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  1. Home
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  3. Priorities and Christian Ethics
  • Cited by 10
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
October 2009
Print publication year:
1998
Online ISBN:
9780511585494
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511585494
Subjects:
Religious Ethics, Ethics, Religion, Philosophy
Series:
New Studies in Christian Ethics (12)
Information

Book description

This book provides a full treatment of an issue which is particularly pressing: when the claims of the nearest (e.g. parents, children, spouses, friends) conflict with the claims of the neediest, as they constantly do, where should preference go? Professor Hallett focuses first on a specific, representative case, pitting the lesser need of a son against the greater need of starving strangers. He brings to bear on this single paradigm all the resources of theological and philosophical reflection - scriptures, patristic teaching, the Thomistic tradition, current debates - and from this single example he sheds light on a wide range of comparable cases, both private and public. This distinctive strategy leads to distinctive and challenging results, and at the same time helps to clarify the traditional 'order of charity' and the celebrated 'preferential option for the poor'.

Reviews

"This book, with an example obviously of interest to students, deserves a place in college and seminary libraries as an illustration of careful casuitry." Choice

"...the book is clearly written, impressively researched, and usually thoughtful....an admirable and challenging addition to literature on the nature and order of Christian love and deserves to be read in any graduate discussion of the subject." Paul J. Wadell, Religious Studies Review

"The book is, in the best tradition of roman Catholic casuistry, a detailed exploration of an issue...that seeks to investigate a particular moral dilemma so as to shed light on more general issues and exemplify broader moral principles." Jeph Holloway, Southwestern Journal of Theology

"This book is an exemplary piece of casuistry in the best sense of the word...wonderful...To read this book is to be invited into a world of rare moral beauty. This book has the kind of authority that arises when a thinker sympathetically entertains arguments that are contrary to his own. This makes the book a rewarding experience, a real page turner as the reader tries to follow myriad well-told arguments regarding a concrete case that, by analogy, is the story of our lives, the situation about which each of us makes decisions every day, directing our resources either toward the nearest of the neediest every time we open our wallets." The Journal of Religion

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