Christian Ethics and the Moral Psychologies

Christian Century, May 1, 2007 by Robin Lovin

Christian Ethics and the Moral Psychologies. By Don S. Browning. (Eerdmans, 254 pp., $30.00 paperback.) Overcoming Our Evil: Human Nature and Spiritual Exercises in Xunzi and Augustine. By Aaron Stalnaker. (Georgetown University Press, 352 pp., $49.95.) Comparative and interdisciplinary studies provide important new perspectives on Christian ethics in these books. Browning offers a masterful survey of the interaction of psychology and ethics in Freud, Erikson, Kohlberg, Gilligan and others. The wide range of theories coheres around Browning's own integration of psychological and ethical ways of interpreting human experience. Stalnaker has his own way of tackling the difficult questions of comparative method, but he engages Augustine and Xunzi on their terms and provides a fresh perspective on Augustine's understanding of evil.

Selected by Robin Lovin, who teaches at Southern Methodist University.