460 - As I Have Loved You: The Challenge of Christian Ethics

As I Have Loved You: The Challenge of Christian Ethics
James P. Hanigan
New York, Paulist, 1986. 227 pp. $9.95.

This introduction to Christian

461 - As I Have Loved You: The Challenge of Christian Ethics

ethics has in view primarily a Catholic, post-Vatican II audience in need of better familiarity with the events in recent church history and in theological exchange which have produced uncertainties about what it means to be a Catholic Christian. However, the importance of many issues obviously extends beyond Catholicism. These include the roles of conscience and of church authority, the relation of the worldview furnished by religious faith to specific moral convictions, the relation of love and law, the function of moral rules, the meanings of moral goodness and of sin as basic orientations of the person and not merely acts, and the importance of community for individual moral agency. As a study from a Catholic standpoint, the book is unusual but commendable in that it treats biblical resources as more fundamental than Thomistic "natural law"; and in that it treats both "personal" and "social" ethics in their communal context. The author's discussion of such topics as birth control, the church's teaching authority, and the possibility of absolute moral rules differs at points with "official" teaching, but is always respectful, balanced, and cautious. This work would serve best for college students or adult study groups. It includes questions and a bibliography after each chapter. Since it is not a case-based or concretemoral-issues approach, it does presuppose the willingness and ability of the reader to become engaged with fairly theoretical questions in ethics and theology.

Lisa Sowle Cahill
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, Mass.