This book is the twenty-second in the series New Studies in Christian Ethics. It is written by the distinguished Jesuit theologian David Hollenbach on the theme of the common good that has been so central to recent Catholic social theology. More than that, Hollenbach himself has been a seminal influence upon the widely discussed social pronouncements of the American Catholic Bishops in recent years.

David Hollenbach shows that he is well aware of the difficulties that a notion of the common good faces in modern democratic societies. There is the long-standing fear engendered by the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that still find parallels in tensions between Christians and Muslims in various parts of the world and specifically between Hindus and Muslims in India, between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, and between Jews and Muslims in Israel (I write this the day after the destruction of the World Trade Center). All too often in the past and in the present the “common” good has been imposed by one religious group upon another through coercion rather than mutually agreed through dialogue. There is also the self-evident cultural pluralism of modern democratic societies with sharp differences within and between religious and secular groups. It is hardly surprising that such societies tend to opt for a goal of tolerance rather than any shared common good.

However, David Hollenbach argues that tolerance on its own is simply not adequate to resolve all of the dilemmas of modern democratic societies.