Ki Joo CHOI, Sarah M. Moses, and Andrea Vicini, editors. Reimagining the Moral Life: On Lisa Sowle Cahill’s Contributions to Christian Ethics. 2020 New York: Orbis Books. ISBN 9781626983793. Reviewed by Michael J. McCALLION, Sacred Heart Major Seminary.

 The three editors of this book honor their mentor Lisa Cahill, and in doing so express their gratitude to her for nurturing them as scholars and believers. The editors agree that Lisa Cahill was a generous mentor and that she continues to inspire them.

Part I deals with “Fundamental Christian Ethics” and has chapters by Choi, O’Connell, FitzGerald, Roche, and Moses. Part II “Christian Social Ethics” has chapters by Ward, Jackson-Meyer, Sherman, Ryan, Dinh and Edwards, and O’Brien. Part III “The Future of Christian Ethics” has chapters by Flores, Mben, Ridenour, Senander, Catta, and Choi. It concludes with a bibliography of Cahill’s selected publications which includes 16 books and numerous other publications.

Justice, human flourishing, embodiment, the local community, local neighborhood, particularity, subsidiarity, and love are just some of themes running throughout Cahill’s work which the authors address in this book. O’Connell, for example, argues that Cahill’s concepts of experience, embodiment, and community can be applied to social change in various local particularities. Indeed, the “local” appears in several chapters as does subsidiarity as well as interaction. As I am a sociologist, I found these authors sounding like sociologists, especially symbolic interaction sociologists, as they discussed Cahill’s work. And this makes sense, given Cahill studied Catholic Social Teaching and wrote extensively about the common good.

A sociological dimension is also derived from O’Connell describing Cahill as a neopragmatist and that her neopragmatism has roots in experience and embodiment. More specifically, O’Connell argues that our embodied selves are socially constituted through interaction with other embodied selves. That is pure symbolic interactionist sociological thinking – social meaning arises from social interaction, not individual minds. I kept thinking Cahill is a good Catholic moral thinker and a good sociologist.
Another noteworthy theme of Cahill’s work is love. Again, sounding like a sociologist, Cahill saw love not as a private affair between God and the believer but a story of justice to be encountered and proclaimed and lived. In other words, love is social. But love is also about justice, a theme the great sociological thinker Emile Durkheim spent much of his career writing about.

Raymond Ward’s chapter deals specifically with Catholic Social Teaching, his title being “Catholic Social Teaching: Insights for a Fragmented U.S. Church.” Ward, I believe, highlights again Cahill’s sociology as well as moral theology. For example, Ward advocates three strategies for responding to ecclesial fragmentation based on Cahill’s work, all of which are profoundly social as well as moral: finding common ground, advocating for structural change (a social realism par excellence), and undertaking shared action.

Many other themes are elaborated on throughout this fine book. The book is a beautiful honor the editors have bestowed to Lisa Cahill. I recommend it for theologians and sociologists alike.