Brent Waters

Book Review: Sarah Bachelard, Resurrection and Moral Imagination

worth living, yet again points to the complexity of the issues. A free-range dairy cow could be cold and malnourished in a field, and relatively unproductive, whereas a cow in a barn might well have all her needs met, as well as being milked intensively in order to help sustain human life. Although meat and dairy consumption certainly need to fall if they are to be sustainable in the context of a growing global population, criticisms of ‘factory’ farming are unhelpful if a viable alternative is not clearly defined. Moreover, the distinction between ‘factory’ animal farming and free range, and between intensive arable farming and local community gardening, is not clear cut. In order to advance understanding, detailed definitions will be needed rather than simple polarities.

Book Review: Allen Verhey, Nature and Altering ItVerheyAllen, Nature and Altering It (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010). x + 150 pp., £10.99/US

with and indeed ruled by awareness of eternity. His conclusion to this effect seems to have less to do with close observation than with somewhat doctrinaire ideas about the self-sufficient life of the Trinity and Jesus’ role: ‘Figuring an enduring notion of forgiveness requires first mapping forgiveness’s journey onto a full doctrine of God, locating its possibility, its eternal “thereness”, within the superabundance of God’s Trinitarian life’ (p. 153). This disconnect persists. It seems that Tran’s heavily-cited authorities cannot accept that the earliest affirmations of the divinity of Jesus can now be recognised as mythological. The hints in this direction under the heading of ‘The Myth of God Incarnate’ may seem on the surface to have been no more than an ephemeral moment in the story of modern theology, but the underlying insight remains, in however inchoate a form. The author writes persuasively on the unwisdom of the suggestion sometimes made that there are memories so painful that they must be forgotten. He insists instead on a strong notion of the redemption of memory as both possible and desirable: ‘forgiveness comes as a gift of re-narration, the engrafting of memories of horror onto God’s redemption of all things’ (p. 129). This approach can perhaps only take off if it finds a way to integrate rather than forget the mythological undercurrent. It needs to do so in the interest of a much more earthed and yet refined sense both of God and of Jesus if it is to speak convincingly to and out of the searing stories this book revisits. Meanwhile we are left with the author’s heartening belief that ‘eucharistic remembering, unlike...depoliticized memory, creates space for memory by enacting conversation between past and present’ (p. 202). We need others to remind us to remember (p. 259). ‘Eucharist is not a statement but a politics’ which by being ‘attuned to memory as the guardian of difference...refuses integration into the national mythos’ (p. 269).

15 (pb), ISBN 978-0-8028-6548-9.

human and who felt directly threatened by Singer’s ideas. Surely they deserve acknowledgement. In a similar way, Camosy criticises those who wished to maintain Terri Schiavo’s assisted nutrition and hydration for fighting ‘a proxy war over abortion policy’ (p. 64), but he does not mention her parents, who were in fact at the centre of this legal fight. Even if Camosy disagreed with them (which he hints is his position), he should at least have expressed a word of sympathy for those whose overriding concern was to continue to care for and to feed their daughter. The perspective of such people is notable by its absence from this book. This book has much to recommend it as the counterweight to that sizeable literature of anti-Singer polemic by Christians, and it would be useful for students who should be encouraged to move beyond simple polarities in ethical theory. The weakness of this book is the lack of a more robust critique of Singer’s position, but this could easily be offset if it were used in conjunction with a more critical volume, for example, the very rich collection by Oderberg and Laing, Human Lives: Critical Essays on Consequentialist Bioethics.

Book Review: Jonathan Chaplin, Herman Dooyeweerd: Christian Philosopher of State and Civil SocietyChaplinJonathane, Herman Dooyeweerd: Christian Philosopher of State and Civil Society (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). xii + 452 pp., £59.95 (hb), ISBN 978-0-268-02305-8.

honour and spectacle were appropriated by Christians for their own purposes is undeniable: but Castelli is blind to the transformation — and even subversion — of these concepts when they are put to use in Christian culture making. Castelli’s tendency is rather to overstate the paradoxes and ambiguities brought about by such appropriations because this suits her overall theme. Thus the appeal to truth-telling at the end of the book seems to sit at odds with the author’s own method, which so readily collapses truth into power and its effects. And yet it is hard to see how it is possible to advocate a recovery of the truth-telling aspect of martyrdom without a substantial account of what that truth is. There is a need for a conceptual clarification of martyrdom for our times; but such a clarification ought to at least be open to the theological option — since that is what the martyrs thought that they were suffering to defend. Castelli’s secularist point of view seems to be that it is impossible to sift out the perpetrators and the sufferers of religious violence because they are all part of the one, inherently violent, discourse which is merely a struggle for power. However, genuinely Christian martyrdoms are inconceivable without Christ. No study of the deaths of Christian martyrs can convincingly proceed without reference to the meaning of Christ’s death, or at least the meanings claimed for it. Could it not at least be countenanced that here was a divine declaration of peace and a divine act of absorbing violence? Or that here was a model of reconciliation for the world which the martyrs saw themselves as imitating?

Book Review: Genetics and Christian Ethics; Genetics, Theology, and Ethics: An Interdisciplinary Conversation

wit, carries things along most agreeably; yet enjoying the entertainment and following the argument are rather different things. The author is reluctant to impose a cull upon the fauna of his mind. It leaps from one point to another, throws up new questions, chases down blind alleys, explores alternatives, explodes absurdities, links up with other arguments, burrows into the history of Western thought. It demands a high level of attention to follow all the sudden transitions, arguments that begin in one place and go somewhere else, the glissandi of quotations and anecdotes, counter-suggestible side-swipes, rhetorical questions. Any natural science is a dangerous field of study; press its perspective on any subject hard enough, and you end up no longer knowing even the most ordinary things that you used to know. The infinite accountability of the universe on those particular terms seems to leave no room for any other accountability on other terms (other natural-scientific terms included). As a mode of discovery by abstraction, a science serves us by occluding things from view, like putting pressure on our eyes to distort mid-distance vision, so that we see the text on the page in front of us more clearly. Clark’s firm intention is to combat the illusions of science, to persuade us to ’rely on our best insights into the world of beauty’ (p. 319), as he says in his concluding remarks. But what are we left with as an account of

Genetic Turning Points: The Ethics of Human Genetic Intervention, by James C. Peterson. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001. 364 pp. pb. £15.99. ISBN 0-8028-4920-2

equal relationships. Finally, there are two curious omissions. The first is given Kelly’s stated aim of developing a ’person centred sexual ethics’ there is no engagement with recent and extensive theological material relating to divine and human personhood. The second is that in his substantial discussion of the Pope’s view on these matters Kelly neither analyses ’Love and Responsibility’, nor the writing collected under the title ’The Theology of the Body’, which outside of the encyclicals constitutes John Paul 11’s most thorough treatments of sexual ethics.

On Moral Medicine: Theological Perspectives in Medical Ethics, edited by Stephen E. Lammers and Allen Verhey. Second edition. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1998. 1004 pp. pb. No price. ISBN 0-8028-4249-6

his book is part of a series on ’The Family, Religion, and TCulture’ resulting from the Religion, Culture, and Family project at the Institute for Advanced Study in the University of Chicago Divinity School. The author was a member of a diverse group of scholars who met periodically to discuss and assess the condition and prospects of the family in American society. Consequently, this book purports to address the growing ability to control human reproduction in light of the family. Peters’ principal thesis is that ’if concerned Christians are to meet the moral challenge posed by the advance of reproductive technology, we will have to acknowledge and accept increased choice and construct our ethics on a culture of choice’ (p. 3). This thesis is supported by three corollaries: 1) Trying to deny choice