The Challenge of Doing the Right Thing: Real Values, Limited Understanding, and Character-Driven Judgments

Additional Book Details

The Challenge of Doing the Right Thing: Real Values, Limited Understanding, and Character-Driven Judgments is a 450-page collection of editorials and articles written by David Sherwood for Social Work and Christianity and for the North American Association of Christians in Social Work between 1981 and 2017 focused on integrating Christian faith, values, and ethics with competent professional social work practice.

In the first article from 1981, Add to Your Faith Virtue: The Integration of Christian Values and Social Work Practice, David wrote about the worldview assumptions (faith) that are behind all moral imperatives, secular or religious and outlined several guidelines for the ethical integration of Christian values and social work practice. The last editorial from 2017 was the introduction to the special issue on Christianity and Social Work Practice with LGBTQ Clients and was titled Dealing Competently, Ethically, and Faithfully with Hard Issues: The Difficult but Necessary Road. In both of these articles, as is most of the articles in this collect, David argues that in ethical decision-making, decisions frequently involve making judgments that functionally prioritize legitimate values that are in tension with each other. He contends that the mission of NACSW and Social Work & Christianity has been to walk the difficult middle roadclearly committed to both Christian faith and competent social work practice, not presuming to have the final answers in either, and helping members and readers to come as close to faithfulness and competence as possible.