Choosing the Good Quotes

“God is both transcendent (beyond us) and immanent (near us).”
― Dennis P. Hollinger, Choosing the Good: Christian Ethics in a Complex World

“There is a tendency today to eliminate religiously based ethics from public square debates and allow only secular versions to influence the shape and motivations of public life. Such forms of secularization not only cut off the culture from rich resources needed in a complex, pluralistic world but also severely limit the rights of those who live their lives in the light of religious commitments. At the same time, some religious believers in pluralistic societies err in attempting to force their religiously rooted ethic on an unbelieving society. This raises conflicts within society and in the case of Christianity is also contrary to biblical understandings of Christian morality.”
― Dennis P. Hollinger, Choosing the Good: Christian Ethics in a Complex World

“Pastoral care cannot be reduced to ethics, and ethics cannot be reduced to pastoral care. If we reduce our care to ethics, we will lack empathy, love, and understanding in applying ethical norms to people’s lives; if we reduce ethics to pastoral care, we will end up with a minimalistic ethic of shallow love or humanistic care.”
― Dennis P. Hollinger, Choosing the Good: Christian Ethics in a Complex World

“as Lewis Smedes once pointed out, “We have no ideal world in which to find out what God expects us to do; we have only this changing and broken one. . . . And obedience to unchanging commands must adjust to changing conditions.”11 But that in no way implies that the moral and theological guides are themselves relativistic, sometimes binding and at other times not.”
― Dennis P. Hollinger, Choosing the Good: Christian Ethics in a Complex World

“we must be open to the fact that in regard to some ethical judgments, our focus will be more on the wise, judicious course of action than on the absolute right course of action.”
― Dennis P. Hollinger, Choosing the Good: Christian Ethics in a Complex World

“In the twentieth century, many philosophers have utilized analytical philosophy4 as a framework for exploring the nature of moral situations and the meaning and validity of moral terms such as justice, goodness, virtue, and right. In fact, earlier in the twentieth century, one school of analytical philosophy, logical positivism, argued that ethical judgments are not really propositions or meaningful statements; they are purely emotive, arousing feeling, and hence belong to psychology or sociology.”
― Dennis P. Hollinger, Choosing the Good: Christian Ethics in a Complex World

“There is a tendency today to turn moral issues into amoral ones, to argue that many of the decisions and choices we make are merely personal choices that lie outside the ethical purview. For example, in the current debate about euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide, some argue that this is not a moral issue but simply a matter of controlling one’s life. Ethical questions need not be raised.”
― Dennis P. Hollinger, Choosing the Good: Christian Ethics in a Complex World

“We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create. Lord of all things, he is not lord of himself. He feels lost amid his own abundance. With more means at his disposal, more knowledge, more technique than ever, it turns out that the world today goes the same way as the worst of worlds that have been; it simply drifts.41”
― Dennis P. Hollinger, Choosing the Good: Christian Ethics in a Complex World