Discusses moral aspects of interracial marriage and interracial marriage laws in the United States. Concludes that the Catholic Church supports the right of individuals to marry the person of their choice regardless of race and that laws forbidding interracial marriage are unjust and should be repealed.

This is a new release of the original 1949 edition.

"Charges, denials, and countercharges of bigotry are increasingly frequent in the U.S. Bigotry is a fraught and contested term, evident from the rejoinder that calling out bigotry is political correctness. That is so even though renouncing- and denouncing-bigotry seems to be a shared political value with a long history. Identifying, responding to, and preventing bigotry have engaged the efforts of many people. People disagree, however, over who is a bigot and what makes a belief, attitude, or action bigoted. This book argues that bigotry has both a backward- and forward-looking dimension. We learn bigotry's meaning by looking to the past, but bigotry also has an important forward-looking dimension. Past examples of bigotry on which there is consensus become the basis for prospective judgments about analogous forms of bigotry. The rhetoric of bigotry-how people use such words as "bigot," "bigoted," and "bigotry"-poses puzzles that urgently demand attention. Those include whether bigotry concerns the motivation for or the content of a belief or action; whether reasonableness is a defense to charges of bigotry; whether the bigot is a distinct type, or whether we are all a bit bigoted; and whether "bigotry" is the term society gives to beliefs that now are beyond the pale. This book addresses those puzzles by examining prior controversies over interfaith and interracial marriage and the recent controversy over same-sex marriage, as well as controversies over landmark civil rights law and more recent conflicts between religious liberty and state antidiscrimination laws protecting LGBTQ persons"--

A stark and undramatic presentation of the basic principles of Catholic moral theology and an application of these principles to areas of interracial behaviour. Stresses the function and necessity of charity in resolving this problem.

Modern Moral Problems addresses moral quandaries that can beguile and confuse faithful Catholics. Written in a question-and-answer format, the book covers questions regarding sexuality, medical ethics, business practices, civic responsibilities, and the sacramental life of the Church. The extraordinary assortment of issues-forming a single, organized collection-is a valuable reference for anyone seeking clear and concise answers to tough moral questions. Written in a conversational tone often spliced with humor, this work by a highly respected moral theologian will be read with fascination for its clarity of argument and fundamental good sense. Originally published as a monthly question-and-answer column in a magazine for priests, these selections by Msgr. William B. Smith retain a striking current topicality. Msgr. Smith often tackled matters of controversy in the Catholic Church, ones which continue to draw conflicting opinions. Interesting, informative, and eminently practical, this book conveys an overall impression that sound thinking about morality is rooted in a tradition within the Catholic Church, even when the answers to particular moral questions cannot be found in catechisms or Vatican documents. Msgr. Smith offers a clear-headed approach to the quandaries of our time precisely because of his training in traditional moral principles and his fidelity to the Catholic magisterium. This book should be in the possession of all seminarians and priests, who are bound to confront moral matters that are not so easily decided at first glance. But lay people, too, will find here rich responses to the challenging and sometimes unresolved moral questions they encounter in their own lives.

Before Vatican II, before the race riots of the 1940s, the white Jesuit priest John Lafarge decried America’s treatment of blacks. In the first scholarly biography of Lafarge, David W Southern paints a portrait of a man ahead of his church on the race issue who nevertheless did not press hard enough in ridding it of an institutional bias against African-Americans. Southern follows Lafarge from his birth into the Social Register in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1880, to his death in 1963, just months after his participation in the March on Washington. According to Southern, Lafarge was the foremost Catholic spokesman on black-white relations in America for more than thirty years. In a series of books and articles—he served on the staff of the influential Jesuit weekly America from 1926 until his death—he significantly improved the image of the Church in the eyes of black, Jewish, and Protestant leaders. In 1934 he founded the Catholic Interracial Council of New York, the most important Catholic civil rights organization in the pre-Brown era. His declaration in 1937 that racism is a sin and a heresy so impressed the pope that he employed Lafarge to write an encyclical on the subject. Although lauded in his time for his achievements in race relations, Lafarge, Southern contends, espoused too gradualist an approach. Southern maintains that Lafarge was fettered by a fierce loyalty to the Church, a staunch clericalism, an intense concern with the image of Catholicism in Protestant America, an aristocratic background, and Eurocentric thinking—producing in him an abiding paternalism and lingering ambivalence about black culture, and a tendency to conceal the Church’s discriminatory practices rather than reveal them. Moreover, he was too slow to condemn segregation and approve the nonviolent direct action of Martin Luther King, Jr. Still, Southern sees in Lafarge a redeeming capacity for liberal growth, citing his inspiration of a younger, more militant generation of Catholics and his joining in the 1963 march. Based on extensive archival research, John LaFarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism fills a serious gap in Catholic social history and race-relations history. An impressive, engrossing biography, it also casts light on the broader historical issues of the Church’s attitudes and practices toward African-Americans since the Civil War, Catholic liberalism before Vatican II, and the seeds of unrest that manifest themselves today in the rapidly growing black Catholic community.

With this careful, nuanced exegetical volume in the New Studies in Biblical Theology, J. Daniel Hays provides a clear theological foundation for life in contemporary multiracial cultures and challenges churches to pursue racial unity in Christ.

Sketches the development of fundamental moral theology in the U.S. and then uses original sources to document the significant changes that have occurred in the discipline, as well as the primary issues in Catholic moral theology today.

In this fascinating cultural history of interracial marriage and its legal regulation in the United States, Fay Botham argues that religion--specifically, Protestant and Catholic beliefs about marriage and race--had a significant effect on legal decisions concerning miscegenation and marriage in the century following the Civil War. She contends that the white southern Protestant notion that God "dispersed" the races and the American Catholic emphasis on human unity and common origins point to ways that religion influenced the course of litigation and illuminate the religious bases for Christian racist and antiracist movements.

NAMED A RECOMMENDED BOOK OF 2018 BY: Buzzfeed • The Boston Globe • The Millions • InStyle • Southern Living • Vogue • Popsugar • Kirkus • The Washington Post • Library Journal • Real Simple • NPR “With his unerring eye for nuance and unsparing sense of irony, Rumaan Alam’s second novel is both heartfelt and thought-provoking.” — Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere From the bestselling author of Leave the World Behind, a novel about the families we fight to build and those we fight to keep Like many first-time mothers, Rebecca Stone finds herself both deeply in love with her newborn son and deeply overwhelmed. Struggling to juggle the demands of motherhood with her own aspirations and feeling utterly alone in the process, she reaches out to the only person at the hospital who offers her any real help—Priscilla Johnson—and begs her to come home with them as her son’s nanny. Priscilla’s presence quickly does as much to shake up Rebecca’s perception of the world as it does to stabilize her life. Rebecca is white, and Priscilla is black, and through their relationship, Rebecca finds herself confronting, for the first time, the blind spots of her own privilege. She feels profoundly connected to the woman who essentially taught her what it means to be a mother. When Priscilla dies unexpectedly in childbirth, Rebecca steps forward to adopt the baby. But she is unprepared for what it means to be a white mother with a black son. As she soon learns, navigating motherhood for her is a matter of learning how to raise two children whom she loves with equal ferocity, but whom the world is determined to treat differently. Written with the warmth and psychological acuity that defined his debut, Rumaan Alam has crafted a remarkable novel about the lives we choose, and the lives that are chosen for us.