Disruptive Christian Ethics: Addressing Racism & Women's Lives - Essential Book for Theology Students & Social Justice Advocates

This a great book for contemporary students and scholars of Christian ethics seeking to deepen their understanding of faith and ethics. Starting with real people, West makes women, particularly women of color, and sexual violation her entry point into constructing Christian ethics. Her proposal is "disruptive" because she insists that the universal vision of Christian ethics begins precisely here, in the particular experiences of particular people living particular lives. The disruption is felt when the Christian imperative is re-framed in the material conditions and embodied experiences of subjugated persons whose lives are impacted by gender-discrimination, homophobia, and race. Approached this way, Christian ethics avoid sanctuary in the abstract universals of theological claims and rationalizations of human nature and destiny for West. Instead, Christian ethics disturbs widespread Christian complacency about the lives of people living amidst persistent injustices institutionally structured and experienced at the intersections of personal, social, and political life. In response, she lays out a liberative vision of social ethics that struggles to connect Christian social thought to a practical faith that resists abstraction, elevates embodied life and sets sight on transformation in the concrete.West's disruptive Christian ethics is important. It follows an American tradition of Christian social ethics from Union Theological Seminary, from Reinhold Niebuhr through the John C Bennett, Bev Harrison, and others. West makes her contribution by incorporating feminist and womanist critiques, which lead her to an understanding of Christian social ethics that truly ties the universal claims of Christian thinking to lives lived in the particular realities. West tightens the connection of Christian thinking to concrete practices. West's book is an excellent unity of Christian realism and liberation ethics in a disruptive synthesis that brings Christian social ethics vibrancy and puts it in a new light.