Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women's Lives Matter

Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women's Lives Matter. By Traei C. West. (Westminster John Knox, 232 pp., $24.95.) Only Human: Christian Reflections on the Journey Toward Wholeness. By David P. Gushee. (Jossey-Bass, 256 pp., $22.95.) In quite different ways these two works raise questions about how Christian ethics can speak to human diversity. In Disruptive Christian Ethics, West proposes a method that would take seriously the details of lives affected by racism and sexism before attempting to make universal moral claims. Gushee, in Only Human, begins with the question of whether we can say that human nature exists and proposes an approach to ethics in which claims about sin, human freedom and moral virtue grow out of ordinary moral experience. His discussion culminates with a diverse series of portraits of people who exhibited moral greatness, including Florence Nightingale and Martin Luther King Jr. Gushee's approach is engagingly direct, and his book is suitable for specialists and general readers alike. West, however, might pose this question to Gushee: Whose experience is considered the ordinary experience on which a Christian account of human nature is based?

Selected by Robin Lovin, who teaches ethics at Southern Methodist University.

COPYRIGHT 2006 The Christian Century Foundation
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