In this study John Bowlin argues that Aquinas's moral theology receives much of its character and content from an assumption about our common lot: the good we desire is difficult to know and to will, in particular because of contingencies of various kinds - within ourselves, in the ends and objects we pursue, and in the circumstances of choice. Since contingencies are fortune's effects, Aquinas insists that it is fortune that makes good choice difficult. Bowlin then explicates Aquinas's treatment of a number of topics in light of this difficulty: the moral and theological virtues, the first precepts of the natural law, the voluntariness of virtuous action, and the happiness available to us in this life. By noting that Aquinas proceeds with an eye on fortune's threats to virtue, agency, and happiness, Bowlin places him more precisely in the history of ethics, among Aristotle, Augustine, and the Stoics.

Christianity struggles to show how living on earth matters for living with God. While people of faith increasingly seek practical ways to respond to the environmental crisis, theology has had difficulty contextualizing the crisis and interpreting the responses. In Ecologies of Grace, Willis Jenkins presents a field-shaping introduction to Christian environmental ethics that offers resources for renewing theology. Observing how religious environmental practices often draw on concepts of grace, Jenkins maps the way Christian environmental strategies draw from traditions of salvation as they engage the problems of environmental ethics. He then uses this new map to explore afresh the ecological dimensions of Christian theology. Jenkins first shows how Christian ethics uniquely frames environmental issues, and then how those approaches both challenge and reinhabit theological traditions. He identifies three major strategies for making environmental problems intelligible to Christian moral experience. Each one draws on a distinct pattern of grace as it adapts a secular approach to environmental ethics. The strategies of ecojustice, stewardship, and ecological spirituality make environments matter for Christian experience by drawing on patterns of sanctification, redemption, and deification. He then confronts the problems of each of these strategies through critical reappraisals of Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, and Sergei Bulgakov. Each represents a soteriological tradition which Jenkins explores as an ecology of grace, letting environmental questions guide investigation into how nature becomes significant for Christian experience. By being particularly sensitive to the ways in which environmental problems are made intelligible to Christian moral experience, Jenkins guides his readers toward a fuller understanding of Christianity and ecology. He not only makes sense of the variety of Christian environmental ethics, but by showing how environmental issues come to the heart of Christian experience, prepares fertile ground for theological renewal.

This book discusses Aquinas's reception of Aristotle's work, exploring how Aquinas adopts, corrects or transforms key themes from Aristotle's ethics.

In Wealth, Virtue, and Moral Luck, Kate Ward addresses the issue of inequality from the perspective of Christian virtue ethics, arguing that our individual life circumstances affect our ability to pursue virtue and showing how Christians and Christian communities should respond to create a world where it is easier for people to be virtuous.

"Mary Wollstonecraft revolutionized ancient traditions of the virtues in modern and Christian modes for feminist and abolitionist aims. Formed by religious traditions of dissent, Wollstonecraft radically altered the garments of the eighteenth-century religious, ethical, political, and aesthetic imagination. She sought to discard sexed virtues, to shed corsets that restrict women's roles and rights, to expose and break chains of domination, to exchange the vicious finery of the rich for virtue in rags, and to design garb fit for a society in which all participate in defining and cultivating common goods. The virtues and debate about them remain indispensable to modern Christian traditions and democratic societies. When wed, virtues and contestation are among the goods shared in common. Canonical in women and gender studies, feminist philosophy, political science, literary studies, and history, Wollstonecraft is mostly unknown or ignored in contemporary virtue ethics, theology, and religious studies. Modern Virtue seeks to transform prominent narratives in each. Wollstonecraft scholars debate whether theology is ornamental or foundational for her radical arguments. Her use of the wardrobe metaphor provides a fitting alternative. Modern Virtue also challenges influential and competing narratives about the virtues in modernity. These stories render modern virtue a contradiction in terms, common goods obsolete. Modern accounts of the virtues must address this two-fold conundrum: systems of domination thwart virtue and mask vice, and the virtues are integral to just socio-political transformation. Wollstonecraft's does just this"--

A comprehensive examination of the moral psychology of wrongdoing from a major historical figure, Thomas Aquinas.

Medieval writers were fascinated by fortune and misfortune, yet the critical problems raised by such explorations have not been adequately theorized. Allan Mitchell invites us to consider these contingencies in relation to an "ethics of the event." His book examines how Middle English writers including Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Malory treat unpredictable events such as sexual attraction, political disaster, social competition, traumatic accidents, and the textual condition itself - locating in fortune the very potentiality of ethical life. While earlier scholarship has detailed the iconography of Lady Fortune, this book alters and advances the conversation so that we see fortune less as a negative exemplum than as a positive sign of radical phenomena.