Passion and Reason

Grace Cumming Long provides us with a Christian ethics from the perspective of women's experience, rooted in passion and reason, emotion and research. Through a collage of autobiographical narratives and feminist theologies Cumming Long constructs an unconventional approach to moral questioning, using the arts of cooking, painting, quilting, and weaving to illuminate how Christians must be creative in finding faithful ways to respond to God and to the social crises of our day. She examines welfare, reproductive choice, addiction, handicapping conditions, and AIDS within her ethical framework, and maintains that cooperation, dependence, creativity, and the compassionate use of power are the theological values Christians bring to an ethics that move us beyond patriarchy.