How do various concepts of God impact the moral life? Is God ultimately required for goodness? In this edited collection, an international panel of contemporary philosophers and theologians offer new avenues of exploration from a theist perspective for these important questions.
The book features several approaches to address these questions. Common themes include philosophical and theological conceptions of God with reference to human morality, particular Trinitarian accounts of God and the resultant ethical implications, and how communities are shaped, promoted, and transformed by accounts of God.
Bringing together philosophical and theological insights on the relationship between God and our moral lives, this book will be of keen interest to scholars of the philosophy of religion, particularly those looking at ethics, social justice and morality.
Introduction: God and the Moral Life, Myriam Renaud and Joshua Daniel 1 Three Arguments for the Dependence of Morality upon Religion, John Hare 2 Moral Concepts of God in an Age of Globalization and Contingency, Myriam Renaud 3 God and the Human Good, William Schweiker 4 Ethical Reflection on ‘God’: Making Sense of Things, Pamela Sue Anderson 5 Emptying God: The Ethics of Theology in Merleau-Ponty’s Work, Mayra Rivera 6 An Edwardsian Theoethical Aesthetics of Recognition, Joshua Daniel 7 Trinity, Virtue, and Violence, Aristotle Papanikolaou 8 God as Infinite: Ethical Implications, David Tracy 9 Plumblines in the Vastness: Measures without Measure, Michael Fishbane 10 Mascot or Judge: God and the Mores of Church and Society, Marilyn McCord Adams
Biography
Myriam Renaud is completing her Ph.D. in religious thought and ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her dissertation focuses on advancing a systematic method to construct validly moral concepts of God. She is a former Managing Editor of Sightings, the University of Chicago’s online, general-audience publication. Her research has appeared in scholarly journals such as Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, and the Anglican Theological Review; she has analyzed religion in public life for popular media outlets such as The Atlantic (online) and Religion Dispatches. She is Principal Investigator and Project Director of the Global Ethic Project at the Parliament of the World’s Religions and on the teaching faculty of Claremont Lincoln University.
Joshua Daniel is a theological ethicist on the teaching staff of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults, at the University of Chicago's Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies. His recent book is Transforming Faith: Individual and Community in H. Richard Niebuhr, and his articles have appeared in the Journal of Religious Ethics, the Journal of the Society for Christian Ethics, the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy and Political Theology.
