There has been a kind of “turn to the family” on the part of the Christian churches in the past decade, manifesting a concern for what is judged to be the western family in “crisis.” Unfortunately, the voices of religion have had little more effect than the voices of psychology or sociology in either healing or empowering the family, and they have had perhaps less success in interpreting the difficulties which beset the contemporary family as an institution. This failure may represent simply the intractability of the problems which individuals and families face. It may also, however, represent an almost tragic perception on the part of many persons that the Christian tradition regarding family life is today too oppressive to yield a prophetic, a healing or a freeing word.

The incorporation of feminist issues and feminist methods and sources into a Christian ethics curriculum is at once a simple and a complex enterprise. It is simple because a feminist approach to ethics can be made explicit at almost every juncture in the curriculum. It is complex because feminist ethics is, like most other general approaches to ethics, pluralistic. Moreover, as a systematic discipline it is in its beginning stages, and there are few comprehensive sources to which students can turn for analytical foundations. The difficulties which students and teachers face in building a syllabus for feminist ethics, however, are not essentially different from those we confront in much of the teaching of ethics. That is, controversy demands the use of a variety of sources; most of the appropriate readings are to be found in short essays rather than in book-length treatments; and since ethics is in many respects a derivative discipline, significant materials must be drawn from many other areas of learning, including theology, biblical studies, and the behavioral, social, and natural sciences.