Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Library of Theological Ethics)

Rating:
Summary: The normal state of mind
Review: This is a good book in a way that shows that life quickly becomes too complicated for a few simple rules to work everything out effectively. The intellectual part played by the author seems to be like the "no actor anywhere better than the Jack of Hearts" in the song, "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts" by Bob Dylan, the longest song on the "Blood on the Tracks" album, which has been extremely popular for years. Situations are as different as the verses of that song, and Rosemary is not unusual when "she was with Big Jim but she was leaning toward the Jack of Hearts." Lily "had come away from a broken home with lots of strange affairs with men in every walk of life which took her everywhere, but she never met anyone quite like the Jack of Hearts." The song is more tragic than this book. The book is religious enough to adopt love as its ultimate standard. Love can be a great motivator on a personal level, but the situations that it leads to in sex and warfare can be quite striking, like American troops breaking down doors in the middle of the night because they are trying to find people and weapons that are more dangerous than Hosea's wife. I liked this book because it illustrated that sex might be considered useful in a lot of situations, which was not what I was experiencing in real life at the time. Our society is due for some attitude adjustment on sex and love, and this book clearly thinks love is more important, but people who read it are more likely to be interested in the sex. After you read it, you might know what Bob Dylan meant when he sang, "I know I've seen that face somewhere, Big Jim was thinking to himself."