Mutuality

By selecting as her focus 'mutuality, ' Nothwehr brings to the fore an issue of perennial importance in Christian social ethics, that of power. As she shows, feminist theology invites religious ethicists to reconceive normative questions of power from the vantage point of its dynamic, mutual sharing, a sharing that encompasses not only individual relations, but society and the natural world. She also demonstrates how attention to relations of mutuality sheds light on the spectrum of classical Christian theological and moral topics, revealing dimensions of our traditions that standard assumptions about power as domination tend to obscure. --Christine Firer Hinze, Associate Professor of Theology, Marquette University This book allows 'mutuality' to take its rightful place along with 'love' and 'justice' in Christian social ethics. Written with great clarity, with excellent scholarship, and with the thinking of key historical figures in mind, this book focuses on the thinking of four contemporary Christian feminists--Beverly Wildung Harrison, Carter Heyward, Elizabeth Johnson, and Rosemary Radford Ruether--to show that 'mutuality' is at the heart of ethics. But it does more. It shows that 'mutuality' at the heart of the human, at the heart of the divine, and at the heart of the meeting between the two. --John J. Shea, visiting Associate Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling, Boston College Dawn Nothwehr employs a corrective category, 'mutuality.' At first blush the term would seem too tender and nebulous to address the splits in our consciousness, but this theologian brings well-informed care to its definition. It becomes in her hands a critical tool which can do healing surgery on many foundational categories of Catholic theology, and indeed on much of modern thinking beyond the pale of Catholicism. Mutuality calls attention to the essential interdependency of all that is in our cosmos. --Daniel C. Maguire, Professor of Theological Ethics Marquette Universit