Justice in the Making: Feminist Social Ethics

Catholic New Times, Dec 18, 2005

Justice in the Making: Feminist Social Ethics: Beverly Wildung Harrison, Louisville, Westminster John Knox press, 2004, 251 pp.

This is a collection of essays by the students of much respected feminist theologian Beverly Wildung Harrison, honouring her retirement from decades at Union Theological in New York. It also includes some of her most powerful talks. A professor in Christian Ethics since 1980, Harrison has had a profound effect on women advisees who encouraged her to collate a series of articles in the area of feminist ethics. The first part, "The Task of Liberatory Feminist Ethics," seeks a revision of Christian tradition away from past oppressions." This is the necessary task of hearing and integrating marginal exduded voices induding, and here especially, women's experiences as formative of a more compelling direction in Christian ethics. Harrison begins with the fact of "deeply embedded misogyny" and "malestream hegemonies." In part two, Harrison engages Protestant thinkers and tradition from Niebuhr to Dorothee Soelle.