Abstract

As I have listened to incarcerated women over many years, I have learned about the ways they work to construct moral and meaningful lives against all odds. Trying to find forms of Christian ethical reflection to engage their (and my) experiences has helped me to explore ways of “doing” Christian ethics that attend carefully to “ordinary” life. I describe how women inside understand ethics as judgment and contrast this form of ethics to the moral work they do in relation to themselves and each other. I conclude by suggesting some guideposts for a Christian ordinary ethics that attends critically to the particular practices of building meaningful lives in context, especially those locations requiring persons to “make a way out of no way.”