What might we learn if the study of ethics focused less on hard cases and more on the practices of everyday life? In Everyday Ethics, Michael Lamb and Brian Williams gather some of the world’s leading scholars and practitioners of moral theology (including some GUP authors) to explore that question in dialogue with anthropology and the social sciences. Inspired by the work of Michael Banner, these scholars cross disciplinary boundaries to analyze the ethics of ordinary practices—from eating, learning, and loving thy neighbor to borrowing and spending, using technology, and working in a flexible economy. Along the way, they consider the moral and methodological questions that emerge from this interdisciplinary dialogue and assess the implications for the future of moral theology.

“This is a fresh, insightful and highly stimulating contribution to debates about the nature of Christian ethics and the relation between theology and the social sciences. The book responds to Michael Banner’s important recent proposal that theological ethics be grounded in an “everyday ethics” schooled by social anthropology. Banner’s intervention is one of the most fruitful and creative contributions to the field in the last decade and, as such, both merits and needs contextualization and critical interpretation. This collection offers precisely that, serving as an excellent ‘companion’ to Banner, while also extending his insights into new areas and complementing and challenging it with a range of new perspectives. Much more than a dialogue with a single thinker, the book turns out to be an authoritative guide into many of the contemporary concerns and possibilities of theological ethics as a whole.”—Jonathan Chaplin, Independent researcher and writer, Member, Cambridge University Divinity Faculty

Contributors

• Michael Banner, University of Cambridge
• Luke Bretherton, Duke University
• Brian Brock, University of Aberdeen
• Morgan Clarke, University of Oxford
• Molly Farneth, Haverford College
• Craig M. Gay, Regent College
• Eric Gregory, Princeton University
• Jennifer Herdt, Yale University
• Michael Lamb, Wake Forest University
• Philip Lorish, University of Virginia
• Charles T. Mathewes, University of Virginia
• Patrick McKearney, University of Cambridge
• Stephanie Mota Thurston, Princeton Theological Seminary
• Rachel Muers, University of Leeds
• Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury
• Brian A. Williams, Eastern University