Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2022 -

This book will unsettle many in the Christian ethical tradition but it will also impress many with its adroit use of biblical and theological scholarship and reasoned response to one of the crying moral issues of the day--gender discrimination. Thatcher (Univ. of Exeter, UK) wants to incorporate new and scientifically informed insights into what he regards as the fluid lived reality of gender and reject older traditional views of gender difference, especially the binary differences between male and female. These binaries have led to untold harm to those persons on the "weaker" side of them, especially LGBTIQ people, and have overlooked what Thatcher helpfully calls the wide-ranging continuum along which gender, with all its variations, currently exists. The notion of a continuum erases traditionally understood stark differences with clean boundaries between them and forces Christian ethicists to reimagine a whole new way of thinking about gender. Along the way, Thatcher builds his case through a close reading and critical evaluation of two major Christian thinkers, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Barth.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.