In recent American politics, the term “morality” has come to be used in a way almost entirely restricted to private family and sexual issues, leaving aside responsibility for immensely consequential decisions about initiating wars, oppressive policies, regressive tax structures, and disregard of the United Nations and international law. Public Dimensions of a Believer's Life is about human responsibility in public life and the moral and spiritual factors involved in exercising that responsibility. Monika Hellwig explores the decisions people have to make in human affairs at all levels of social organization, the values that guide these decisions, and the way those values are often apparently in conflict with one another.

By looking at major moral issues in the political decisions, actions and failures to act, of the twentieth century in the light of the tradition of the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance), Hellwig's work explores the moral implications of the political life in our own times.