Political and legal theorists sometimes assign attempts to define the purpose of law and government into one of two categories: protectionism indicates that law and government should protect people from the violation of their rights while perfectionism indicates that law and government should also actively promote virtue in the human community. In this essay I draw primarily from the biblical covenant with Noah (Gn 8:21–9:17), supplemented with other biblical and moral-theological considerations. I argue that protectionism, contrary to common assumptions, need not be individualist, subjectivist, or indifferent to the broader well-being of society. Furthermore, and chiefly, I argue that a strong (yet rebuttable) protectionist presumption ought to govern Christian ethical reflection upon the purpose of law and government.

John Howard Yoder's reclamation of Christ's law of love as normative for Christian ethics makes important contributions to the field, but this pacifist legacy is tainted by his sexual violence against women. Prominent "witness" and "feminist" ethicists either defend or condemn Yoder, reflecting retributive approaches to wrongdoing. Restorative justice models—with their emphasis on truth-telling, particularity, and communal responses to violence—illuminate common ground between these often antagonistic groups of ethicists, whose specific resources are needed to "do justice" to Yoder's legacy. Yoder claimed that "Christian identity itself calls for feminist engagement," but he failed to fully develop this claim in his theology or embody it in his life. By collaborating in such a truly feminist pacifist politics, witness and feminist ethicists not only strengthen their own internal projects with respect to the church's mission and the promotion of women's flourishing but also more effectively address sexual violence.

Henri de Lubac's (1896–1991) treatment of the relationship between nature and grace helped the Catholic Church to move beyond the antagonisms that had defined its relationship with the modern nation-state. In critiquing de Lubac, some recent scholarship has presented an interpretation of Aquinas that is remarkably similar to the problems associated with the neo-Scholastic method. These approaches indicate that in order for late modern democratic states to achieve their connatural ends of justice and the common good, they must directly advert to revealed knowledge and Church teaching. This essay proposes an alternative correction to de Lubac that both maintains a distinction between nature and grace and facilitates a capacity for Christians to engage in a nuanced dialogue of affirmation and critique of the human goods sought by late modern political and legal institutions. In the conclusion, this nature-grace distinction is used to analyze the way the US Catholic Bishops have engaged in moral, political, and legal debates over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

The international law regulating resort to armed force, still known by the Latin phrase, the jus ad bellum, forms a principal substantive subfield of international law, along with human rights law, international environmental law, and international economic law. Among theologians, philosophers, and political scientists, just war theory is a major topic of study. Nevertheless, only a minority of scholars and practitioners know both jus ad bellum and just war theory well. Lack of knowledge has led to the erroneous view that the two areas are in conflict. This article responds to this misapprehension, explaining the deep compatibility of international law and just war theory. Today's jus ad bellum, especially the peremptory norm against aggression, is not only the law; it also forms the minimum threshold of a just war under just war theory. In other words, for a war to be morally just, it must at least be lawful. To go to war in violation of the jus ad bellum is both a legal and a moral wrong. Compliance not only fulfills the general moral good of obedience to law; it forms the first step toward fulfilling moral obligations in the grave area of war. This characterization of the relationship between law and morality is seen in the history of the legal prohibition on force and in the actual set of rules that make up the contemporary regime. Comprehensive and persuasive accounts of the jus ad bellum and just war theory consistently reflect this thesis.

This essay invites Christian ethicists to engage in a mutually beneficial conversation with the secular law, particularly the common law. It argues that the common law's feature of narrative accountability provides a natural bridge to Christian ethics. It also points out contact points between the two fields regarding normative concepts of persons, actions, norms, and the common good. Finally, it illustrates the possibilities of a conversation between law and Christian ethics by delving into the leading case on the doctrine of unconscionability, which permits courts to refuse to enforce contracts that shock the conscience.

This essay lays out preliminary grounds for an alternative theological approach to animal ethics based on closer consideration of natural law theory and ethological reports of wild justice compared with dominant animal rights perspectives. It draws on Jean Porter's interpretation of scholastic natural law theory and on scientific narratives about the laws of nature to navigate the difficult territory between nature and reason in natural law. In Western societies, attempts to detach from our animal roots have fostered forms of legal provisions that treat animals as property rather than as living, social beings entangled with human societies.

This essay assesses the possibilities for poetic-liturgical compositions, such as requiems, to promote Christian public engagement when legal frameworks are perceived to be inadequate for securing justice. This essay addresses the perception that legal statutes and procedures failed to honor the personhood of two particular African American males and discusses how aesthetic responses have been used to counter the devaluing of their lives. One such response, Marilyn Nelson's poem Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem, questions the law's failure to protect an eighteenth-century enslaved man. Another requiem memorializes Michael Brown after the teen's killing by a police officer in 2014. This essay discusses these particular aesthetic responses and then evaluates the possibilities for the requiem as a Christian practice of civic engagement by appropriating Charles Mathewes's articulation of hopeful citizenship. In cases when the law is perceived to be complicit in devaluing African American personhood, liturgy can be a meaningful Christian response.

The following remarks were prepared as a response to Mary Ellen O'Connell's plenary address, "The Just War Tradition and International Law against War: The Myth of Discordant Doctrines," at the 2015 annual meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics. O'Connell's essay appears in this issue of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics (vol. 35, no. 2). After noting some points of agreement, the response discusses five main issues: the moral complexity of "peace," the consonance of a peremptory norm against aggression with just war thinking, the formative role of controversial political convictions in the interpretation of international law, the political defects of the current international legal system, and the efficacy of military intervention.

Powerful interest groups have responded to evidence of environmental or health risks by manufacturing doubt, partially through attacks on scientists. The current legal standard for the admissibility of scientific evidence in court enables such strategies for generating doubt. In the face of attacks on their reputations and careers, researchers working on public interest science need the courage to speak the truth despite risk, which Michel Foucault described as the virtue of parrhesia. Parrhesia is also a Christian virtue shown in the willingness to witness to truth in the face of risk because of one's confidence in God. This essay argues that Christianity possesses resources to form individuals in parrhesia in ways that support the dedication to scientific truth.

Most evangelical Christians have understood their faith, rooted in a high view of biblical authority, to be irreconcilable with "homosexuality." This has meant that devoted LGBT people raised as evangelical Christians must choose between their sexuality and their faith/religious community. This creates enormous psychic distress, turns LGBT Christians and their allies away from (evangelical) Christianity, and contributes to intense alienation between the gay community and evangelicals all over the world. But traditional evangelical attitudes on LGBT people and their relationships are beginning to change. This paper offers a description of the state of the conversation in the North American evangelical community on this issue, and summarizes my own normative proposal.

In recent years, scholars have increasingly emphasized the reliance of Adam Smith's moral theory on the virtues. This essay argues that Smith's account of the virtues differs from most virtue theories because his must be read through the construct of the impartial spectator. Smith's spectator bears what Emmanuel Levinas might call a "trace" ofthe transcendent and employs what Amartya Sen calls an "open impartiality," which is an impartiality not bound to any social group. As the essay explores how Smith deploys the virtues, it shows that his deeper concern is not with the virtues but with how people respond to the market, their neighbors, and the structure ofthe world. It shows how H. Richard Niebuhr's concept of responsibility can be a helpful lens for understanding Smith's moral and economic approaches.

The latest trend in ethics, sometimes dismissed as a fad, is the effort to connect ethics to empirical science. Two different versions of this "latest thing'' can be found in the work of Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene. Their projects are, at least partly, unwitting recoveries of eighteenth-century Christian moral sense theory. Such similarities need not worry Christian ethicists but should instead inspire a careful retrieval of sentimentalism. It provides much of what today's empirical ethicists hope to deliver without the pitfalls.

How can just warriors prohibit torture absolutely while still allowing that killing can be just? The best arguments for torture's wrongness and impermissibility seem to suggest that killing, too, is always wrong. If torture is wrong because it attacks imago Dei, why isn't killing wrong too, for killing seems at least as much an attack as torture? This question, which seems to force a choice between pacifism or countenancing "just torture" alongside just war killing, has scarcely been asked in Christian ethics. Nigel Biggar and Darrel Cole are among the only Christian ethicists even to consider this question. They leverage these issues to argue for torture's permissibility. Against such views, this essay shows why torture but not killing is always wrong, what so distinguishes torture from just war killing that it but not killing should be categorically prohibited. I elucidate three features that distinguish torture from just war killing and establish torture as always wrong: its intention and proximate end, its violating as opposed to destructive character, and its context of domination. I conclude by showing how these features are illustrated and exemplified by practices documented in the 2014 US Senate report on torture.

It is not difficult to observe that social anger is pervasive in several contemporary political movements organized for the purpose of resisting systemic injustice and galvanizing institutional reform. However, the field of Catholic theological ethics currently lacks a normative framework adequate for the task of understanding and evaluating these public expressions of social anger. This essay draws upon the common good tradition and the preferential option for the poor in order to argue that social anger is best understood as a ''cognitive interruption" of the ideological rationalizations for oppression and privilege. To the extent that this cognitive interruption is integrated with the civic virtues of restorative justice, conflictual solidarity, and prophetic prudence, it should be judged as rightly expressed through the public actions of social agents aiming to resist human rights violations and to demand equitable institutional participation.

Conscience as an individual's nnoral self-awareness has received very little attention in recent decades. H. Richard Niebuhr developed a theory of conscience as moral self-awareness, but, after Niebuhr, interest in this particular understanding of conscience largely disappeared, generally because of its association with the practical philosophy and nnoral theology of Immanuel Kant. The common assumption is that Kanf s theory of conscience compliments his theory of autonomy: conscience is the means by which the autonomous individual rightly knows herself because it is the means by which she holds herself accountable to the moral order she has made for herself. In this essay I challenge this understanding of Kanf s theory of autonomy and, in turn, Kant's theory of conscience. I argue that Kant understands conscience to be the knowledge we have of ourselves as we strive to approximate the knowledge God has of us as God holds us accountable to the moral law that we should believe God promulgates to us. I conclude that Kant's theory of conscience is indeed valuable for contemporary Christian ethics because it draws attention to an important yet neglected biblical and theological witness —namely, that God intimately knows each individual and that each individual is singularly accountable before God.

This essay explores some theological implications of cognitive-science research into moral reasoning. Evolutionary theorizing argues that human morality originated as an adaptation that enabled our evolutionary ancestors to function as members of a social species. Neuroscientific experiments suggest that utilitarian responses to the moral dilemmas known as "trolley problems" involve more activity in brain areas associated with reason and less in areas associated with emotion than do nonutilitarian responses. According to Peter Singer and Joshua Greene, these two areas of research, taken together, support utilitarianism. They might therefore also seem to challenge nonutilitarian theological ethics. However, drawing on Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it is argued instead that cognitive-science research on moral reasoning could offer a valuable hermeneutic of suspicion concerning ethics as a (merely) human project. Christians can welcome this critical function as an aid in the theological reconstruction of ethics without thereby being committed to the inferences drawn by Singer and Greene.

Environmental ethicists, philosophers, and moral theologians increasingly examine how anthropogenic climate change (linked to the burning of fossil fuels) poses questions of causality, responsibility, and agency in ways that stretch the capabilities of received moral traditions. This essay opens comparative religious ethical analysis on the topic of contemporary energy ethics for privileged populations, especially in the United States.

Prophetic speech serves as an important way to engage with a world in need of change, but prophetic speech might not always serve the person or community that uses it. After outlining the potential problems of prophetic speech, this essay presents the tradition of holy folly as an important alternative means of engagement and critique. This essay suggests that this once critical tradition should be attended to again in order to inform what it means to think about and perform Christian ethics. After presenting a background of holy folly and after categorizing critical elements of folly's modes of being and engagement, the essay offers a couple of ways through which elements of folly might be appropriated in the current day by those who cannot fully live the life ofthe holy fool.

Apologies are morally significant with regard to their form, function, and freight. Nevertheless, little work in Christian ethics considers apologies. Philosophical and social scientific literature on apologies focuses on the conditions for making valid apologies and the efficacy of apologies in moral repair but ignores the import of apologies for the offender. This literature is ill equipped to specify the relation between persons and their moral failures, minimizes the difficulty of understanding our own moral failure, does not adequately treat the relationship between explanation and apology, and neglects the way that apology making may comprise a process of moral repair for the offender. Relevant resources in Christian moral tradition can inform and enrich ethical consideration of apologies.

Climate change may be the most far-reaching manifestation of white privilege and class privilege to face humankind. Caused overwhelmingly by highconsuming people, climate change is wreaking death and destruction foremost on impoverished people, who also are disproportionately people of color. This essay first posits climate change as a compelling moral matter of "race- and class-based climate debt" and ''Global North climate debt." A second part draws upon the descriptive and transformative tasks of Christian ethics as a critical discourse to frame a moral response. Finally, the essay illustrates implications for public policy. I propose the concepts of "climate privilege," "climate violence," and "blinders of climate privilege" as tools for demystifying our situation; ''climate reparations" as a dimension of a moral response; and "atmospheric citizenship" as a tool for moral identity.