Family, by Lisa Sowle Cahill

Lisa Sowle Cahill has given a well-reasoned face to a position within the American family debate which has been difficult to describe and even more difficult to promote. The tug-of-war under way between rival claimants to the words "family" and "Christian" makes the voice of a thoughtful centrist difficult to notice. In her new book Cahill is once again at work with her sources--the Judeo-Christian scriptures; the Roman Catholic tradition of papal and episcopal writings on social justice; classic works in theological ethics by Protestant thinkers; the social sciences; and recent public-policy initiatives--to craft a corrective to the seemingly interminable drivel marketed under the words "Christian family."

This is not Cahill's first foray into family studies, nor is it her first attempt to balance multiple secular and theological sources in a sustained reflection on a timely practical issue. The list of topics to which she, a professor of ethics and theology at Boston College, has devoted her scholarly efforts puts her current volume into perspective: euthanasia, war, sex, aging, the rights of women and refugees, birth control and reproductive technologies, human cloning, economic justice--and the list goes on. Cahill's scope of scholarly interests is perhaps even broader than the entire Roman Catholic encyclical tradition from Leo XIII to John Paul II.

Her last book on concerns pertinent to the American family debate was Sex, Gender and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1996), which, building on her earlier Between the Sexes: Foundations for a Christian Ethics of Sexuality (For­tress, 1985), charted a theology of embodiment and relationality based on a cross-culturally shared set of human goods, the preservation and cultivation of which forms the moral compass for individuals and communities. In each case, she has worked in an interdisciplinary fashion with the four classic sources for theological reflection: scripture, tradition, reason and experience.