Grace and Social Ethics: Gift as the Foundation of Our Life Together - Paperback

by Angela Carpenter (Author)

Grace and Social Ethics demonstrates why the doctrine of grace has significant implications for social ethics and for Christian engagement with culture. The book reframes Christian social ethics by illuminating how grace shapes human identity and community.

Angela Carpenter integrates theology and social science to articulate a vision of human persons as constituted by gift rather than merit. This graced anthropology compellingly bridges theology and contemporary research on human dependence and mutuality. Carpenter insightfully applies this graced identity to pressing issues in social ethics such as criminal justice, labor practices, and gun violence.

Scholars and students of theological ethics as well as pastors seeking resources for moral formation will find illuminating perspectives in this integrative work, which situates social justice imperatives within God's gracious purposes.

Back Jacket

"Wonderfully erudite yet remarkably accessible"

Grace and Social Ethics demonstrates why the doctrine of grace has significant implications for social ethics and for Christian engagement with culture.

"This is a wonderfully smart, effortlessly learned, and deeply insightful book. Carpenter weaves together the best ideas from science, theology, and ethics to help us understand what it means to be human, and she explains all of it in prose that is not only clear but a genuine pleasure to read. I heartily commend this book."
--Kevin W. Hector, University of Chicago

"In this wise and wide-ranging book, Carpenter deftly guides her readers through the findings of evolutionary anthropology and social psychology and into the thickets of contemporary debates around work, criminal justice, and gun control. Along the way, she uncovers the profound implications of the experience of grace for human sociality and builds a robust case for a social ethics deeply rooted in Reformation theology. Grace and Social Ethics is balm in Gilead!"
--Jennifer A. Herdt, Yale Divinity School

"Carpenter powerfully reminds us that grace is deeper than individual salvation because God is deeper than individual salvation, making redemptive action what individual salvation comes to in the life of God. The gift structure of creation comes with remarkable implications for ethics, ones we'd often rather forget on the way to forgetting ourselves. Grace and Social Ethics calls us back to ourselves by calling us back to divine grace, the first and final site of creaturely possibility."
--Jonathan Tran, Baylor University

"We human beings are relational creatures who need gifts of love. Without God's love we would not even exist, but what does our need for grace mean for our life together? Carpenter's wonderfully erudite yet remarkably accessible book insightfully reveals an overlapping consensus in theological, biological, and psychological understandings of our dependent nature. She then draws out important implications concerning the ways we deal with fear and anxiety and encourages us to seek out meaning in life."
--Jesse Couenhoven, Villanova University

Author Biography

Angela Carpenter (PhD, University of Notre Dame) is the Leonard and Marjorie Maas Associate Professor of Reformed Theology at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. Her first book, Responsive Becoming: Moral Formation in Theological, Evolutionary, and Developmental Perspective, received the Martin Institute and Dallas Willard Research Center Book Award.