Welcome - by Lois Shepherd & Margaret E Mohrmann (Hardcover)

About the Book

An innovative approach to ethics, showing that welcoming other persons is the primary moral act. The use of stories and cases make the book an ideal text for students to explore ethical questions in the classroom and in their lives. The book also describes a variety of practices that help shape us into more welcoming persons.

Book Synopsis

This book offers a striking reorientation of ethics by arguing that welcome is the foundational practice from which moral life begins. Rather than treating ethics as a matter of rules, principles, or isolated virtues, the authors propose welcome as the primary moral orientation that makes responsibility, care, and justice possible in the first place.
Drawing on their interdisciplinary expertise in law, medicine, and religious ethics, the authors present ethics as something lived and relational. Being welcoming, they argue, is not a momentary act of kindness but an ongoing moral commitment that shapes how we see, receive, and respond to others in every context-from clinical encounters and legal systems to everyday social interactions. Welcome precedes obligation, creating the openness necessary to understand what responsibility requires.
The book is structured around a series of interconnected "patterns" rather than a linear theoretical argument. These patterns-stories, reflections, and case studies-illustrate how welcome operates in practice and what is lost when it is absent. Examples drawn from healthcare, law, and ordinary life invite readers to reflect on high-stakes moral situations as well as quotidian encounters, making the book especially effective for classroom discussion.

Written in a clear, accessible style, this volume is well suited for undergraduate and graduate courses in ethics, medical humanities, biomedical ethics, law and ethics, and religious studies. It offers students a compelling framework for understanding moral formation and human flourishing, while inviting readers to reconsider ethics as a shared, dynamic practice rooted in how we receive one another.

Review Quotes

"With their new book Welcome, Lois Shepherd and Margaret Mohrmann provide an original and important contribution to the field of ethics, and indeed, to human relationships generally. Rather than a theory with examples, they describe welcoming with rich illustrations that make this experience come alive, even in difficult interactions. Altogether, a masterful work of exceptional value." --Larry R. Churchill, Stahlman Professor of Medical Ethics Emeritus, Vanderbilt University

"In Welcome, Shepherd and Mohrmann show convincingly how welcoming is a necessary-and difficult-obligation. It is not an emotional disposition but a call to engagement and action, both for individuals and for institutions. Welcome can show us ways for bioethics to recapture health and health policy, through the challenging work of openness in these difficult times." --Nancy M. P. King, JD, Emeritus Professor, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Co-author of Bioethics Reenvisioned: A Path toward Health Justice

"For centuries philosophers have been working through the fundamental question of what it is to be an ethical person. In this insightful and practical book, Shepherd and Mohrmann provide an answer that is at once deceptively simple and straightforward, and profoundly deep and complex. They argue that the starting point for ethics is attentive and intentional presence and openness to all others in all encounters. While they rely on ethical language familiar to all (responsibility, action, obligation, love, empathy, virtue), their insistence on the posture of welcome as the foundation of ethics is innovative. As is their demonstration of philosophical argument as non-linear, narrative, inclusive, and expansive. This primer on what it is to be a welcoming person is not just another abstract philosophical treatise; it will transform the way you organize your thoughts and actions about responsibility, love, and communal obligations." --Aline Kalbian, Professor of Religion, Florida State University

"Welcome: Patterns of the Moral Life weaves together moral philosophy, phenomenology, literature, and seasoned professional experience to make a powerful case for an "ethics of welcoming." Lois Shepherd and Margaret Mohrmann have produced an original and elegant work that will engage, challenge, and guide a wide reading audience. This is a book of practical wisdom of the highest order." --Richard B. Miller, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Emeritus Professor of Religion, Politics, and Ethics, University of Chicago

About the Author

Lois Shepherd, JD, is Wallenborn Professor of Biomedical Ethics and professor of Law and Public Health Sciences at the University of Virginia. She is the co-author of Bioethics and the Law, now in its fifth edition, among other books.
Margaret Mohrmann, MD, PhD, is Professor Emerita of Pediatrics, Medical Education, and Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Attending Children: A Doctor's Education among other books.