"Redeeming Truth has as its overarching theme the redemption of truth looked at philosophically and theologically. This collection is notable in that it embraces a variety of approaches to its theme, from traditional forays to those that engage postmodernism and those that consider feminist theology. As many of the essays respond directly to other contributions, the volume reflects the vigor of the debate."--Jacket.

On ethics and gender -- Feminism as an ethics of gender -- Is ethics a man's subject? -- The matter of bodies -- The subject of language -- The power of agency -- Engendering ethics -- Conceiving of difference -- Subjected in hope -- For love of God.

The central thrust of this article is to prompt new consideration of how faith and reason are understood to be at work in the discipline of theological ethics. To bring into question contemporary assumptions, a close reading of Aristotle is undertaken to illuminate his understanding of phronesis as a uniquely self-involving way of thinking that is transformative of the thinker. Phronesis, which may be translated as mindfulness, is shown to distinguish what is essential to ethical thinking. This philosophical preparation may (...) clear a way for theology likewise to be understood anew. Kierkegaard’s reflection on Abraham’s experience of faith in Fear and Trembling discloses how theology is the working out by means of phronesis of the salvation disclosed to faith in the believer’s soul. In these two phenomena—mindfulness and faith—lies what is essential to the practice of Christian ethics. (shrink)

What the moral theologian has to teach concerning the Sermon on the Mount depends fundamentally on how these words of the Lord are heard. With hearing comes understanding, and because this Sermon is considered in the tradition to be a kind of interpretative key to any understanding of the Christian life as such, the way one hears what is being said is critical to the formation and practices of faith in the believer. In an age determined by nihilism, this hearing (...) has been overtaken by the need to reassert the moral god, in consequence of which faith is reduced to its service in propping up an otherwise endangered morality, however variously that may be described. This is illustrated with reference to John Paul II's encyclical letter, Veritatis Splendor. What is lost through such an account is the hearing of this Sermon as a word of grace, from out of whose movement the hearer is prepared for the reception of faith and is turned out toward the future with God. St Thomas Aquinas's teaching shows how each use of grace is an event of appropriation wherein the believer is conformed to Christ, so that in one's understanding and making one's own of what is being heard, God is claiming His own. (shrink)

As the signs of the highest expectations of the world’s economy come crashing down around us and the dust settles on a sorrowing humanity led foolishly towards war as its only and immediate prospect, ethical thinking is called upon to hold open the way for us to find the truth by which we are to live, and to do so with intellectual acuity and pastoral sensitivity. What might this way be? This paper is written as a preliminary exploration of the (...) question of this way, and of the truth to which ethics is ordered, and it is written to enquire about the way that is being drawn out by a global ethics. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical investigation of the theological assumptions that lie within three forms of modern feminist ethics, with a view to challenging feminist ethics to enter the new theological possibilities opened up in postmodernity for the conceiving of god. The first part of the paper considers the conceiving of god in modern feminisms, in which theology becomes ethics. The consequences of this development are considered. The second part of the paper investigates the turn into postmodernity which hears the (...) saying of the death of god and the critique of onto-theology. This disturbance to the foundations of feminist ethics is understood as part of a wider critique of humanism manifest particularly in gender theory. That the end of the modern human subject might allow a conceiving of god through an understanding of the performative is the restored orthodoxy to which the paper points. (shrink)