If suffering is a human condition, then the virtue of compassion is another, which disposes persons to suffer the pain of others as partly their own. From a Christian standpoint, this book explores how persons are able to orient themselves towards the co-suffering of another person's pain.

Applying the ethical concepts of Thomas Aquinas to contemporary moral problems, this book both presents new interpretations of Thomist theology and offers new insights into today's perplexing moral dilemmas. This volume addresses such contemporary issues as internalized oppression, especially as it relates to women and African-Americans; feminism and anger; child abuse; friendship and charity; and finally, justice and reason. The collection revives Aquinas as an ethicist who has relevant things to say about contemporary concerns. These essays illustrate how Thomistic ethics can encourage and empower people in moral struggles. As the first book to use Aquinas to explore such issues as child abuse and oppression, it includes a variety of approaches to Aquinas' ethics. "Aquinas and Empowerment" is a valuable resource for students of classical thought and contemporary ethics.

In these essays, a diverse group of ethicists draw insights from both religious and feminist scholarship in order to propose creative new approaches to the ethics of medical care. While traditional ethics emphasizes rules, justice, and fairness, the contributors to this volume embrace an "ethics of care", which regards emotional engagement in the lives of others as basic to discerning what we ought to do on their behalf. The essays reflect on the three related themes: community, narrative, and emotion. They argue for the need to understand patients and caregivers alike as moral agents who are embedded in multiple communities, who seek to attain or promote healing partly through the medium of storytelling, and who do so by cultivating good emotional habits. A thought-provoking contribution to a field that has long been dominated by an ethics of principle, "Medicine and the Ethics of Care" will appeal to scholars and students who want to move beyond the constraints of that traditional approach.

All of us want to live happily and live well. Sometimes that happens; sometimes it does not. Why? Why do our emotions swing as they do, making us joyous or brooding or, more typically, somewhere in between? In this book Diana Cates explores the influence of our emotions on our lives, particularly as they relate to our sense of religion and morality. In doing so she demonstrates how Thomas Aquinas' theory of emotions can help us better understand what is at stake. Cates, an ethicist, attempts to show how emotions are composed as mental states; identify the ways in which religious beliefs, intuitions, images, and questions can affect the formation and the course of a person's emotions; and show how Aquinas can instruct readers on the quality of their own emotional lives. She begins by examining the meaning of religious ethics, then discusses what religious ethics can teach us about the relationship between religion and the emotions. In the shank of the book Cates digs deep into the work of Aquinas, retrieving and explicating, demonstrating his approach to emotions and interpreting his work in light of recent studies of emotion from philosophical and ethical sources. The final chapter synthesizes some of the most compelling features of Aquinas' account, highlighting the practical ethical benefits of studying Aquinas on emotions. Such a study challenges us to become more aware of and articulate about understanding the nature of reality--and the ways in which our emotions are tied to that quest.