Prima facie, Christian ethics will be centred on Jesus Christ, but to what extent can and should textbooks for academic study of the field have this focus? Perhaps the two most influential Anglophone Christian ethicists of recent decades are Stanley Hauerwas and Oliver O’Donovan. Their introductory volumes were both very Christocentric although in different ways. Yet recent textbooks in the discipline generally do not manifest such a strong focus on Jesus Christ. This generates one criterion by which we might assess (...) such books. This article reviews six textbooks, four by UK and two by US authors. It suggests that other criteria for assessment include whether they give appropriate prominence to the Pauline vision of ‘life by the Spirit’, whether they manifest such pastoral responsibility as Christian ethicists have for students, and whether they are alert to overlapping concerns in Christian ethics and missiology. (shrink)

Stoddart writes that the God of Christian faith ‘knew [surveillance’s] gaze [and] suffered its harsh consequences’. That was especially so during the last week of Jesus’ life, when the religious/political leaders engaged him in tension-filled exchanges. Employing Stoddart’s concept of ‘visibility’, I propose a new way of reading the controversy about Roman tax which, taking up insights in Myers’s ‘political’ commentary, shows connections between this text and those immediately preceding it. Jesus makes central in the engagement about tax the same (...) issue as is already at stake: identity and recognition. His ‘amazing’ response makes clear what the leaders are not seeing. (shrink)

Prima facie, Christian ethics will be centred on Jesus Christ, but to what extent can and should textbooks for academic study of the field have this focus? Perhaps the two most influential Anglophone Christian ethicists of recent decades are Stanley Hauerwas and Oliver O’Donovan. Their introductory (if demanding) volumes (The Peaceable Kingdom, 1983, and Resurrection and Moral Order, 1986) were both very Christocentric although in different ways. Yet recent textbooks in the discipline generally do not manifest such a strong focus (...) on Jesus Christ. This generates one criterion by which we might assess such books. This article reviews six textbooks, four by UK and two by US authors. It suggests that other criteria for assessment include whether they give appropriate prominence to the Pauline vision of ‘life by the Spirit’, whether they manifest such pastoral responsibility as Christian ethicists have for students, and whether they are alert to overlapping concerns in Christian ethics and missiology. (shrink)

Prima facie, Christian ethics will be centred on Jesus Christ, but to what extent can and should textbooks for academic study of the field have this focus? Perhaps the two most influential Anglophone Christian ethicists of recent decades are Stanley Hauerwas and Oliver O’Donovan. Their introductory volumes were both very Christocentric although in different ways. Yet recent textbooks in the discipline generally do not manifest such a strong focus on Jesus Christ. This generates one criterion by which we might assess (...) such books. This article reviews six textbooks, four by UK and two by US authors. It suggests that other criteria for assessment include whether they give appropriate prominence to the Pauline vision of ‘life by the Spirit’, whether they manifest such pastoral responsibility as Christian ethicists have for students, and whether they are alert to overlapping concerns in Christian ethics and missiology. (shrink)