering constructive engagement and expanding ethical insight. Kathryn Tanner's analysis of culture and tradition in Theories of Culture is used to explicate the strengths and limitations of Williams's thought.

This essay reconstructs the medieval practice of evangelical poverty as a resource for contemporary political theology. Francis of Assisi and his predecessors committed themselves to a form of voluntary poverty that directly contested the distribution of social power in twelfth-century Europe. Evangelical poverty was for them a critical and liberating practice. Yet they disagreed about how this practice was related to standing norms of ecclesial authority. Francis broke with the earlier movements by defining evangelical poverty as a posture of humility and obedience rather than as a counterclaim on apostolic authority. These movements are worth retrieving both for their shared commitment to a liberating poverty and for the questions they raise about the relationship between poverty and authority.

Detention, a pillar of the contemporary US immigration system, has detrimental effects on those who are incarcerated, their families, and their communities. Following a discussion of immigration detention and the ways in which faith-connected groups are responding, this essay draws on twenty in-depth interviews to explore the links between these ethical practices and the Christian mystical tradition. In particular, it brings the voices of activists responding to immigration detention into conversation with the three stages of the mystical journey articulated by Dorothee Soelle—being amazed, letting go, and resisting. The essay argues that mysticism and action for social justice are intimately interwoven, and it suggests that recognition of this could enrich Christian discussion and praxis surrounding immigration.

Aquinas's teachings on usury are difficult to apply directly to the modern economy given the tremendous transformations in economic institutions and sensibilities since his day. However, his treatment of the relationship between the abstraction of money and the problem of disordered concupiscent desire proves to be helpful in understanding modern financial instability. Money invites a disordered understanding of the infinite good that is the object of human desire, channeling that desire into the fruitless quest for indefinite accumulation, which is both destabilizing to the economic system and ultimately frustrates the pursuit of real goods. Aquinas's thought offers clarity about the proper role of economic goods in a life well lived that is necessary for thinking about the role finance should play in a humane economy.

This essay offers a constructive, ecological extension of Martin Luther King Jr.'s social ethics using a phrase from Henry David Thoreau's classic, Walden, that King often used: "improved means to an unimproved end." King argued that this Thoreauvian theme "summarized" modern life; in particular, he employed this idea to address the systemic, interconnected forces of racism, materialism, and militarism. This essay argues that King's work is fertile ground for the cultivation of an ecological ethic capable of resisting the logic of commodification of the West.

This essay presents an apology for theological humanism drawn from Christian sources as the most adequate ethical stance for respecting and enhancing the integrity of human and nonhuman life into the global future. After clarifying the meaning and task of an apology, the essay begins with the ethical challenge posed by global dynamics and then explores the endangerment to future life by the expansion of human power. In order to formulate an ethics in this fraught context, the essay then explores the relation between the discourses of identity and responsibility as two dominant patterns of thought in current ethics and argues that claims about "identity" must be situated within an ethics of responsibility. The apology concludes by uncovering the ethical meaning of theological humanism in terms of Christian affirmation of being fully alive in love through Christ and before God.

Police and protesters clashed in the aftermath of fatal police violence against unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland. Commentators on all sides of the public discourse about these events invoked the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. to ground their opinions of the violent encounters as well as the public protests and protest movements that ensued in response. I explore the competing invocations, reflecting on what about King captures the American public imagination, what gets omitted, and what is at stake in the debate. Finally, I examine how King's theological ethics can both inform the means of public protest and address the abuses of American state power.

Francisco de Vitoria offers a stimulating vision of moral cosmopolitanism that foreshadows the cosmopolitanism implicit in contemporary Catholic social teaching. After drawing a distinction between mora/cosmopolitanism and politica/cosmopolitanism, this essay retrieves Vitoria's cosmopolitan vision in his efforts to defend "the rights of the Indians" through concepts such as subjective rights, ius gentium, the right to travel, and the inherent human dignity of all people. Nonetheless, he opposes all claims of universal sovereignty. Vitoria thus appears as advocating moral but not political cosmopolitanism, perhaps because his political imagination is shaped by monarchies, with their totalitarian tendencies, rather than by modern democracies. The final part of the essay explores how the distinction between different kinds of cosmopolitanism illuminates the variety of positions on the subject to be found in contemporary Catholic social teaching.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's account of a transnational "confessing" church, developed with allusion to W.E.B. Du Bois, offers critical potential for addressing the problem of the global color line. To make this case, I first trace the ways in which Du Bois's and Bonhoeffer's German-American exchange studies contribute to their critical standpoints. Bonhoeffer's "Protestantism without Reformation" is then examined to show that its view of American denominations is not mere German paternalism but a critique of how atomized churches can mask racial segregation, even as it takes seriously America's founding as a "nation of refugees." Finally, Bonhoeffer's references to intercultural encounter, particularly with respect to the Jewish diaspora in his later Ethics, provide for the extension of his ecclesiology beyond Germany and the "West." Specifically, Du Bois's own creedal language and pan-Africanism require that a truly global confession of the "form of Christ" must attend to unrecognized histories from the "Black Atlantic."

I document the historically unprecedented challenges and opportunities attending the prospect of devising ecumenical ethics endorsed by both Catholics and Protestants. First, I offer several reasons for attending to the connection between ecumenism and ethics. This topic has received insufficient attention from scholars of ethics, especially given the importance and challenge of reaching a common moral witness. Second, I review previous comparisons of Catholic and Protestant approaches in ethics. Such work transitions over the twentieth century from dismissive to appreciative. Third, I show how one of the key methodological differentiators softens in recent decades as there emerges an increasing consensus on the moral sources of scripture, natural law, and history. I conclude by emphasizing the humility required for progress in the pursuit of any ecumenical ethics. The route to a common moral witness that manifests the divinely given unity of the church is continual conversion through corporate dialogue on a global scale.

Economic cooperative practices increase the ability of agents and communities to resist or curb ecologically damaging practices and to adapt to inevitable cultural and material transitions due to climate change. The history of African American economic cooperatives demonstrates how such efforts can build practical and leadership skills, transform local culture, and lay groundwork for wider collective action. Such practices fit Willis Jenkins's model of prophetic pragmatism insofar as they draw on inherited traditions and transform culture and us. Contemporary Christians and church communities can encourage economic cooperation as a form of resistance to ecological destruction and, in doing so, encourage the habits of humility, hope, and courage.

Recent religious reflection on the nature of justice divides largely along two camps: Nicholas Wolterstorff and others perceive strong compatibility between Christian thought and justice-as-natural rights, while "right-order" theorists committed to premodern notions of justice, such as Oliver O'Donovan, challenge the theological integrity of rights. Much is at stake in this debate. O'Donovan worries that Christian enthrallment with justice-as-rights betokens conceptual desperation. Wolterstorff argues that justice-as-right-order discounts human dignity. There is some truth to each claim, although each thinker also overlooks important constructive possibilities. This essay offers an extended critique of justice-as-rights, identifying crucial missing biblical and theological features. It then sketches out a contemporary right-order account that responds to Wolterstorff s concerns about human dignity. The insights uncovered in this theological debate extend beyond Christian ethics in ways that reconceive the pursuit of justice in religiously pluralistic polities.

In my writings on the history of human rights, the Axial Age, and the genesis of values, I have treated the experience of self-transcendence and the attribution of sacredness as a fundamental anthropological phenomenon. But this fundamental fact of ideal formation has a flip side: The sacralization of particular meanings is originally always also the sacralization of a collectivity. This I call the danger of self-sacralization. In this contribution I offer a brief, historically oriented sociological sketch of the tensions between "religion" and "politics" in light of this assumption, discuss H. Richard Niebuhr's relevance for this area of study, and illustrate my thesis with regard to contemporary cases where the danger of self-sacralization is particularly urgent.