WITHTHE OVERWHELMINGLY DISPROPORTIONATE NUMBER OF BLACK MEN on death row, some argue that today's death penalty executions in the United States are the equivalent of legalized lynching. Others may charge this equivalence as hyperbole, but the numbers betray a system of racialized injustice that people of good will ought to reject today as did like-willed people of the churches, synagogues, and community organizations of the years leading up to the civil rights movement and beyond. This essay exposes the factors of race and poverty that lead to determinations of the guilt or innocence and the likelihood of a death or life sentence to those convicted of capital crimes.

THIS ESSAY PRESENTS A PARTICULAR HISTORY OF DETROIT, ONE THAT, BY analyzing the sites and uses of unshared social power, provides an ethical analysis of the processes by which Detroit has become the poorest big city in the United States. Of necessity this story must weave together a variety of elements: economic forces and the theories that justify them, public policies and the politics that underlie them, white racism, sexism, and the spirit of resistance that found its voice in the streets, in radical philosophic and economic theories, in union activism, and in some Christian churches. In this history can be heard the voices of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, the liberal cry for civil rights, and the radical demand for workers' rights. Today, as these same destructive economic and political choices reach into the homes of Detroit's and other cities' white suburbanites, these Detroit voices prophetically challenge business as usual.

TO ADDRESS THE ROLE OF CHILDREN AND FAMILIES IN STRUGGLES FOR justice, we must bear in mind not "family" in the abstract but particular families in particular times and places. The decisions and actions of particular families—certain African American and white families with children of high school age in Little Rock, Arkansas, during the academic years 1957 and 1958—prompted the controversy I reconsider here, between the German-born political philosopher Hannah Arendt and African American participants and leaders in the southern civil rights movement, most famously represented by Martin Luther King Jr.

THIS ESSAY PROPOSES A CONCEPTION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN art and ethics that moves away from popular causative understandings. Turning to select themes treated in the work of the literary theorist Elaine Scarry, the moral and aesthetical theology of Jonathan Edwards, and finally the philosophical reflections of Marcia Muelder Eaton, a more positive theoretical account of the moral relevance of art and various aesthetic experiences emerge. Central to this account is the observation that art objects, specifically those objects that can be judged as beautiful, provoke a number of deliberative practices. These practices range from the solitary to the relational. Special emphasis on the latter practices provide the conceptual space to reflect more imaginatively about the significance of art for the building of political community and the task of Christian ethics more generally.

THIS ESSAY PROPOSES THAT EVERYDAY REFERENCES TO HEROES AND suicides share a lack of critical common sense, and that ethicists should initiate critical discourse on these issues to lift the level of popular reflection. The absence of critical discourse serves the interests of powerful social groups and organizations to the disadvantage of other social groups. The absence of critical discourse is further supported by broad social suspicion of decision making by ordinary individuals resulting in social preference for trusting elites, even when the arguments supporting such preferences are recognized as flawed or untrue.

Although the term "Bioethics" literally means "Life Ethics," there is a frequent differentiation of Christian bioethicists into those focusing on medical issues versus those focusing on environmental issues. Yet, many challenges to human and environmental health are interdependent, suggesting the need for greater collaboration. After exploring the historical trajectories that have led to these two distinct foci in Christian ethics, this essay will argue for a greater collaboration between the two specializations and make some suggestions concerning how collaboration may be facilitated. As an illustration of this thesis, I examine avian influenza as a case study.

IN THE PAST DECADE, RELIGIOUS ACTIVISTS HELPED PASS LIVING WAGE legislation in 177 municipalities across the United States. Drawing on concepts from social movement theory, this essay analyzes the framing success of these religious actors, particularly their mediation of theological inheritances, language, and rituals for broader political audiences. Much of the success of religious actors comes from their universalizing of ethical tropes such as "worker dignity" that resonate with dominant United States' culture while simultaneously not disrupting neoclassical economic ideals (such as independence from the welfare state). This approach entails significant ideological risks, for example, promoting independence from government as an ultimate value, but this framing strategy does introduce, at minimum, an effective triage mechanism in the U.S. capitalist economy and, optimally, a pathway for citizen economic education that funds future transformative politics. The essay concludes with suggestions for future framing for the movement.

A THEOLOGICAL BIOETHICS NEEDS, FIRST, A THEOLOGICAL POLITICS. THE thesis of this essay rests on the claim that the contours of a theological politics are found in the nature of sacramental practices. More specifically, a theological politics of medicine is found in the sacramental practice of anointing of the sick. Anointing provides a radically theological hermeneutic—a theologically robust vision for interpreting medicine that, if enacted, can powerfully make real God's work in the world. Such a vision is embodied in one particular twentieth-century exemplar—the organization called Partners In Health (PIH) and its cofounder, Paul Farmer. Farmer and PIH, I argue, live the theologic and theological politics of medicine embodied in the practice of anointing. What is more, they show—against those who would accuse such an approach of being naively idealistic—that such a theological politics is possible, powerful, and can even change the world.

THE JUST WAR THEORY OBLIGES CITIZENS OF A DEMOCRACY TO OPPOSE war unless it is being waged as a last resort and their nation possesses a just cause, the right intent, legitimate authority, and the probability of success without inflicting disproportionate harm. However, several contemporary Hollywood combat films suggest that the only real moral duties in wartime belong to soldiers, who are to defend and protect their comrades in arms. At the same time, by consistently presenting the obligation to "support the troops" as the public's principal wartime duty and as the final answer to any criticism of the war, proponents of the Bush administration's war in Iraq have exported this "warrior's ethic" home from the battlefield and substituted it for the just war theory. As a result, citizens are no longer expected to critique their government's call to arms but are instead expected to exhibit loyalty to the troops by supporting the war.

THIS ESSAY APPLIES CONCEPTS AND VALUE JUDGMENTS FROM WITHIN the Jewish tradition to the range of questions raised by genetic testing for BRCA1/2 mutations as well as possible prophylactic interventions to prevent breast cancer; in so doing, it models a Jewish methodology for approaching contemporary situations through the lens of classical Judaism. It notes the Jewish tradition's robust skepticism about the value of partial knowledge and its repeated admonitions against predicting future events based on incomplete data. The essay also weighs Jewish tradition's strong imperative to aggressively pursue good health against Judaism's equally strong reluctance to attempt to predict future events based on partial data. This essay offers few definitive conclusions about Jewish law; instead, it shows that Jewish tradition can tolerate and support several different choices simultaneously. Jewish sources can guide individuals through the decision-making process without prescribing specific behaviors.

THIS ESSAY PRESENTS AN EXTENDED MEDITATION ON THE DEVELOPING practice of scriptural reasoning insofar as it may contribute to our thinking about political discourse in the context of late-modern liberal democracies. Concerns are raised about the account of argument and practical reason expressed by practitioners of scriptural reasoning, particularly with respect to an antimetaphysical bias. Following Franklin Gamwell, I suggest that a coherent theoretical account of democracy should be open to the critical assessment of metaphysical claims. I conclude that scriptural reasoning does provide a helpful resource for thinking about argument across religious traditions in a democratic context but requires a clearer position on metaphysics to make a truly distinctive contribution to reforming our understanding of democratic politics in the context of religious pluralism.

THIS ESSAY ARGUES THAT JUDGMENTS ABOUT THE NATURE AND function of human reason play analogous (though not identical) roles in Catholic and Muslim arguments for political liberalism. Focusing on the works of John Courtney Murray and three contemporary Muslim reformers, I note three similarities. First, thinkers in both traditions argue that it is humankind's unique ability to reason about the moral law that constitutes our dignity and provides the foundation for the right to religious liberty. Second, this ability to reason is what allows us to provide the publicly accessible justifications that the liberal principle of reciprocity seems to require. Finally, all four authors argue that their attempts to reform or develop their traditions are dependent upon and required by the dictates of human reason.

THE RECENT CONVERSATION WITHIN CHRISTIAN ETHICS ABOUT THE RELAtionship between universal obligations and particular, intensive relations—between agape and "special relations"—largely accepts Gene Outka's formulation that these are separate and competing moral claims that must be balanced within the Christian moral life. I examine the relationship between agape and special relations through the lens of dependency and dependent-care relations. Attention to dependent care and the material needs addressed within them raises questions about the sharp division between universal and particular obligations. Drawing on the work of feminist philosopher Eva Feder Kittay, I argue that an adequate understanding of Christian love must take account of both our fundamental human equality and the pervasiveness of dependency in human life. Such an understanding of Christian love reveals that agape is a matter of personal and social ethics.

CHILDREN ARE INCONSISTENTLY LABELED MORAL AGENTS IN SOME HIGHLY charged situations and denied that status in others. This essay draws on the writings of Nomy Arpaly, Lisa Tessman, and legal theorists to argue that both children and adults should nearly always be considered moral agents. But agency does not imply autonomy, ability to articulate rational reasons, or legal liability for either adults or children. Rather, all agents are dependent and conditioned. This quality divides them from a strict Augustinian vision in which adults and children are fully and solely responsible for their actions. The subtext of Augustine's Confessions suggests that Augustine's biography can as easily be interpreted according to the present framework as according to his own thematic of concupiscence.

THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY, "READING MORE THAN LOLITA IN TEHRAN," IS meant to invoke Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, a memoir documenting how Western literary classics have the ability to change and improve the lives of people living under theocratic rule. In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran, Nafisi invited seven of her best women students to attend a weekly study of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and other authors she believed would provide the women with examples of how to successfully assert their autonomy despite great odds.

RECENT JEWISH—CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE HAS UNCOVERED THAT THE EARLY church's ethics were firmly rooted in Jewish halakhic thinking. This essay explores the topic through a study of the church's moral reasoning in Acts 10—15. We see the church readily employing distinctions that are now rarely invoked by Christian ethicists, such as between universal and particular moral law. These distinctions allowed the church to understand the ethical significance of the Torah not by imposing external categories on it (ceremonial versus moral) but through the Torah's own, internal distinctions. Thus, the church's understanding of the Torah can best be understood through the image of geirei toshav (aliens who live in the midst of the people). This image could help Christian ethicists understand their relation to pluralistic contexts because it was precisely the increased pluralism of gentile inclusion that prompted the church in Acts. I briefly consider the implications for a concrete case: the Episcopal-Anglican Communion's debate about homosexuality, which employs the Acts 10—15 narrative.

IN THIS ESSAY I USE W. E. B. DU BOIS AND HIS CATEGORY OF TRAGIC SOUL-life in an attempt to expand John Rawls's notion of public reason. As it stands, the divide between religion and politics within Rawlsian political liberalism inadequately attends to the role of moral beliefs, especially those used to justify and reinforce antiblack racism, in forming and fashioning political commitments. By introducing tragic soul-life and Du Bois's category of second sight, I plan to show how a reflective model of deliberation based on Du Boisian themes will allow social actors to interrogate the overlap between political and comprehensive beliefs without necessarily compromising democratic traditions on which rest political conceptions of justice.

LYNCHING, A MORAL PROBLEM THAT PROVIDES INSIGHT INTO AMERICA'S past and present, is more than "a rope and a bundle of sticks." Lynching was always intended as a metaphor to understand race relations in the United States. How, then, might we interpret the proliferation of nooses in various American locales in 2006 and 2007? In this essay I examine whether responses to a cultural symbol—the noose—can result in ethical possibilities that contribute to the common good.

ANALYZED THROUGH THE WORK OF FEMINIST AND QUEER THEORIST JUDITH Butler, anthropologist Saba Mahmood, and philosopher Martha Nussbaum, motherhood complicates theories of performativity that separate sex from gender and that equate women's agency with progressive politics. Motherhood should be understood as performative, that is, entailing self-reflective agency but not entirely separable from women's bodies. While motherhood may be manipulated to support patriarchal institutions, experiences of motherhood also inspire fresh interpretations and critiques of anthropocentric Christian theology and Muslim religious texts. Given the political dimensions of motherhood, the appearance of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin as prominent politicians attests to the variety of performativity and the need to protect women's agency.

THE PRIMARY GOAL OF THIS ESSAY IS TO BRING PUBLIC AWARENESS OF MILitary prostitution sprung up around U.S. military bases across the globe. With a focus on the lived experiences of Korean military prostitutes for American soldiers in South Korea ("Western princesses"), this essay argues that military prostitution should be considered a human reality in the realm of international politics: the U.S. empire building at the expenses of women's bodies. This argument further aims to foster Christian feminist—social ethics that reconstructs a Christian realistic approach to globalized militarism, the relation between sensuality and sexuality, and transnational solidarity for peace.