“Viewing moral theology from the perspective of the new law of grace, Mother Christa Nutt superbly locates religious obedience within charity, the Beatitudes, personal liberty, and Christian maturity. She shows how the fixing of the will by a vow strengthens the focus on God and reaffirms the interior balance of the person. Thus, the vow does not paralyse freedom. It enhances it.”

“Mother Mary Christa has written a profound synthesis of many strands of philosophical and theological truth concerning the consecrated life, always through the lens of St. Thomas Aquinas and complemented by a battery of Thomistic theological studies by many authors. She has shown that the consecrated life needs to be seen in light of metaphyics, as well as Trinitarian and Christocentric theology. A deeper appreciation of theology is necessary for an ongoing renewal and reform of consecrated institutes and persons. As St. Thomas reminds us, charity must be continually growing (for most of us in spurts due to weakness of the will, blindness of the intellect, and the sometime push of unreasonable emotions). For the will to keep choosing to follow more closely the Lord Jesus, it needs the mind to give directives from personal insights and holy contemplative wisdom to make the journey to heaven in a community of sinners amidst the interior and sometime exterior obstacles to divine love. Will power—and “won’t power”—is not enough because the will is blind faculty needing direction. Traditionally these obstacles have been called the world, the flesh, and the devil. Consecrated life then is a kind of battle, not for sissies, and is to facilitate a consecrated community manifesting a serious cluster of virtues, theological and moral, united under divine love of God and community. This book of Mother’s will provide needed intellectual inspiration and conviction to stay on course for the road to heaven with life’s many challenges.”

“This theologically insightful and elegant book provides a much-needed Thomistic analysis of religious life and the character of religious obedience. Threading the needle between the extremes of obedience as a law-based notion of conformity to extrinsic norms and an overly subjective notion of religion as self-development, the work provides us with a realistic and profound portrait of religious life as a pathway to true happiness through union with God in a common life of virtue, mutual sacrifice, and trusting participation in community life. At once personal and collective, true religion, as Aquinas understands it, sets us free for what is genuinely good and liberates us for a life that is at once ecclesial and collective. An important contribution to the ongoing work of renewal in Thomistic moral theology.”

“A thoughtful, bracing, Christocentric, and hope-filled exploration of the consecrated life by a leader of the renewal of religious communities according to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council and Pope St. John Paul II.”