A dear friend who had stage four cancer told me how few, if any, of her friends and family were prepared to take the time to listen to what she was going through and enter into the reality of her situation. Existing as she did on a precipice between life and death, she felt alone and unheard. Instead of listening, friends and family rushed to offer either platitudes or crazy cures (eating kale being a memorable one) or find reasons that explained away what was going on and thereby dissolved their own dis-ease. Her situation demanded paying attention to what was actually going on, however uncomfortable or bewildering it was.

James Rebanks’s grandfather took pride in the careful way he watched and judged what was occurring each day with the land and livestock he farmed. Rebanks writes that when his grandfather stood looking over a gate, “he was figuring these things out by close and thoughtful observation.” In a meditation on the changing nature of the relationship British farmers have with the land they till and the animals they keep, Rebanks notes that this kind of deep attention is disappearing. “Managing animals the traditional way required specialist knowledge and judgment, and skilled people to care for them and understand their needs.” In an age of factory farming, such expertise “didn’t scale up easily for mass production.”

When my father died, my family and I needed a way to house and express our grief, bury his body, and gather with others to remember him. We could not conjure funeral practices out of nothing for ourselves; and even if we could have, we did not have the energy to do so. We were also confronted with having to navigate a vexed and primal moral question: What constitutes good care for the dead? Our tradition gave us words (Scripture and prayers), a ritual process (liturgies and funerary rites), institutions (the church and municipal cemetery), practices (bedside visitation by the priest, last rites, burial and memorial services), and virtues (truthfulness, hospitality, faith, hope, and love) for answering this question. It provided us with moral means to fulfill moral ends in a time of trouble.

Many students I’ve taught have been subject to legalistic and harmful forms of judgmentalism in either their church, community, or online interactions. In reaction against that legalism, they tend to practice a relativistic “you do you” approach to moral questions. In the name of tolerance and freedom, they see morality as a purely personal matter and are hesitant to make moral judgments about their own actions, let alone those of others. Yet this “live and let live” mentality undermines the pursuit of love and justice.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors dealt with scarce resources and overwhelming need. In such situations, they had to engage in triage. A decision must be made, for example, about how to allocate ventilators. But should doctors allocate ventilators on a first come, first served basis? Or do they prioritize the sickest patients? Do they give ventilators to the essential personnel whose presence is most needed (e.g., medical staff or those required for maintaining critical infrastructure)? Or do they grant them to those most likely to survive? In the face of equally terrible possibilities, medical practitioners are still required to discern a morally responsible course of action. And they must act in real time without knowing what the outcome will be. Their actions are constrained both by their own limited knowledge and capacity and by a system that can’t or won’t give them the resources they need to solve the problem.

Some years ago, I was involved in a community organizing coalition called London Citizens and its response to the financial crisis of 2007–2008. The coalition, which addressed issues ranging from street safety to the need for a living wage, was made up of churches, mosques, synagogues, trade unions, schools, resident associations, and universities. In the wake of the crisis, the coalition engaged in a process of listening to the folk who were part of the membership institutions to hear how the crisis, and the economic recession that came in its aftermath, was affecting them and what issues needed to be addressed. What became clear was that many were negatively affected by extortionate rates of interest charged by credit card companies, banks, and subprime lenders who at the same time were being bailed out by taxpayers’ money.

When most of us hear the word “politics” we think of either fights between political parties, fractious policy debates, or a manipulative and self-interested form of negotiation expressed in the phrase “they’re playing politics with the issue.” But underneath the polarization, rage tweets, and backroom deals is the reality that politics is the description of a moral and existential good. Politics embodies the recognition that some kind of common life with others must be cultivated and sustained over time if life is to go on.

Intimacy is a basic building block of a flourishing life. A lack of intimacy and the resulting loneliness and sense of isolation can cause dire physical, mental, and public health problems that in turn diminish our ability to act with and for others.1 This chapter begins by focusing on intimacy in general, which then frames a more specific focus on sexual intimacy and the intimacies of home. My argument is that vulnerability is an inherent feature of creatureliness that can be metabolized in ways that produce either intimacy or precarity. On my account, intimacy is a moral relation that specifies what love and justice mean in practice.

When my family and I moved to the United States, my eldest son had never played or seen a game of basketball. He was not even that interested in sports. But on arrival, he was invited to join a neighborhood recreational team. That opportunity awakened a love for the game that then became his passion until he went to university. As it turned out, being a serious basketball player in North Carolina is not a trivial matter. It structured much of his life, including how he experienced school, our town, the intersections of gender, class, and race, as well as his own physical development. However, there was neither an identity nor a way of acting as a basketball player that was somehow hidden inside him waiting to jump out.

Sojourner Truth was an abolitionist and women’s rights activist who combined her own experience of slavery, empirical evidence about slavery, and a fervent theological vision to summon others to change. As she put it: “The Lord has made me a sign unto this nation, an’ I go round a-testifyin’, an’ showin’ on ’em their sins agin my people.”1 Sojourner Truth prophetically revealed what was going on as a prelude to demanding that those who heard her change how they lived and then join with her to abolish the system of slavery. She was a witness.

I remember vividly seeing footage on the news of the space shuttle Challenger launching on January 28, 1986. Seventy-four seconds after takeoff it exploded, killing all seven crew members. The immediate cause of the explosion was a technical fault. But it was not just a mechanical failure that led to the deaths of everyone on board. The cause was also a failure of character. The Challenger space shuttle disaster was investigated by a presidential commission and subsequently the subject of extensive research and analysis.

On August 26, 1572, Peter Ramus was stabbed to death in his study, his body thrown out the window, mutilated, and then cast into the Seine. He was one of thousands killed over a period of a few days in Paris and then over several weeks as the violence spread beyond the city. This bloodletting came to be known as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The reason for the massacre was ostensibly a conflict between Catholics and Protestants. But it also had to do with court intrigue, mob violence, the settling of scores, and a sporadic civil war that had begun a decade earlier.

To be a moral person is always a struggle. Converting one’s temptations into virtue and foolishness into wisdom is a part of the struggle, as is transforming places and peoples accursed by abuse and injustice into a realm of blessing. But we cannot do either alone. Nor should we. The gift of coming together with others in a shared struggle to live well is that, in doing so, we discover who we are already in Christ and forge more loving and just forms of common life that anticipate and witness to the world as it will be in Christ.

The Hippocratic Oath dates back to the fifth century bce and forms a key part of thinking about medical ethics even today. In it we see various behavioral rules such as promising not to administer poison, not to take sexual advantage of a patient, and not to violate confidentiality. Set within the context of an oath or covenant, such rules were there to ensure medicine was practiced ethically. In the contemporary context, some people have a knee-jerk reaction against any kind of rules.

Part I focused on ethics as a mode of description. I argued that ethical descriptions should situate us within and help us respond morally to the world in which we find ourselves. Inherent in ethical description is a determination of the gap between the world as it is and a vision of the world as it should be if we are to live well. Part I set out how we become rightly orientated and able to pursue a vision of a flourishing life through a combination of listening to creation, Scripture, strangers, cries for liberation, and our ancestors. However, while moral description is a first step in ethical deliberation, ethics does not live by description alone.

Does Scripture have anything to say about whether genetically modified crops are moral? Can the Bible provide an answer to whether it is legitimate to possess nuclear weapons in order to deter an enemy? Underlying these specific questions are two broader ones: How can Scripture help address contemporary issues? And can it provide answers to moral questions that go beyond what Scripture teaches?