At the outset of Ethics at the Edges of Law: Christian Moralists and American Legal Thought, Cathleen Kaveny explains that the purpose of her book is to impart new energy to the interdisciplinary conversation between Christian ethicists and legal scholars. Kaveny observes that the tête-à-tête has tended to be one directional, with legal scholars drawing on theological principles in order to offer critiques of public policy, law, and case precedent. As significant as the theological critique may be, Kaveny proposes that the dialogue would be enriched if it were to be expanded beyond the unilateral direction. On the one hand, she writes to invite theologians and ethicists to turn to the law. On the other hand, she affirms the role played by religious ethics in contributing to debates about controversial public issues. Pointing to the promise of interdisciplinary work between religious ethics and law, Kaveny comments:

Kaveny writes to emphasize that both sound legal and ethical analyses transcend any kind of religious or secular dogmatism in favor of interpretation rooted in reason.

Nurturing a conversation between theology and law that displays a reciprocity poses the challenge that the facilitator enjoys the necessary expertise in each of the respective disciplines. Kaveny is, of course, well suited to the task that she proposes because she is a lawyer and theologian. She completed her JD and PhD at Yale, clerked for a federal appeals court judge, practiced health-care law, and over the last two decades of service as a professor of law and of theology has developed a stellar reputation as an expert on the relation between law and religion. This book demonstrates that her reputation is well deserved. Clearly written and carefully structured, the book is divided into three parts, each of which consists of three chapters. Part 1 treats the reciprocity between theological ethics and law with chapters about Catholic natural-law theory, Protestant fidelity to Sacred Scripture, and American pragmatism.

Kaveny's first chapter discusses the thought of John Noonan, for whom Kaveny served as a law clerk as she commenced her professional career. Immersed in law and philosophical theology, Noonan's thought constitutes a strong starting point for Kaveny's book. Noonan's work preceded the attempt to develop a contemporary interchange between law and theology. In particular, he has adroitly brought legal modes of analysis to bear on Catholic theological doctrine. Through his analysis of Catholic doctrine about religious freedom, slavery, and marriage, Noonan has shown that the church's ostensibly immutable teaching is more open to historical development than some figures of the Catholic magisterial authority may be willing to admit. Rather than reject the natural law on which Catholic magisterial teaching places emphasis, Noonan's work calls for a rethinking of the natural-law tradition. A retrieved theory of natural law would continue to value universal moral principles available through the use of right reason even as it affords a role for the historically contingent. Noonan's and Kaveny's concern is not simply limited to moral disputes within the Catholic Church. In a secular pluralist democracy, arguments based on reason can claim a broader appeal than arguments directly derived from sectarian revelation.

With Noonan as the forerunner of the project, in chapter 2 Kaveny expands the inquiry to ponder the relation between the universal and particular, immutable and contingent, and transcendent and historical. To do so, she turns to the work of the twentieth-century Protestant thinkers Karl Barth, Stanley Hauerwas, and Paul Ramsey. On account of the traditional focus on Sacred Scripture as well a theological anthropology that tends to view human reason as fundamentally disordered, Protestant ethicists have been reluctant to accept any kind of natural-law theory in which reason functions independent of divine revelation. During the twentieth century, Barth assiduously maintained that the distinctive nature of Christian revelation cast serious doubt on natural law. A bit later in the century, Hauerwas remained just as adamant in his skepticism about reason's capacity to detect natural-law principles independently. Kaveny, however, questions this reluctance by drawing an analogy between secular contract theory and Protestant covenantal theology. Both adopt a methodology in which one relies on reason to apply principles to facts in such a way that the narrative (the historically contingent) plays a critical role. In this regard, she turns to the thought of Ramsey about Jacques Maritain's understanding of “connaturality” in natural-law theory. Maritain held that the principles of natural law are known progressively by a historical self through synderesis, which yields intuitions of practical reason based on moral or aesthetic experience and that consequently the natural law is never exhausted by any particular articulation of it. Ramsey concluded that Maritain's understanding of “connaturality” rectifies neo-scholastic tendencies to adhere rigidly to abstractions and to cut off reasonable exploration of issues prematurely. Reminding us of Ramsey's reconciliation with natural law via Maritain exemplifies the direction of the conversation that Kaveny endeavors to facilitate.

Having illustrated the reciprocal value of the exchange between law and theology from Catholic and Protestant perspectives, in chapter 3 Kaveny directs us to Jeffrey Stout, a thinker in the American pragmatist tradition. As she indicates, Stout wants “to negotiate the space between example and doctrine, between system and story,” and Stout's effort “perfectly captures the practice of the American common-law tradition.” As she does throughout her manuscript, Kaveny draws on her knowledge of the law of contract to demonstrate the centrality of narrative in interpreting and applying general principles. She observes that in resolving contract disputes, common-law judges practice “interstitial creativity” as they honor case precedent and translate it with fluidity to arrive at fair outcomes for individual parties and for the common good. Turning to the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre, Kaveny posits that all rational inquiry occurs in the context of the historical and that tradition (legal as well as theological) itself develops from a variety of historical contexts. Standing alone, part 1 of the book represents a serious contribution to scholarship concerning the role of Christian ethics vis-à-vis a common/public/social morality. It whets the reader's desire to hear more about the dialogue between theological ethics and secular law.

Part 2 of the book does not disappoint. In this part, Kaveny asks about the relationship among love, justice, and law. The complex relationship between love and justice, mercy and law, compassion and impartiality, and forgiveness and retribution is fertile ground in which Kaveny's interdisciplinary scholarship between law and theology plants seeds that blossom into a cornucopia of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. In chapter 4, Kaveny highlights the appealing thought of Gene Outka concerning agape. When applied to the individual believer, the gospel mandate to love ones’ neighbor as oneself has an immediate urgency recalling the self-emptying (kenosis) of Jesus. If it is to be accepted in a pluralistic democracy, the application of the Christian command to love one's neighbor in addressing public social controversies differs from its direct appeal to individual kenosis, and it requires mediating principles. She shows that the application of the Christian command is greatly facilitated by the kind of methodology used by courts to address conflicts between private individuals in which individual autonomy, impartiality, respect for others, and equality serve as basic legal principles. Not only does this chapter represent an important insight about the way in which the gospel command to love requires mediating principles when it is applied in a public and social context, but it also demonstrates that public policy dislocated from its religious roots runs the risk of losing its inner life. This chapter reveals the considerable depth of Kaveny's reflection on the relation among love, justice, and law.

Offering another example through which to explore the relation among love, justice, and law, chapter 5 takes up the debate between Paul Ramsey and Richard McCormick on whether end-of-life decisions about incompetent patients should be resolved by family members or by the courts. This chapter returns us to the dispute about reason and natural law. The Jesuit McCormick generally favored leaving decisions of this type to family members, thus reflecting his traditional Catholic optimism about the role of reason. In contrast, Princeton's Ramsey wanted more reliance on the courts. He cautioned that family members’ reason, which is fundamentally disordered by sin (the traditional Protestant anthropological take), needs to be safeguarded through the neutrality of law applied by objective judges. As an undergraduate at Princeton, Kaveny was privileged to study under Ramsey's tutelage, but this fact does not prevent her from being critical of his thought even as she acknowledges his path-cutting contributions. In recalling the McCormick–Ramsey debate, Kaveny offers a reminder that the law for all its virtues remains a blunt instrument, which is not always best suited to deal with the particularity of intimate personal and family decisions.

In chapter 6, Kaveny rounds out this part of the book with the work of Margaret Farley on love, justice, and compassion. Farley, a longtime professor at Yale, now emerita, explores the relationship in a way that is loyal to the Catholic moral tradition with an openness to the historically contingent in addressing contemporary ethical issues. The English word “compassion” stems from the Latin root compassio, meaning “to suffer with” the other, and Farley describes compassionate love as entailing an understanding of the other through an appreciation of the suffering present in the existential circumstances of life. Kaveny both affirms Farley's contribution to the discussion about sexual morality and at the same time extends her own reflections about the relation of love, compassion, justice, and law to a broader band of social issues. With a painfully striking example, Kaveny suggests how the relation could have informed the case of the Boston marathon bomber who was sentenced to death for his crimes. She queries what course of action best advances the common good when victims’ statements are permitted by the courts, and what the enlightened state's obligations might be in light of the desire for personal vengeance. Kaveny's reflections about love, justice, and law have clear applications to debates not only about the death penalty but also about issues such as immigration, health care, the environment, and equitable income distribution.

Although Kaveny does not address the issue directly, part 2 serves as an implicit refutation of John Rawls’ prohibition of the introduction of religious values into public discourse. Of course, later in his life, Rawls himself expressed second thoughts about his blanket prohibition. Obviously, Kaveny is by no means advocating a literalist or fundamentalist religious approach to controversial issues in the public forum. Part 2 of Kaveny's nuanced work explains why certain derivative moral values remain at the core of democratic society and have much to contribute to debates in the public sphere. Again, one can see the potential of a retrieved natural-law theory open to the historically contingent. Having engaged Outka, McCormick, Ramsey, and Farley about the relationship among love, justice, and law, Kaveny leads us to part 3 of her book.

Part 3 concentrates on ways that law could contribute to theology. In chapter 7, Kaveny relies on Robert Rodes’ legal categories, which broadly speaking distinguish between a perception of law as ideal, didactic, and aspirational from one that sees law as pragmatic, functional, and realistic. Kaveny applies Rodes’ legal theory to understand certain controversies within the Catholic community. For example, in light of Massachusetts’ requirements with regard to equality and neutrality in adoption proceedings, was it morally permissible for Catholic Charities to facilitate adoptions by gay parents? When efforts at compromise failed, the church hierarchy withdrew Catholic Charities from the adoption business. Reflecting the idealized notion of law described by Rhodes, Kaveny notes that the bishops were concerned with the moral purity of the church's witness against homosexual relations and marriage. Not everyone in the Catholic community necessarily agreed with the bishops, and they advocated what Rodes describes as the more pragmatic understanding of law. It was widely acknowledged that Catholic Charities possessed experience and expertise in this sensitive area of family law rooted in Catholic personalism, which values the dignity and goodness of each human being. This proved especially important in cases of hard-to-place children for whom Catholic Charities served as an indefatigable advocate. The inability to find a compromise reduced the options for potential parents and their adoptive progeny. It diminished the corporeal works of mercy in particular for poor, powerless children in most need of the church's help. It removed the church's presence from a significant social system and diminished the church's voice in this branch of family law.

For the Catholic Church, chapter 8 counts as perhaps the most immediately important chapter of Kaveny's book. Here, she relies on secular legal structures such as statutes of limitations and the definition of continuing crimes to critique the church's exclusion from full communion based on marital status. Kaveny asks: why should divorced and remarried persons be treated as if they are committing ongoing crimes with no statute of limitations? Embracing the theology of Walter Kasper on mercy, Kaveny observes that ecclesiastical law (canon law) needs to incorporate theological principles such as reconciliation, forgiveness, mercy, and love in order to be faithful to its ultimate purpose, the salvation of souls. Appealing to the traditional notion of canonical equity, Kaveny indicates that canonical equity incorporates the fundamental fairness of equity even as it is informed by evangelical love in addressing particular historical circumstances. Cardinal Kasper's work represents an eloquent statement of Christian ethics in and of itself, but its significance has only been bolstered by the fact that Pope Francis has relied upon it in his prophetic attempts to bring Christ's grace to those who are excluded from full participation in the church's life. His acute pastoral awareness leads Pope Francis to recognize the situation of the divorced and remarried Catholic who has no personal need of, or even interest in, obtaining a church annulment but who wants full communion with the church. The pontiff's proposed application of the principles of canonical equity on a case-by-case basis to such individuals and their ecclesiastical communities stands as a salient example of the careful casuistry that has long exemplified the integration of mercy and justice in the Catholic moral tradition. The pope has also suggested that compassionate love should not be overlooked for LGTBQ human beings. In light of the efforts of Pope Francis to open the Catholic Church to people who may feel injured by the church's law, this chapter serves as a poignant reminder that ecclesiastical law needs to strike a balance between antinomian and legalistic approaches.

Chapter 9 sets forth a critique of the work of conservative Christian moral theologians such as Germain Grisez and Hugo Tristram Engelhardt. Kaveny argues that it is precisely in their “rigid adherence” to abstract principles that such moralists fail to understand the theological methodology that interprets the Christian tradition in the best possible light. Kaveny contrasts this approach with a casuistry that prudently weighs the specifics of individual cases against conceptual generality. Likewise, the legal method relied upon by common-law judges in deciding cases tends to privilege the facts as the contextual narrative that must inform any appeal to abstract legal principles. If the method of secular law were to be accepted into the calculus, Kaveny suggests that Christian ethicists could resolve seemingly intractable moral disputes in ways that foster individual flourishing and promote the communal good. In Kaveny's estimation, the fixation of conservative moralists such as Grisez and Engelhardt on abstract points of moral dogma fails to appreciate the best of the Catholic and Protestant traditions.

Even if all that this book accomplished was to present a survey of some of the salient features of the thought of the various ethicists who grace its pages, Kaveny's project would represent a successful scholarly contribution. However, Kaveny has penned more than a textbook as she expands the dialogue between secular law and religious ethics and promotes a reciprocity of enrichment between them. I enjoyed reading this erudite book, and I learned from it. The book pays careful attention to detail even as it invites the reader to consider traditional perspectives from a new vantage point. The book will be of great interest to theologians, legal scholars, religious ministers, lawyers, philosophers, secular ethicists, and all other persons who are concerned with the resolution of controversial issues that arise in our pluralistic democratic society. Kaveny's work is about Christian ethics and law. As she notes in the introduction, it would be interesting to expand the parameters of the parley to include other conversation partners, especially religious participants from outside the Christian tradition (e.g., Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist), as well as other secular legal theorists (e.g., legal positivists, interpretivists, and critical legal theorists). Notwithstanding the concern for a pluralism of perspectives, however, the nicely defined parameters of Kaveny's monograph yield admirable interdisciplinary scholarship.