- This is a very enlightening and fascinating book. Dean's ability to bring anthropological, sociological, psychological, historical, cultural, as well as philosophical insights to the age old drama of human morality and its development, and to do so in such lucid prose, is simply breathtaking.
- (My first degree as a young man was in Catholic Theology from the Universita Urbiana in Rome in the late 1960's. I was studying for the priesthood. The Second Vatican Council had just finished and there were revolutions in every sphere - but one. Our professors were inspired by the reformist thinking upending every dimension of their particular fields - doctrinal, scriptural, liturgical, sacramental. Except for one. That was moral theology. It was stuck in medieval mud, and amazingly still is sixty years later. Not one dimension of the church's thinking and teaching on morality has changed. I live in hope that over the next few decades such a profound revolution will be unleashed)
- As Dean claims: One of the core themes of this book is that morality ought to adapt to the world we live in. His argument is wide-ranging with explorations of race, empathy, anger, ostracism, social media, outrage, cancel culture, mob incitement, sex, political divides, and other contemporary tensions.
- His chapter on religion is exceptionally good. Religious belief can be good and bad. From ancient times there were small gods that evolved into Big Gods. There is atheism, and our current secular democratic societies with their substantial social services have enabled inevitable religious decline.
- The chapter on sex through the ages is insightful and comprehensive; today's fierce debates are sympathetically explored, such as biological determinism and the spectrum. He lashes Victorian Sexual Morality and provides a nice summary of contraception and the pill and how sexual lives have been liberated.
- Political and social morality is a field rarely covered in any depth, particularly in Christian theology, but Dean does it superbly and sympathetically. What has brought about the swerve to the populist right in recent politics? Why did 2016 happen - Brexit and Trump? He explores ethnonationalism, and the sociological divide of 'Anywheres' and 'Somewheres'.
- The final chapter on moral customs throughout history is well worth quoting:
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