Emerging from the first successful cloning of a mammal, a sheep named "Dolly," is a critical but under-asked question: "Why do so many of us find this feat (and its potential application to human subjects) to be deeply disturbing?" This paper suggests that the answer rests not primarily in the theological and philosophical arguments most often heard against cloning but in the threat the act poses to our foundational "cosmological categories." Building upon theories introduced by Mary Douglas and Jeffrey Stout, the essay argues that Dolly becomes a "cabbit" in sheep's clothing—an outwardly innocuous entity which, like Stout's cat/rabbit, offends at a deep and visceral level. Like the cabbit, the cloned sheep and especially the cloned human are disturbing not because of the way they are produced nor by the physical threat they pose but because they challenge the very way we understand and organize our world.

During 1996-1997, between the OJ Simpson criminal and civil trials, the media needed a sensational topic. They discovered "Ebonics." The Oakland, California School Board's resolution declaring "Ebonics" a language triggered controversy and condemnation. This essay explores ethical implications for the pedagogical use of Ebonics from a Womanist perspective, as a vehicle of empowerment. After defining Womanist thought, I explore: (1) the history of Ebonics and the Oakland School Board's concerns; (2) the impact of Ebonics on student and teacher authority; (3) the hermeneutics and ethical issues surrounding Ebonics; and (4) how using Ebonics empowers or marginalizes teacher and student.

Feminist theologians and ethicists reject the normative nature of traditional gender roles as unjust, and as part of a sinful social order. In its place, they advocate mutuality and alternative anthropologies. Although I find much of this work compelling, I question its rejection of capitalism as endemic of the old sexual-political order. Capitalism is not monolithic, nor is it necessarily hostile to women. I advocate a stakeholder model of capitalism, which can more readily address the feminist critique. Such a model would reject both the rigid traditional family roles that denigrate women, and the radical individualism that undermines family.

Christian ethicists writing about the church need to take the contributions of sociology of religion more clearly into account when they develop their theories. Using the work of Tex Sample and Robert Wuthnow, the author criticizes the image of the church as "colony" adopted by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, as well as the model of church as "discipleship of equals" supported by feminist biblical scholar Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza. Neither model of the church attends adequately to various sociological realities in the church, in particular, to the influences of class and social location on church communities and their members.

More than any other dimension of modern war, strategic use of air power has systematically violated the moral principle of non-combatant immunity to direct military attack that lies at the heart of the idea of just war. This paper will argue that new air weapons and tactics, such as those used in the Gulf War, mark a real change in that moral reality of war. Further, the paper explores directions in which weapons procurement, tactics, and military doctrine should continue to evolve if the military forces of the United States are to continue to improve their capabilities to conduct stragetic bombing campaigns in future wars within the limits of just war.

In this essay, I consider the rival liberal and communitarian accounts of justice emerging in complex, pluralist societies. I argue that we err in posing the question of human rights as a Hobson's choice between a formal, universal metanarrative, as envisioned in philosophical liberalism, or as a merely local, ethnocentric narrative of the western bourgeoisie, as in the communitarian critique. For human rights are best viewed rhetorically, as establishing the possibility of rationally persuasive argument across our varied narrative traditions. The essay concludes by attending to the role of religious belief in the public reason of a postmodern society.

Women's informal accounts of their experience, news reports, and psychological and endocrinological studies concur that maternal-infant relations are inevitably erotic, if not explicitly sexually charged. In a culture that both affirms pursuit of "natural" pleasure and condemns overt eroticism in any relationship between unequals, maternal erotic experience is problematic. This essay gathers insights from the literatures of psychoanalysis, naturalism, maternal practice, and victim advocacy, as well as the Christian theological ethics of Lisa Sowle Cahill, Christine E. Gudorf, and Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, to construct a tentative descriptive and prescriptive account of maternal eroticism.

The paper argues that while Schleiermacher intends to base Christian ethics on the Christian principle of a supra-rational knowledge of God's will communicated solely through Christ, and not available to human reason, Schleiermacher nevertheless borrows for his Christian ethics from his philosophical ethics. He is able to do this because his philosophical ethics, as distinct from Kant's, incorporates insights from religious feeling. Schleiermacher's Christian ethics, therefore, is more a theory of Christian, reformative action in the church and the state than a full-blown religious ethics.