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C. C. Pecknold, The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics. Edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells. Pp. xiv + 510. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. isbn 0 631 23506 X. £85/$124.95, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 57, Issue 1, April 2006, Pages 413–418, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/fli248
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Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells have conceived a companion to Christian ethics that should inspire theological educators, especially those who are helping the Church to reflect on its practices, discerning within Christian worship signs of God's guidance for a robustly virtuous life. With lively contributors making both bold and modest claims about the centrality of liturgy, the volume is refreshing in a field of ethics that too often manages to bore students. With Hauerwas & co. theological ethics is bound not to be boring, and in this collection of essays we see a sketch of what might be a genuine paradigm shift in the field. At a time when the Christian tradition has reached deadlock on a number of seemingly intractable ‘ethical’ issues, the editors reconceive the discipline and interrupt a process of reasoning that has outlived its usefulness. Here is not simply an alternative to what is done in ‘religious ethics’ but entails a critique of all current ethical thinking that might not adequately reflect the ways in which communal practices, pedagogically structured, constitute a moral life. Covering a range of liturgical practices (e.g. gathering, praising, reading, listening, proclaiming, confessing, interceding, offering, eating, washing, baptism, marriage, peace, sending, etc.) this volume rethinks the field of Christian ethics in the broadest terms.
