Remembering Paul Ramsey:

...Commonweal was one of several Catholic periodicals and journals where Ramsey became a familiar participant in moral discussion of' topics from marriage to missiles...

...An abiding theoretical concern for Ramsey was Catholic natural-law tradition...

...This was the approach he used in Nine Modern Moralists, and also in his dialogue with Anglo-American moral philosophy in the book he coedited with Gene outka, Norm and context in Christian Ethics...

...As he worked on his last book, I would get telephone calls of seminar length and depth as Ramsey checked his interpretation of a passage in the Catholic bishops' pastoral letter...

...In War and Moral Discourse, Ralph Potter made the point that many of those who disagreed with Ramsey's application of the just-war ethic to Vietnam and to the nuclear question, nonetheless owed their basic inspiration to Ramsey's work of revivifying the classical categories...

...His death should not pass without a grateful acknowledgment of how broadly and deeply this Methodist moralist influenced Catholic scholars, pastors, and citizens...

...What he wrote, the way he wrote, and the vigor he brought to Christian moral argument make his work a landmark in this generation...

...Only a few weeks before serious illness overtook him, he sent to the publishers a critique of the Methodist and Catholic bishops' statements on nuclear policy...

...His intellectual and professional home was the Department of Religion at Princeton University where he taught for more than thirty years...

...To write in either field was to encounter Ramsey at the outset of one's research...

...In the 1950s and 1960s Ramsey was the principal architect of the revival of the just-war theory...

...Ramsey's interest in Catholic theology came in the middle of his professional career...

...Having seen the galleys of this book, I know that I disagree with some of its judgments, but I welcome it because disagreeing with Ramsey is always a learning experience...

...Ramsey's engagement with these issues continued until his death...

...Some of these disciples have already made substantial contributions to applied ethics...

...Ramsey was an enormously productive scholar whose writings made distinctive contributions to ethics in three areas...

...To encounter Ramsey was to meet a maverick whose views often ran counter to prevailing ethical and political opinion...

...Ramsey staked out a position explicitly grounded in Christian terms, but hardly sectarian in the range of arguments he used to address personal and public policy issues...

...then I met him personally through board meetings, seminars, and conferences...

...Ramsey epitomized the kind of in-depth dialogue within the Christian community which the ecumenical age of Vatican II has made possible...

...In these settings one encountered an approachable, engaging Christian scholar, always more interested in what others were doing than in focusing on his own work...

...When Ramsey began to write on war and peace in the late 1950s, the just-war ethic was an acknowledged but seldom used resource in the Christian church...

...He took his undergraduate degree at Millsap College in Mississippi, then his doctorate at Yale University where he studied under Richard Niebuhr...

...To know Ramsey only through the written word was to miss much of him...

...The power of his analysis, the willingness to engage the hard cases in any field he explored, and the sense of political realism which he brought to his writings, all gave Ramsey's work an audience beyond the Christian community...

...Even before The Just War was published, Ramsey had already opened a second front of applied research in medical ethics...

...Charles Curran's systematic review of Ramsey's thought pointed out that one should not conclude from Ramsey' s abiding interest in natural law that he espoused a natural-law position...

...His appreciation of the Catholic moral tradition and the specific practical issues he chose to address made him a careful student of Catholic thought, a friendly critic of some of its positions, a catalyst for development of its content...

...We will remember him, and learn from his ideas, but we will not replace Paul Ramsey.ace Paul Ramsey...

...The man was neither forbidding nor contentious...

...From the publication of The Patient as Person in the mid-1960s through Ethics at the Edges of Life in the late 1970s, Ramsey turned out a steady stream of books and articles on questions on the beginning and end of life, experimentation, informed consent, genetics, and the care of the terminally ill...

...The first was the ethic of war...

...This kind of contact was often followed by handwritten notes from Princeton...

...In these two areas of applied ethics, Ramsey's writings were both found-ational and controversial...

...Ramsey's work led the way for a generation of younger scholars for whom he was both a guide and a critic...

...His medical ethics showed the same care for empirical evidence, sensitivity to the practitioner, and determination to protect moral principles in the face of technological change that marked Ramsey's work on war and peace...

...These were Ramsey's comments on other authors, sometimes humorous, often contentious...

...it is unlikely that his formal training inclined him toward Catholic teaching...

...Ramsey's analysis of Jacques Maritain in Nine Modern Moralists, and his participation in Catholic debates about sexual and social ethics sustained his interest in the potential and limits of the natural-law style of reasoning...

...The writings were dense, forbidding, and filled-Richard McCormick often noted-with "purple patches...

...In two books, spanning a decade of writing, War and the Christian Conscience and The Just War, Ramsey probed the foundation of the just-war ethic in Augustine and Aquinas, and then launched a prodigious effort to apply the classical teachings to the radically changed conditions of the nuclear age...

...First, he was interested in ethical theory, usually setting forth his own position as part of a critique of other philosophers or theologians...

...Ramsey leaves disciples on faculties and in graduate schools around the country, a tribute to his distinguished teaching career...

...It would be possible to continue this intellectual biography in much greater detail, but there was more to Paul Ramsey than his writings...

...It would be more accurate to say that the natural-law discussion provided a background for Ramsey's two major contributions to applied ethics...

...My contact began by reading Ramsey in seminary twenty-five years ago...

...But no disciple will quite fill the void left by Ramsey's premature passing...