Gathered for the Journey

Gathered for the Journey brings to market, a new and contemporary approach to catholic moral theology. The writers, all post Vatican II contemporaries themselves, have created a tightly knitted series of chapters, with a specific undergraduate student readership in mind. Threefold in structure, part one takes up theological topics in terms of questions of formation, part two, human fulfilment, habits, and practices, and part three, how the Christian way of life shapes how we see moral questions and act on them.

The threefold structure of the book also underlines a methodological claim that is worked through in the following chapters. The text moves from gathering in worship, to faith in the Trinitarian God, through Christology, to Ecclesiology and then to theological anthropology, dealing with questions of Globalization, War, Bioethics, Sex and the Environment in the final section. The three parts of the book are also unified by questions that characterize virtue ethics, questions like ‘what are human beings for?’, ‘who ought we to become?’, and ‘what is the role of the church in the world?’ The virtue ethics approach is not undertaken at the exclusion of understanding moral rules and natural law, but these topics, like the chapters on the virtues, are set in terms of human fulfillment in God. Gathered for the Journey is designed as a classroom text for students of catholic moral theology, but will also be of interest and use to those outside the Catholic faith, studying Christian ethics.

David Matzko McCarthy teaches in the department of Theology at Mount St Mary's University, Emmitsburg. Therese Lysaught teaches in the department of Religious Studies at the University of Dayton, Ohio.