In The Cosmic Common Good: Religious Grounds for Ecological Ethics, Daniel P. Scheid expands upon a core concept of Catholic social teaching, significantly widening the scope of the common good to embrace the vast entirety of creation as well as its manifold local bioregions. He maintains that “the cosmic common good can be a thoroughly Catholic concept, rooted in a Christian tradition devoted to the God of Jesus Christ” (7). In part 1, this assertion is developed by identifying how ancient, medieval, and contemporary Catholic theologies of creation contribute to a vision of the cosmic common good. This Catholic vision is profoundly theocentric, emphasizing that the ultimate good of creation is to glorify God, who endows all creatures with goodness, celebrating the diversity of species that more truly represents God's rich creativity than could any single species. All are ordained to participate in the cosmic common good and so promote what Augustine calls the “tranquility of order,” the order of the universe that Aquinas names as its “highest good.”

This traditional foundation supports Scheid's movement into both contemporary Catholic eco-theology and interreligious dialogue. Scheid's understanding of the common good finds both continuity and unique expression in Thomas Berry's theology of the “numinous presence” that enables the multiform universe to emerge and evolve into a dynamic whole. Berry highlights the self-organization, spontaneity, and wildness of the universe's manifold “subjects in communion.” Having thus enlarged the reader's recognition of the cosmic scope of the Catholic common good, Scheid brings this concept into dialogue with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Native American spirituality, yielding both “intriguing resonances” and opportunities for conceptual and ethical challenges.

The ambitious scope of the work is validated by detailed argumentation with thorough reference to classic texts. The clarity of the writing and careful establishment of interconnecting themes, linking classic principles in a dense conceptual scaffold, make The Cosmic Common Good a valuable teaching text, one that not only conveys the essential themes of Catholic social teaching, but also illustrates their flexibility and fecundity for new moral meanings in expanding ethical contexts. For example, Earth solidarity is named as a source of moral conversion, the emotional commitment that seeks all creatures’ participation in the cosmic common good. Additionally, cosmic subsidiarity shows why excessive human activity violates the rights of nonhuman lives and ecosystems to cosmic participation.

This engagement explores “intriguing resonances” in the harmonies between the Catholic cosmic good and Hinduism's theistic dharmic ecology, such as the fluidity of Ātman and rebirth that further decenter the human person. Likewise a Catholic cosmic holism is stretched by Buddhist mindfulness of interbeing. Each comparison critiques Western liberal individualism, and affirms the greater dignity of the human person as ethical caretaker, not consumer or manager.

The elements of a cosmic ethic are boldly articulated in Scheid's proposed charter of Earth Rights, which advocates for the integrity of rivers and mountains, and for humankind's responsibility to protect these rights. Though he notes that Catholic conceptions of rights are based in moral agency and duties not generally ascribed to animals and plants, extending his characteristic interpretive freedom might suggest that the instrumental and intrinsic goods provided by nonhuman life implicitly fulfill a duty to meet the needs of others.

Scheid acknowledges that each chapter is too brief for comprehensive dialogue. The chapter on Lakota Sioux spirituality initiates analysis of the dynamics of oppression that white Americans are then challenged to recognize as their own history. Here in particular, if space permitted, extended discussion of patterns of social violence and ecological devastation might empower a response of solidarity. While avoiding a colonizing “mining” of indigenous spirituality, Scheid helpfully invites critiques of a Catholic cosmic common good. The practice of prayer before a hunt invites the question, what prayers and rituals of repentance might Christians employ to restore the balance when we do own our role in ecological destruction?

Any ethic flows from a vision of relationships between self, society, and ultimate reality. In short, this unique contribution to religion and ecology succeeds in establishing that the most powerful argument for honoring the full cosmic dimensions of the common good is profoundly and properly theological: that the narrative of cosmic interrelation offers the most complete ground for ethics, and the fullness of God's glory as Creator can be expressed only by a vision that reflects the entire cosmos.