ROMAN CATHOLIC ETHICISTS AND THEOLOGIANS HAVE REMAINED RELAtively silent about crises in US criminal justice systems, with two exceptions. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops published a document in 2000 calling for rehabilitative and restorative approaches to crime. Historian Andrew Skotnicki has criticized the bishops for ignoring traditional Catholic models of punishment—monastic and ecclesiastical prisons. This essay challenges Skotnicki and bolsters the bishops' argument by proposing that the sacraments, especially the Eucharist and Penance, provide a stronger basis in Catholicism for responding to crime and the crises in US criminal justice systems in ways that foster rehabilitation and restore justice while also reforming broken systems and promoting social justice.

THE ESSAY DEMONSTRATES THE SUBTLETY OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS (AA) on sin and addiction. It suggests a parallel between Aquinas's understanding of acedia and invidia as the two vitia capitalia most directly undermining of God's caritas and AA founder Bill Wilson's understanding of two contemporary deadly sins, self-pity and resentment, as the "root" of alcoholics' troubles. I argue that AA's understanding of sin and addiction is relevant far beyond the lives of alcoholics. Indeed, its understanding could help the Christian tradition rediscover the "soul" of its sin-talk, aiding all of us in discerning our sin and in recovering from sin in our lives.

DESPITE ITS PROMINENCE IN BOTH BIBLICAL AND CLASSICAL LITERATURE, the moral category of luxury has been lost in contemporary Christian ethics. To address the spending of one's money as a moral act, I propose recovering the category. A survey of the history of the term illustrates its particular place in a set of economic virtues and vices, and suggests that its "defenders" in the eighteenth century rely on arguments that are antithetical to a virtue ethics perspective and are called into question by contemporary science and experience. But what counts as luxury? I conclude with a beginning casuistry in the context of the contemporary economy, suggesting that "cheap" goods may be luxuries but shared public goods are not.

IN THIS ESSAY I CONSIDER WHETHER POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT MAKES good persons. I first examine how the self is formed as a moral agent in and through the exercise of moral agency in political life, which I call "political agency." Politics is a morally ambiguous context of formation. On the one hand, political engagement trains the skills and virtues conducive to good citizenship in particular and the good life in general. But it also entails the instrumental and even coercive uses of power to countervail the interests of others. This often leaves the self disintegrated. Drawing on John Calvin's moral theology, I argue that God transfigures this fractured, political self in the cruciform shape that lives dedicated to politics take. The political self becomes a site of God's redeeming work in the world.

CHRISTIAN ECOLOGICAL ETHICISTS INCREASINGLY RECOGNIZE THAT MORAL response to contemporary problems such as mass extinction and climate change must incorporate and build upon established movements for social justice. This essay contributes to that work by learning from the twentieth-century union organizer César Chávez and his advocacy for justice and environmental health among farm workers. I argue that understanding key themes of Chávez's morality in his context, particularly the universality of human dignity and the importance of personal and collective sacrifice, can contribute to a Christian ecological ethics with a program for social change and justice.

SCHOLARS OFTEN VIEW MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO political theology in the context of his philosophy of nonviolence. Drawing on feminist and womanist thought, I reconstruct King's theopolitical practice to construe nonviolence more broadly as including any "agapic activity" that forms and sustains community. In doing so, I uncover in King's thought a conception of agape that resonates with feminist emphasis on the relational and community-oriented nature of love, and I draw on womanist thought to highlight the role of creativity, not solely love or justice, to King's ethical thinking. Both emphases suggest a vision of churches as communities of creativity with community-creating practices at the heart of their political roles.

I BEGIN THIS ESSAY BY EXAMINING HOW OUR "VIAGRA CULTURE"—ATAN-gled web of biotechnology, consumerism, and medicalization—creates an opening for patriarchy in our era. The second section examines how such large sociocultural forces invade women's bedrooms, impacting their intimate relationships. We then consider men who adopt a counternarrative to that of patriarchy and anxiety, whose sexuality is distinguished by tenderness and mutual regard. The essay closes with reflections on how the Viagra culture reminds us of the need to nurture the virtue of generosity, a virtue that marks good sex and characterizes the lovers who practice it.

WHAT DOES RESPECT REQUIRE OF RELIGIOUSLY MOTIVATED CITIZENS AS they support coercive public policies? In his recent work, Christopher Eberle argues against the doctrine of restraint, a norm that requires citizens to refrain from supporting laws for which public reasons are unavailable. Against Eberle, I defend the doctrine of restraint as a necessary corollary to liberal democratic respect. For this defense, I draw from one imaginary case, Robert Audi's example of "sacred dandelions" and laws banning lawn maintenance, and one real-world dispute, current debates about same-sex marriage policies. I argue that the doctrine of restraint when coupled with an inclusive definition of public reason better accords with our intuitive sense of what respect requires in both cases.

IN CRITICALLY ANALYZING THE DEADLY VIPER CONTROVERSY AND MARY Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church's social activism in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we consider questions concerning the (in)ability of Asian Americans to participate in public discourse in meaningful ways that spur social change while fostering solidarity with other marginalized ethnic groups in the United States. Drawing on Christian theo-ethical reflection on the racial or social identity of Jesus as a hybridized concept, we argue for a robust public discourse that recognizes Asian Americans as a social group without succumbing to the ghettoization of Asian American identity or a withdrawal from engagement with other justice-seeking social groups. In doing so, we look toward constructive modes of public discourse carried out by multiple counterpublics that both give voice to the Asian American community and open the space for collaboration across ethnic, racial, class, religious, and national boundaries.

FUNCTIONAL MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING (fMRI) DETECTS DEGREES of consciousness in a few vegetative patients, despite the difficulty of establishing any form of communication with them at the bedside. What are the implications of our understanding of consciousness in defining one's identity? How do we care for these patients? To answer these questions, I propose relationality as an appropriate ethical resource. Relationality supports a renewed understanding of consciousness, identity, and care; it addresses the associated ethical issues; and it characterizes who we are, how we understand ourselves theologically, and how, through discernment, we promote justice and love.

IN THIS ESSAY I ASSERT THAT AFFLUENT CONSUMER CULTURES INCULCATE in their residents certain forms of desiring. One of those forms tends to silence the complicity that the affluent enjoy through appropriating the material benefits that come to them through the labor and poor living conditions of people in domestic and global poverty. A prime example is the cheap food that political policy and economic structures promote. The affluent are themselves spiritually stunted through the dynamics of complicity. The essay suggests that contrition is a gift of grace in the face of complicity. Consumerism blocks contrition; that is the operative dynamic here. The failure to be contrite blocks the work of grace in people's lives. However, contrition can slingshot those who experience the Christian vision of desire into a budding transformation which reeducates their desires. Some of those consequences involve a redirection of our sensory experience and an increase in community and compassion.

Moral injury, the experience of having acted (or consented to others acting) incommensurably with one's most deeply held moral conceptions, is increasingly recognized by the mental health disciplines to be associated with postcombat traumatic stress. In this essay I argue that moral injury is an important and useful clinical construct but that the phenomenon of moral injury beckons beyond the structural constraints of contemporary psychology toward something like moral theology. This something, embodied in specific communal practices, can rescue moral injury from the medical model and the means—end logic of techne and can allow for truthful, contextualized narration of and healing from morally fragmenting combat experiences.

This essay addresses two growing edges of the just war tradition. First, theorists have been accused of focusing narrowly on justifying war (jus ad bellum) and governing its conduct (jus in bello), neglecting wider considerations that encompass justice during the years prior to and after war. Second, calling a war "just" allegedly makes it seem "good" so that it is easier to fight a war and to bend or set aside the rules. Based on "imperfect justice," we argue for a "justified" war theory, taking all criteria and categories seriously, including jus ante bellum and jus post bellum.

President Barack Obama entered office with a promise to change the style and substance of his predecessor's foreign policy. This essay evaluates his efforts by identifying the key policy goals and principled underpinnings of what might be called an Obama Doctrine. I argue that Obama's distinctive worldview, which holds idealism and realism in generative tension, is deeply rooted in Niebuhrian Christian realism yet diverges from it in important ways. I close with a brief articulation of an Obama Doctrine that reflects the president's perspective on the proper role of American power and influence in the world.

This essay explores classical rabbinic literature's understanding of the prohibition of bloodshed alongside its understanding that "the image of God" corresponds to the physically embodied individual. This conception generates radical implications so that, apart from the narrow instance of a direct aggressor with intent to kill or rape, it is never legitimate to cause the death of any person, even in pursuit of a supposed "greater good." While notions of war and execution are retained in principle, the requirement of direct divine sanction for such actions neutralizes them in practice, removing them from the domain of human judgment and justification.

Modern readers appalled by Abraham's unquestioning obedience to a divine command to slaughter his son on the altar of sacrifice readily and repeatedly comply with governmental calls to sacrifice their own and others' children on the battlefield. But the God who interrupts the sacrifice of Isaac awakens Abraham and modern readers from the idolatrous nightmare of a patriotism that commands and blesses the sacrificial slaughter of our children.

In this essay I examine how compulsory military service and the Roman Catholic Church uphold and perpetuate an inadequate notion of masculinity in South Korea. I argue that the militaristic and Catholic definitions of masculinity significantly and pejoratively affect Korean culture. To unlearn these definitions, I propose an educational "readjusting" program that denounces any unjust discrimination on the basis of sex and gender.

In 1983 the US Catholic bishops noted that "insufficient analytical attention has been given to the moral issues of revolutionary warfare." Decades later systematic analysis of armed revolutionary resistance remains a lacuna within theological scholarship on war and peacemaking. While nonviolence is always preferable, traditional just war criteria can and should be revised to provide guidelines for ethical, armed, revolutionary resistance. Examining the just war criteria of legitimate authority, last resort, and proportionality not from the perspective of society's dominant classes but from that of the oppressed begins to yield a theory of just revolution. When properly met, revised understandings of the just war criteria allow for limited armed resistance as a moral response to severe repression.

To what extent is the Christian ethic, in its varied interpretations, commensurable with the experience of military life, including war? In addressing this question, I sketch two contrasting visions of the Christian faith, abolition and perdurance. My discussion of the two types emphasizes their concepts of the Christian ethic with attention to the question of military service and combat. It also offers theological rationales that provide a deeper understanding of the two alternatives. I conclude by siding with the perdurantist position while taking note of an important lesson learned from the abolitionist type.

The debate over whether the just war theory begins with a "presumption against violence" has raged among Christian ethicists for more than thirty years. One camp argues that the theory begins with a presumption against violence that can be overridden in exceptional circumstances. The other camp claims that the just war tradition instead begins with a presumption against injustice. A careful analysis of the debate, however, reveals that the term "presumption against violence" has been used in three different ways, and that clarifying these usages can show the common ground in the debate and move it toward a resolution.