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This 1999 book examines evidence about church communities, showing that churchgoers are distinctive in their attitudes, beliefs and behaviour. However, these are shared by many non-churchgoers as well. The distinctiveness of church communities in the modern world is thus real but relative, and is central to Christian ethics.

The Common Good and Christian Ethics rethinks the ancient tradition of the common good in a way that addresses contemporary social divisions, both urban and global. David Hollenbach draws on social analysis, moral philosophy, and theological ethics to chart new directions in both urban life and global society.

This book is an examination of issues in the related fields of moral philosophy and Christian theology. It raises the question of whether and to what extent Christian moral presuppositions are distinctive or are held in common with other persons and communities.

In the immediate future we are likely to witness significant developments in human genetic science. It is therefore of critical importance that Christian ethics engages with the genetics debate, since it affects not just the way we perceive ourselves and the natural world, but also has wider implications for our society. This book considers ethical issues arising out of specific practices in human genetics, including genetic screening, gene patenting, gene therapy, genetic counselling as well as feminist concerns. Genetics and Christian Ethics argues for a particular theo-ethical approach that derives from a modified version of virtue ethics, drawing particularly on a Thomistic understanding of the virtues, especially prudence or practical wisdom and justice. The book demonstrates that a theological voice is highly relevant to contested ethical debates about genetics.

Separated from its anchorage in religion, ethics has followed the social sciences in seeing human beings as fundamentally characterised by self-interest, so that altruism is either naively idealistic or arrogantly self-sufficient. Colin Grant contends that, as a modern secular concept, altruism is a parody on the self-giving love of Christianity, so that its dismissal represents a social levelling that loses the depths that theology makes intelligible and religion makes possible. The Christian affirmation is that God is characterised by self-giving love (agape), then expected of Christians. Lacking this theological background, the focus on self-interest in sociobiology and economics, and on human realism in the political focus of John Rawls or the feminist sociability of Carol Gilligan, finds altruism naive or a dangerous distraction from real possibilities of mutual support. This book argues that to dispense with altruism is to dispense with God and with the divine transformation of human possibilities.

Genocide in Rwanda, multiple murder at Denver or Dunblane, the gruesome activities of serial killers - what makes these great evils, and why do they occur? In addressing such questions this book, unusually, interconnects contemporary moral philosophy with work in New Testament scholarship. The conclusions to emerge are surprising. Gordon Graham argues that the inability of modernist thought to account satisfactorily for evil and its occurrence should not lead us to embrace an eclectic postmodernism, but to take seriously some unfashionable pre-modern conceptions - Satan, demonic possession, spiritual powers, cosmic battles. Precisely because it strives to observe the high standards of clarity and rigour that are the hallmarks of philosophy in the analytical tradition, the book makes a powerful case for the rejection of humanism and naturalism, and for explaining the moral obligation to struggle against evil by reference to the New Testament's cosmic narrative.

The book undertakes an interdisciplinary dialogue between Christian love ethicists, feminist economists, feminist political theorists, and other scholars of the global care economy, and will be of interest to scholars in all these fields. It proposes elements necessary for an adequate ethic of love and justice for dependent care relations.

This book describes how the theological virtue of hope contributes to happiness in this life and not just the next. Hope sustains from despair, provides transcendence to our lives and encourages us with the prospect of eternal beatitude. The book addresses students of Christian ethics and theology.

Jean Porter provides a highly sophisticated account of moral reasoning, developed out of the thought of Thomas Aquinas, which offers an alternative to modern moral theories, brings together rule-oriented and virtue-oriented approaches to moral judgement, and points towards a moral life founded on decency and justice.

The first substantial study in Christian Ethics to explore the problem of religion, plurality and ethics. Ian Markham argues that plurality is better safeguarded by a theistic, rather than a secularist, foundation, and shows that the religious affirmation of diversity offers genuine political possibilities in our post-modern world.

This book is about the extent, origins and causes of the environmental crisis. Dr Northcott argues that Christianity has lost the biblical awareness of the inter-connectedness of all life. He shows how Christian theologians and believers might recover a more ecologically friendly belief system and life style.