Your 2023 Christian Ethics Watch List

Eight Books To Keep Your Eye on For the New Year

Each year, there’s innumerable new books birthed into the world, with innumerable authors hoping their little offering finds readers. My own two books published last year have been slowly finding their way into the world (available here and here), and I’m grateful to have had them featured in some “best of 2022” lists that helped them find friends.

My reading runs far and wide, both given my interests and courses that I teach, but I want to highlight eight books coming out this year in the world of Christian moral thought that I’m intrigued by, and hope to spend some time with. If any of these look intriguing to you as well, let’s think about having it as a future book club:

1. Zena Hitz, A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life

   

   Her first book on the intellectual life was one that didn’t quite click for me, but it was a compelling call for simplicity and clarity in the intellectual life. No need to apologize for thinking clearly and pursuing it wholeheartedly! I’m interested to see how she knits together her abiding in interests in philosophy and theology here on the heels of that.

2. Marjorie Corbman, Divine Rage: Malcolm X’s Challenge to Twentieth Century Christians

Some will be familiar with the late James Cone’s book Martin and Malcolm, which draws the two figures biographically into conversation, to display the convergence of their late-in-life trajectories. But I’m intrigued by the panoply of Christian figures that the book proposes to draw in together, as those who wrestled with X’s approach to racial injustice.

3. Stephen Meaward, Beyond Virtue Ethics: A Contemporary Ethic of Ancient Spiritual Struggle

   

   I lean a lot more into virtue ethics than some modes of moral reasoning, mostly because I think virtue and how we become good are the unacknowledged bones of modern moral reasoning: hard to distribute justly when we have no idea what all the distributions of goods is for. But this book, drawing on early Christian writings, promises to trouble virtue ethics by saying that there’s far more to the pursuit of the good than reasoning: there is real down-in-the-earth struggle, with tears and blood.

4. Noreen Herzfeld, The Artifice of Intelligence: Divine and Human Relationship in a Robotic Age

AI is the brave new world, the great question of passing over humans. So many contemporary questions turn on what it means for a human to be fully a human, with AI asking “why not just keep our ability to do things and eliminate the vagaries of human reasoning?”

5. Jason Thacker, The Digital Public Square: Christian Ethics in A Technological Age

Thacker works for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and this promises to provide an accessible introduction to some of the intersections of the moral life and digital life.

6. Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning

Biggar is a careful thinker that I love to diagree with. I was on a panel with him in 2017 as I was beginning to work on the nonviolence book. I will undoubtedly disagree with his assessment of the good of colonialism, but he’ll have some careful things to contend with.

7. Glenn Butner, Jesus the Refugee: Ancient Injustice and Modern Solidarity

   

   I had the privilege of endorsing Glenn’s book, which roots contemporary refugee ethics in the story of Jesus’ flight into Egypt. A provocative re-reading which sheds light on the the aporias within migration law, and what God being with us in flesh means for refugee debates.

8. Matthew J. Lynch, Flood and Fury: Old Testament Violence and the Shalom of God

   

   One of the perennial questions of the ethics of Scripture is how to treat the admonitions toward violence in the Old Testament. The endorsements alone have me intrigued: I’m typically not impressed by this vein of book, but hopeful to be wrong.

What did I miss? What looks interesting to you? Tell us in the comments!