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Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics
ONLINE FIRST ARTICLES
Articles forthcoming in in this journal are available Online First prior to publication. More details about Online First and how to use and cite these articles can be found HERE.
March 27, 2024
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Grace Y. Kao
Future Directions in Christian Ethics Inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Radical Revolution of Values”
first published on March 27, 2024
Though 2023 marks the sixtieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, my reflections on the theme of the 2023 annual meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics, “Vision, Imagination, and Dreams in the Work of Ethics,” are inspired by King’s lesser known “Beyond Vietnam” speech. I connect my hopes for the future of Christian ethics to King’s still unrealized vision of social transformation. It is one where the US (and other empires) would affirm—not subvert—each people’s right to self-determination and we scholar-activists would continue to search for connections between and among social issues even if others insist upon their discreteness.
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Patrick Haley
Forgive as the Lord Forgave You Divine and Human Forgiveness, Justice, and Moral Repair
first published on March 27, 2024
How we envision God’s forgiveness shapes our thinking about human forgiveness as well. Whereas some contemporary Christians such as Miroslav Volf struggle to square victims’ demands with a God who forgives and keeps no record of wrongs, many early Christians expected God to fastidiously punish or reward every deed. In contrast to both extremes, I revisit recent philosophical work on purgatory, which emphasizes sanctification over satisfaction. This approach reveals how God’s forgiveness is consonant with restorative justice. By considering an alternate vision of God’s justice, we can thereby reimagine how our forgiveness too is compatible with—and in fact necessitates—the work of moral repair.
March 20, 2024
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Peng Yin
James Baldwin as a Preface to Christian Ethics
first published on March 20, 2024
Christian ethics stands to benefit from its critics. I argue that James Baldwin should be placed among Ludwig Feuerbach, David Hume, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche as a salutary preface to Christian ethics, especially in his reflections on race and sexuality. Together these figures underscore some characteristic damages of some Christian beliefs. I show Baldwin’s astute treatment of Christianity in four distinctive voices and suggest the recovery of genres, the appreciation for recent achievements and unfinished tasks in the field, the vigilance about ambivalent ethical implications inherent in Christian doctrine (such as eudaimonism and providentialism), and the unsentimental affective preparation as pedagogical gains of including Baldwin in Christian ethics syllabi.
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Laura Stivers
Freedom to Flourish Housing as a Social Good
first published on March 20, 2024
One cause of gentrification and displacement of multigenerational communities of color has been the increase of private equity firms buying affordable homes, upgrading them, raising rents, and evicting tenants. This essay focuses on housing financialization and the increasing shift from the use value of housing as a place to live to the exchange value of housing as a commodity and investment for corporate profit. After identifying the problem of gentrification and housing speculation in Oakland, California, the essay draws on ecowomanist/mujerista/feminist sources to offer a theological foundation in support of housing as a social good for the freedom of households and communities to flourish. It also argues that religious organizations have a moral commitment and role to play in offering an alternative vision of community and in organizing for housing and racial justice.
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Matthew Elmore
Mysticism as Counter-Conduct A Foucauldian Retrieval of Dante and St. Catherine of Siena
first published on March 20, 2024
This essay draws upon Dante and St. Catherine of Siena to flesh out the Foucauldian concept of counter-conduct. Dante and Catherine occupy an important place in early modern history, challenging the designs of medieval pastoral power by embodying a new, secular mixture of the active and the contemplative life. This essay, with Foucault as a guide, suggests that they offer us another way to be modern, a path of self-cultivation surpassing modern norms for nature, the self, and the project of rational knowledge.
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Brian Stiltner
Hope in Community Recovering the Most Elusive Social Virtue in American Church Practice
first published on March 20, 2024
Do American Christians have hope in community, within their congregations and in the wider society, and should they? Putting my fieldwork in five church communities in dialogue with Thomas Aquinas’s account of hope and with insights from congregational studies, I answer yes to both questions. Christian hope is best understood and lived not simply as a theological virtue but as a social virtue. In this understanding, connections forged with others, both inside and outside a church, can develop a community’s realistic, forward-looking trust in social relationships and in the fate of society. I suggest four guidelines for church practices to build up social hope and make it more effectual.
March 19, 2024
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Ryan Juskus
Transforming Sacrifice Zones into Sacred Zones A Christological Vision and Practice of Environmental Justice
first published on March 19, 2024
Through bringing Christian ethics into conversation with original fieldwork and archival research on environmental justice activists, this essay develops an ecopolitical theology and practice of environmental justice as the work of transforming “sacrifice zones” into “sacred zones.” Sacrifice zones are places of concentrated environmental injustice, where harmful toxins and ecological degradation are channeled to secure the social and ecological flourishing of other places. During the movement against the environmentally destructive practice of mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia, leading activist Robyn Kincaid borrowed from Martin Luther King Jr. and green economy visionary Van Jones to envision Appalachia’s transformation from a sacrifice zone into a sacred zone. This essay argues that Kincaid’s constructive conceptualization of sacrifice—“to make sacred”—holds promise for a Christian ethics and politics of environmental justice; develops its implicit theology; demonstrates its relevance beyond Appalachia; and contrasts it with climate politics as usual.
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Travis Pickell
The Phenomenon of Burdened Agency
first published on March 19, 2024
This essay introduces a concept I call “burdened agency.” Burdened agency names a two-fold phenomenon in end-of-life ethics (with relevance beyond). First, the availability of control over the dying process may become an imperative to make choices about when and how death will occur. This is the burden of agency. Second, moral agency is increasingly burdened by “reflexivity.” No longer guided by norms that are taken-for-granted, individuals are, more or less, left to self-consciously negotiate the experience of dying on their own. Increasingly we labor under the existential “weight” of ambiguity, instability, and uncertainty that accompanies highly reflexive moral action.
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Kristin E. Heyer
Moral Imagination and the Future of Ethics
first published on March 19, 2024
The 2023 theme for the Society of Christian Ethics invites us to consider what fuels our collective imagination in the United States today, its impact, and implications for the future of the field of ethics. American exceptionalism, racial anxieties and fear help feed influential myths that prevent the nation from “making real the promises of democracy,” much less approaching the Beloved Community (King). Whereas ethics often focuses upon critique, its scholars and practitioners are also invited to undertake the work of repair, which entails attention to affect, art, and activism—particularly given the malformation of moral imagination. Such shifts have implications for pedagogy and the framing and terrain of the field of Christian ethics, as well.
January 26, 2024
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Nichole M. Flores
A Beautiful and Dangerous Memory Iconoclasm and Hope in the Aesthetics of Social Movements
first published on January 26, 2024
Miguel A. De La Torre rejects hope as the ethical basis for a politically effective and truly liberative form of solidarity. Kelly Brown Douglas, on the other hand, articulates a critical retrieval of hope emphasizing the interpretive relationship between the cross, the lynching tree, and the resurrection. Reading De La Torre and Douglas’s works through Natalie Carnes’s theological aesthetics suggests that their respective works can be engaged as “iconoclasms of fidelity,” or the salutary breaking of idolatrous images toward recovering faithful ones. Examining #SprayTheirNames murals that were created in response to state violence against Black people in the United States, I argue that Carnes’s aesthetics framework holds the violence of the crucifixion and promise of resurrection in visual tension, thus decrying violent oppression while offering a beautiful and dangerous memory that catalyzes hope-filled movement in defense of Black lives.
January 25, 2024
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Emily Dumler-Winckler
Abolition and Anarchy, Then and Now Political Theologies of Resistance, Government, and Non-Reformist Reforms
first published on January 25, 2024
The movements for prison and police abolition today are not only analogous to but extensions of antebellum and postbellum movements for the abolition of slavery and segregation. Dreams of transformative justice, resistance to government, and the creation of alternative practices have been vital to abolitionist efforts to dismantle various US anarchies. This essay examines the political and theological debates of antebellum abolitionists about the US government, the Constitution and law more broadly, civil disobedience, anarchy, and revolution, arguing that these remain vital debates for abolitionists today.
January 19, 2024
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Erin Dufault-Hunter
The End of Whiteness Why a Secularist Vision Will Never Defeat Racism
first published on January 19, 2024
Many well-meaning “white” people adopt an antiracist agenda because we believe it provides the antidote to pernicious racialized inequity in the United States. Ironically, this schema maintains racism, strengthens whiteness as the measure of humanity, and inoculates us against imagining any alternative to racism’s logic. I argue that we can break the fetters of racism by framing whiteness as a principality and power. Perceived as a demonic force rather than an “identity,” we can perceive the goals of whiteness as well as the spirituality that fuels it—and cast it out. We are then freed to “reinvent the future,” emancipated from racialized politics and its violence.
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Mary Nickel
The Pentecost as a Resource for Democratic Politics
first published on January 19, 2024
According to Kristen Deede Johnson, Augustinian theology provides resources for overcoming debates about the consolidation or protection of difference in plural society. Johnson’s Augustine invites us to unite with others in loving and humble interactions with difference. I seek to further concretize the kind of communication that Johnson’s theology entails, putting it in conversation with Iris Marion Young’s theory of “communicative democracy.” Drawing on Willie James Jennings’s interpretive work on Pentecost in his magisterial commentary on Acts, I trace in the event of Pentecost a paradigm for communication between divergent communities that respects difference and underscores possibilities for union. The community born at Pentecost is comprised of divergent constituencies, and yet is nevertheless integrated by communicative practices. The paper invites reflection on how divinely granted visions might be translated into conversations that facilitate what Jennings calls “joining.”
January 4, 2024
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Kelly Brown Douglas
Visions, Imagination, and Dreams in the Work of Ethics What Does it Mean for Us to be Religious Scholars Sixty Years After King’s Dream?
first published on January 4, 2024
This essay addresses what is at the foundation of the US’s seemingly inherent “resistance” to racial justice and hence to Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream. This resistance is rooted in a moral imaginary corrupted by an epistemological gaze defined by whiteness and informed by anti-Blackness. For religious scholars, this means that we must adopt a preferential option for the knowledge and voices of those who historically have been granted little or no epistemic authority within our disciplines.
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Joi R. Orr
Reclaiming the Radical Imagination Food Sovereignty and Land Security for Black Liberation
first published on January 4, 2024
This paper presents an ethnographic study of The Black Church Food Security Network. The Network is a collective of churches, growers, and farmer’s markets creating an alternative church-to-table food distribution system. The Network is motivated by the radical imagination, a hope that defines liberation as Black communities reconnected to land. This study encourages scholars to reclaim the radical imagination of land-centered resistance movements like the Black Church Food Security Network. By doing so, ethicists are empowered to generate revolutionary social imaginaries that refuse the violences of racial capitalism and colonial imaginations.
January 3, 2024
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James W. Haring
Authenticity and Christian Privilege Unpacking the Invisible (Theological) Knapsack
first published on January 3, 2024
In 2020, Amy-Jill Levine challenged the Society of Christian Ethics to take Christian privilege seriously. But Christian ethicists generally neglect Christian privilege as a distinct type. One site for Christian privilege is the ideal of authenticity, which grew from the idea that Christianity represents love, interiority, and spirituality (spirit), while Judaism represents legalism, exteriority, and materiality (letter). By prioritizing “spirit” over “letter,” an isolated ethic of authenticity can detach moral identity from history, race, community, land, and other seemingly extrinsic factors. I draw on Willie James Jennings and Daniel Boyarin to illustrate authenticity’s exclusionary potential and Moses Mendelssohn to construct a more inclusive ideal.
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Russell P. Johnson
The Arc of the Moral Universe Narrative Theology and Constructive Critique
first published on January 3, 2024
Christian witness needs to tell a story in which people can recognize themselves, including political opponents and those who currently benefit from social injustice. It is this capacity to imagine a role for the enemy within the beloved community that separates Christian protest from the politics of resentment. This constructive component of activism makes the critical edge credible, and this is not just a matter of messaging but of theological integrity. A twofold narrative approach, informed by the tradition of nonviolent direct action, offers a way for opponents to take steps to address present injustices without their participation in these injustices having the last word about them.
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Eunil David Cho, Wonchul Shin
Cultivating Virtuous Imagination Among Asian American Dreamers in the Face of Violent Uncertainty
first published on January 3, 2024
By examining the stories of Asian American Dreamers, or Asian American young adults with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status, this essay investigates how these undocumented young adults cultivate virtuous imagination to transcend the violence of uncertainty and radically imagine new paths toward flourishing. The aversive state of structural uncertainty leads them to experience narrative foreclosure and the violent disruption of the pursuit of the good life. This essay subsequently proposes two kinds of stories as moral resources for empowering Asian American Dreamers to cultivate imaginative excellence in order to dream new paths toward flourishing and to resist the toxic internalization of the “model minority” myth: (1) religious stories demonstrating their steadfast commitment to God’s goodness and (2) stories of solidarity co-authored with their suffering neighbors.
April 28, 2023
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Nikia S. Robert
An Ethic of Abolition Becoming Educational Sanctuaries
first published on April 28, 2023
This paper addresses the uncanny resemblance between the educational industrial complex and the US carceral state. Both schools and prisons comprise carceral apparatuses that use policies, pedagogies, and practices to respond punitively to communal transgressions. Moreover, architectural designs and fiscal budgets further reveal symmetries that make learning communities unsafe and complicit with carceral systems. Black and Brown people are disproportionately caught in the frays of punitive disparities, targeted violence, and stereotypes of deviance that drastically impede social thriving. Ergo, this paper responds to the inextricability of punishment that link classrooms to prisons by introducing an abolitionist theological ethic to create educational sanctuaries.
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Marie-Claire Klassen
Mary, Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls Encountering Mary in Fratelli Tutti and Israel-Palestine Today
first published on April 28, 2023
In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis writes that Mary “wants to give birth to a new world . . . where there is room for all those whom our societies discard, where justice and peace are resplendent.” This essay explores the significance of Mary for a Christian vision of peace and justice through ethnographic research on the role of Mary in the lives of Palestinian Christian women and in popular religion in Palestine more broadly. Utilizing the methodology of theological ethnography, this essay centers the personal experiences of Palestinian Christians and considers the implication their understanding of Mary has for Fratelli Tutti and Christian ethics.
April 25, 2023
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Matthew J. Gaudet
Merit, Solidarity, and the Common Good Recovering the University Community
first published on April 25, 2023
The university has long been oriented toward a meritocratic ideal that emphasizes individual labor and individual measures of success. However, recent studies showing the professorate to be depressed, lonely, and extremely anxious about their future careers raise questions about the merits of such meritocracy. Drawing upon classical sociological theories of solidarity as well as recent scholarship on meritocracy in American culture this essay argues that the meritocratic ideals of contemporary academia have stripped it of the ability to produce the genuine solidarity that sustains communities.
April 22, 2023
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Nicholas Hayes-Mota
An Accountable Church? Broad-Based Community Organizing and Ecclesial Ethics
first published on April 22, 2023
Accountability is a quality often demanded of the church and its leaders today, and especially so within the Roman Catholic Church. But how should accountability itself be understood, and how might a more accountable church be achieved? This essay explores these questions from a new angle by offering a detailed ethical analysis of how accountability operates within broad-based community organizing (BBCO), a form of democratic politics with a highly developed theory and practice of accountability in which many churches already participate. In dialogue with BBCO, the essay develops a constructive framework for conceptualizing accountability. It makes a case for understanding accountability principally as a property of reciprocal relationships between persons, and stresses the need to proactively cultivate and sustain relationships of accountability through ongoing democratic practices of accountability. It also highlights the role played by moral authority, power, and virtue in these relationships and practices. The essay concludes by using this framework to propose a new interpretation of the Catholic Church’s accountability crisis. It suggests a more accountable church may only be achieved when the whole people of God begin organizing themselves to build it.
April 20, 2023
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Ogonna Hilary Nwainya
African Palaver Ethics, the Common Good, and Nonrecognition of Women
first published on April 20, 2023
This essay argues that African palaver ethics makes a vital contribution to the common good tradition in Catholic social ethics. It highlights the significance of solidarity in both Bénézet Bujo’s account of palaver ethics and David Hollenbach’s account of the common good. Yet it concedes that palaver ethics is not perfect as it does not adequately address the missing voices of women. Therefore, it calls for the ethical conversion of the palaver so as to duly recognize the voices of African women and their various contributions to the common good.
April 19, 2023
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Caroline Anglim
Intersectionality as a Critical Framework for Medical Ethics Education
first published on April 19, 2023
Medical ethics educators have a responsibility to assess the dominant pedagogical methods and textbooks we utilize to advance our students’ knowledge about cultural differences and health disparities. In this essay, I argue that intersectional theory functions as an effective tool for the assessment and correction of diversity, equity, and inclusion training models for medical students. I critique, in particular, the additive conceptions of identity and diversity that dominate the literature. Intersectional theorists also provide helpful directives for how to train students to be suspicious of social categories and their relations to power structures. Their ideas can be used to create parameters for case-based learning so as not to undertheorize the culture of medicine and to add depth to core concepts like autonomy and privacy through much-needed investigations of identity formation and expression. Ultimately, intersectional theory pushes medical ethicists to educate their students to understand difference, diversity, and inequity within a wider moral frame.
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Ki Joo Choi
Diversity or Option for the Poor? Confronting the Contradictions Between our DEI Commitments and Enrollment Practices
first published on April 19, 2023
This essay focuses on the growing disconnect between the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) commitments of universities and their enrollment practices and considers the economic concerns buttressing this divergence. In response, this essay encourages universities—both administration and faculty—to reexamine the kinds of sacrifices necessary to recruit and support a student body that aligns with their DEI commitments.
April 18, 2023
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Quan Li
Karl Barth, Mou Zongsan, and the Political Responsibility of the Chinese Protestant Church
first published on April 18, 2023
How can dogmatic teachings inform the political witness of the Chinese Protestant church and its calling among the moral crises of the past four decades? This essay responds to this urgent need by examining the political legacies of Karl Barth and Mou Zongsan, two dogmatic thinkers of Protestant Christianity and New Confucianism. A contextual and constructive comparison of the two figures allows us to reconfigure the notion of political responsibility as a praxis theory of neighbor love with several critical elements: it grounds the political responsibility of the church in the imperative of safeguarding fellow humanity and the forming of responsible humanity, and this imperative must be self-critical and forward-looking in practice. It thus contributes to Christian ethics by articulating the legacy of Barth’s dogmatic theology for democratic ethics through interfaith dialogue and a praxis theory of neighbor love for the Chinese Protestant church under the neoliberal regime.
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Marcus Mescher
Toward a Taxonomy of Moral Injury Confronting the Harm Caused by Clergy Sexual Abuse
first published on April 18, 2023
Moral injury signifies an enduring moral anguish experienced as betrayal, shame, confusion, futility, and distrust, entailing intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal dimensions. This essay proposes a taxonomy of moral injury informed by the ripple effects of harm caused by clergy sexual abuse and its concealment in the Catholic Church. These five categories distinguish between the moral distress endured by perpetrators and victims as well as bystanders and other implicated subjects, the moral fallout caused by a specific event in comparison to exposure to a toxic environment, and as a spectrum that spans from acute to diffuse symptoms of moral violation. This typology illuminates how moral injury impacts conscience, which means “to know together,” indicating that healing moral injury is both a personal and communal endeavor.
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Marcia Pally
White Evangelicals and American Right-wing Populism: The Evolutions of an Ethics
first published on April 18, 2023
This article explores current right-wing populism as an ethical position from the perspective of many, though not all, White American evangelicals. The relevant ethics concern not only abortion or gay marriage (which, research finds, are not top vote-motivators) but views of society (who’s in, who’s not) and government (size and role). Building on ideational approaches to studying populism and incorporating historical and religio-cultural material, this article asks: What in White evangelical religious and political history and in present circumstances makes right-wing populism look to be the most ethical stance? In answer, the article explores populism as proposed solutions to the complex intersectionality of economic, way-of-life, and status-loss duress. It investigates how evangelicals, drawing in mediated ways from their religio-political history and beliefs, understand right-populist views of society and government as an ethical solution to these duresses.
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Sandra Sullivan-Dunbar
Catholic Abortion Discourse and the Erosion of Democracy
first published on April 18, 2023
Since World War II, US Catholic anti-abortion discourse has been framed in term of rights-language, ascribing civil and human rights to the prenate from the moment of conception. Yet many of those who would criminalize abortion have allied with anti-democratic political movements that buttress White supremacy and threaten civil rights. This contradiction exposes the theoretical inadequacy and epistemological hubris of current Catholic abortion discourse. While the Catholic Church and individual Catholics may subscribe to absolute moral norms against abortion, they should not leverage rights-language to legislate such norms in a pluralistic democracy. Instead, Catholics should draw on our rich tradition of virtuous practical reasoning for an abortion ethic that honors the moral agency of pregnant persons and democratic citizens.
April 15, 2023
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James W. McCarty
“Hope is a Discipline”: Practicing Moral Imagination in Transformative Justice
first published on April 15, 2023
Rather than “embracing hopelessness,” many marginalized communities understand their practices of political resistance as exercises in hope. One space of contemporary activism where this is evident is in transformative justice movements. Utilizing the idea of moral imagination as articulated in peacebuilding and conflict transformation literature, and the idea of hope as a social practice as articulated by Keri Day, I argue that a close examination of transformative justice organizing reveals hope as a social practice of embodied moral imagination practiced by communities on the margins.
October 27, 2022
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Elisabeth Rain Kincaid, David A. Clairmont
Risk and Responsibility: Religion and Ethics in Socially Responsible Investment Practices
first published on October 27, 2022
Socially responsible investment (SRI) has become a major intervention in global investment practices that responds to the power of institutional investors to affect corporate practice. While SRI grew out of the decisions made by churches to curtail investment in so-called “sin stocks” (companies which profited from alcohol, tobacco and gambling), little work has been done to explain why such a dramatic difference in investment strategy would occur or how it ought to impact the investment decisions of individual Christians and their faith communities. This paper explores how social institutions with a religious character determine how to balance the risk of inflicting harm on those institutions with responsibility for transforming the economic order through making investment decisions. Using data collected from shareholder proposals in corporate proxy filings and interviews with investment managers, we develop a typology of theologically grounded approaches to risk and responsibility.
October 26, 2022
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Emmy Corey
Navigating the Divide: Healing Practices and Collective Wellbeing in a Nairobi Clinic
first published on October 26, 2022
This paper analyzes ethnographic and historical data to emphasize the importance of framing health as collective wellbeing. Exploring missionary medical campaigns during the colonial period in East Africa, I connect the institutional legacy of Euro-American Protestant missions on the contemporary frameworks of US global public health provisions at my research site, Mwana Mwema Program. At this network of faith-based, USAID clinics in Kenya that provide treatment for children living with HIV, practitioners care for the wider community within a global health system that bases donor funding on epidemiological criteria. This narrow framing conflicts with practitioners’ notions of healing as collective wellbeing and can exacerbate communal divisions. I argue that Mwana Mwema’s notion of collective wellbeing offers a healthcare framework that faith-based providers can embrace. It yields more holistic care for entire communities and offers an opportunity for those of us in the United States to rethink our notions of health.
October 22, 2022
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James F. Caccamo
Technology Choices as Moral Choices in Higher Education Institutional Mission as a Criterion for the Ethics of Technology Adoption
first published on October 22, 2022
Despite the moral aspirations of their mission statements, universities often base technology decisions on technical and financial considerations. This paper will explore what it would be like to prioritize ethical considerations in the selection and deployment of technology in higher education. Using the example of a mission grounded in the principles of integral human development and justice (drawing on sources in the Catholic tradition), it will sketch out a six-point framework for considering technologies: enhancement of access to educational opportunities; implementation of structures to support teaching and learning; persistence of embodied corporate interaction; upholding the dignity of work and workers (students, faculty, administrators, and staff); transparency; and maintaining free spaces for exploration and innovation.
October 19, 2022
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Xavier M. Montecel
Liturgy, Virtue, and the Foundations of an Ecclesial Ethic
first published on October 19, 2022
The connection between liturgy and ethics has been an explicit subject of interest among Christian theologians since the second half of the twentieth century. However, most calls for a substantive integration of worship and Christian morality have proceeded in a single direction. Liturgy provides the foundations of an ecclesial ethic that is directed primarily outward as a witness to the world. A troubling consequence of this general approach to linking liturgy and ethics is that the church, situated in an iconic or kerygmatic role, rarely turns its ethical attention inward. In this essay, I offer a reading of the relationship between liturgy and ethics that may begin to overcome these limitations. In dialogue with Orthodox theologians Alexander Schmemann and Vigen Guroian, I propose a renewed emphasis on the eschatological dimension of eucharistic liturgy that, when theorized through the lens of virtue ethics, can yield a more dynamic, inward-facing ecclesial ethic.
October 15, 2022
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Ted A. Smith
The Education of Authenticity: Theological Schools in an Age of Individualization
first published on October 15, 2022
The kind of theological schools that prevail in the US today emerged as hubs of networks of voluntary societies in the early national period. Through a brief history of Lyman Beecher and Lane Theological Seminary, I show both the power of these networks of voluntary associations to connect free individuals and their role in the project of white Protestant settlement. Now every part of those networks is eroding. Critics who blame this erosion on narcissistic individuals understate the individualizing powers of neoliberal orders. We cannot scold people back into community. Instead, we should begin with ideals that exist, in however ideological a form, in the present. Drawing on thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Ulrich Beck, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, bell hooks, Alicia Garza, and Rowan Williams, I argue for a critical redemption of “authenticity” that could reorient theological schools and renew forms of sociality to which they are connected.
October 14, 2022
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Cristina L. H. Traina
Ecclesiology and Trans* Inclusion
first published on October 14, 2022
In a proleptically queer mode, Avery Cardinal Dulles’s Models of the Church argued that the church—a mystery—must bear multiple simultaneously true, dynamic, indispensable, yet inadequate labels. If so, one theological test of our ethics is their ability to sustain ecclesiological multiplicity. The anti-trans* policies of some US dioceses and of the Congregation for Catholic Education (CCE) document “‘Male and Female He Created Them’” embrace Dulles’s institution model to the point of exclusive authoritarian institutionalism, while other CCE documents, embracing open-ended, loving dialogue across difference, favor his communion and community of disciples models without discarding the other dimensions of church. Dulles’s belief in the dynamism and temporality of ecclesiological models is permission to replace the institution model, which is vulnerable to abuse, with a kenotic model drawn from queer theology that installs apophasis and self-criticism as indispensable elements of ecclesiology. Ethics of sexuality and gender must pass this ecclesiological test.
October 11, 2022
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James F. Keenan
Social Trust and the Ethics of Our Institutions
first published on October 11, 2022
Social trust is the basic resource for our institutions and is notably maintained by leaders who have what I call a vulnerable style and a vigilant capacity to recognize ethical challenges on the horizon. The essay follows five steps: a meditation on social trust, an introduction to the notion of style, and a proposal for a vulnerable style so as to become collectively capacious for recognition. Then it turns to the two institutions under examination at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics (SCE): the church and the academy. The essay examines both the church on racial justice through exemplars of vulnerable style and the academy on needed recognition of the precarity of our community colleges. So as to advance an interest in diversifying our styles of communicating within the SCE, the essay provides a meditation, an academic account, an academic proposal, a narrative, and a case.
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Traci C. West
Disruption
first published on October 11, 2022
To examine the institutional ethics of the church there must be a focus on how the mutually reinforcing interplay of cultural and political values of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy are so effectively perpetuated by Christians through their church bodies. Analysis of this institutional process includes an illustration from the United Methodist Church 2019 quadrennial global assembly and a moment of LGBTQI protest against the Church’s enactment of the “traditional plan” banning equality across sexual orientations and gender identities by limiting ordination and full access to pastoral care to cisgender heterosexuals. A transformative vision of institutional ethics of the church requires disruption of the church’s commitment to preserving social domination.
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Darlene Fozard Weaver
Church Ethics for a Morally Diverse World
first published on October 11, 2022
Moral diversity occasions conflicts which ecclesial institutions need or simply choose to address, yet there is dearth of scholarship on Catholic Church ethics and on moral diversity. When confronting moral diversity, the institutional Catholic Church tends to prioritize concerns about cooperation with evil, moral confusion, and scandal. These concerns can express genuine love for neighbors, but they can also forego opportunities for deeper engagement, witness, and formation. An ethics of the institutional Church needs to work through such distinctions, connect them to institutional policies, positions, and procedures, and foster moral maturity, prudence, and solidarity in our ecclesial communities and beyond.
August 17, 2022
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Ki Joo Choi
Interrupting the Violence of Racial Identities: Lessons from Asian American Experience, the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and “Truth Force”
first published on August 17, 2022
Sustained reflection on multiple expressions of Asian American experience directs us to the coercive logic of racial identities. Noticing this logic is critical to identifying the limitations of several strategies to resist and transcend racial injustice, including the demand for racial recognition. Rereading the Parable of the Good Samaritan as one about the perils of racial identity and then taking cues from the nonviolent practice of truth force provide a blueprint that reimagines the liberative role racial identities can play.
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Devan Stahl, Leonard Curry
Intersections and Methods in Disability Theology: Bioethics and Critical Studies as Dialogue Partners
first published on August 17, 2022
Disability theology has been a small but growing field over the past thirty years. This paper reviews the current methods used in the discipline and proposes ways to move the field forward. Two intersections between disability studies and Christian theological ethics are explored in particular: bioethics and critical theory. Bioethics helps to address the material health and wellbeing concerns of people with disabilities and the discriminatory attitudes about disability that stem from the medical field. Critical theory on the other hand, examines disability through cultural productions that shape our ableist imaginary. Critical theory offers resources for countering or “disciplining” our imaginations. Both bioethics and critical theory offer unique entry points into disability, but each also contains limitations that reveal why disability theology must continue to engage multiple methods and discourses.
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Michelle A. Harrington
Know-Nothing Nihilism: Pandemic and the Scandal of White Evangelicalism
first published on August 17, 2022
White evangelical habits of mind and idolatrous allegiances propped up a devastatingly irresponsible political administration; I argue that the COVID-19 pandemic should be viewed as an apocalypse: “a catastrophic revelation”—in this case, of Christian responsibility refused. I engage the works of Christian historians Mark Noll and Kristin Kobes Du Mez to interrogate how evangelical habits of mind and heart have nurtured anti-intellectualism, credulousness, and the uncritical adoption of neoliberal economic individualism before turning to a constructive Christian realist call for “nasty” (honest, embodied) thinking and genuine repentance which draws from Andrew DeCort’s Bonhoeffer scholarship.
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Nicholas Ogle
“You Should Have Known”: Aquinas on Negligence and Moral Culpability
first published on August 17, 2022
Judgments of moral culpability play a crucial role in our lives, providing a basis for practices of accountability that are essential to a just society. Yet when they exceed their proper limits, such judgments can breed resentment and mistrust, thereby undermining the social bonds that they are meant to preserve. In this essay, I explore this tension in cases where the person being judged is sincerely ignorant of having done anything wrong. Drawing upon Aquinas’s discussion of negligence as a cause of sin, I argue that individuals can sometimes be accountable for sins of which they are completely unaware, but only when this ignorance is of something that they could and should have known. Such a perspective, I suggest, offers a helpful way of addressing contemporary concerns regarding social sin and systemic injustice from within the Thomistic tradition.
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M. Therese Lysaught, Cory D. Mitchell
Vicious Trauma: Race, Bodies and the Confounding of Virtue Ethics
first published on August 17, 2022
This essay asks: How do the realities of embodied trauma inflicted by racism interface with virtue theory? This question illuminates two lacunae in virtue theory. The first is attention to race. We argue that the contemporary academic virtue literature performs largely as a White space, failing to address virtue theory’s role in the social construction of race, ignoring the rich and vibrant resources on virtue ethics alive within the Black theological tradition that long antedates Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, and segregating the emerging literature on race and virtue from the broader discourse. The second is lack of attention to embodiment. More precisely, contemporary virtue theory, informed largely by Aristotle, Aquinas, and MacIntyre, has no conceptual space to theorize the body’s role acquiring and deploying virtue and vice. To explore this nexus, we draw on racial trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem, Katie Walker Grimes, and Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited to challenge contemporary virtue theory and open new possibilities for a robustly corporate, enfleshed theological virtue ethic.
July 20, 2022
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Howard Pickett
Epistemic Mercy and Incarceration Rethinking the Demands of Justice
first published on July 20, 2022
Ethicists and activists have joined forces in recent years to address the problem of “epistemic injustice,” the unjust treatment of people as knowers and, by extension, as communicators. After highlighting the difficulties that come with applying their work to the hard case of the incarcerated individual, I turn from the ambiguities of justice to Christian views of mercy. In doing so, I aim to show the contributions religious ethics makes to discussions of epistemic responsibility and vice versa. More concretely, I also aim to show that if and when disbelief is justified—even deserved—incarcerated individuals can and often should receive what I’m calling “epistemic mercy,” a view that revives longstanding debates about mercy and moral obligation.
July 19, 2022
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Matthew Lee Anderson
(When) Is There a Christian Responsibility to Gossip?
first published on July 19, 2022
This paper offers a Thomistic defense of gossip as a licit means of protecting third parties from harm by known offenders. After first clarifying what constitutes gossip, it draws from Thomas Aquinas to identify the narrow set of conditions under which gossip might be both permissible and obligatory. It concludes by specifying how the duty to gossip might work in Christian institutions, and especially within institutions where there are weak systems of formal accountability.
July 15, 2022
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Laura Stivers
Empowerment of Female-Headed Households A Christian Ethical Response
first published on July 15, 2022
This essay focuses on the empowerment of families headed by solo moms in the United States and argues that the so-called “breakup of the family”—whether through divorce, chosen solo parenthood, or non-heterosexual families—is not the primary problem Christian ethicists should be concerned about. Instead, our attention should be directed towards a neoliberal political economic system that does not consider the rearing of children as a public responsibility and does not prioritize support to families of any type. This essay critiques the traditional Christian framing of family and view of the “family crisis” by drawing on the work of Black queer scholars who offer a more inclusive and interdependent understanding of family that challenges the White heteronormative nuclear family ideal. It concludes with an argument for structural change that prioritizes the rearing of children as a public good and not simply the responsibility of individual households and offers support for the flourishing of all families with attention to particularities of race, class, and gender justice.
July 14, 2022
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Andrea Vicini
The Coronavirus Pandemic: Ethical Challenges in Global Public Health
first published on July 14, 2022
The COVID-19 pandemic is critically analyzed as a social magnifying glass that exacerbates pre-existing unjust situations and contexts—locally, nationally, and internationally. Hence, to reflect ethically on the multiple challenges, which people face during this crisis, requires to address the social and political determinants of health. The essay articulates a systemic approach that examines, first, unjust structural dimensions (i.e., poverty, gender, and racism); and second, local and global practices in healthcare, with privileged attention given to structural dynamics, professionals, decisions, and institutional leadership. As a result, the ethics of global public health stresses how health is a shared, interconnected, and inclusive good that should be carefully protected and urgently promoted.
December 29, 2021
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Neil Arner
Apprehending “The Human”: Theological Anthropology and the Crisis of Credibility in the Social Sciences
first published on December 29, 2021
I specify both challenges and opportunities for integrating social scientific and theological accounts of “the human.” I first show that the interests of many theological ethicists lead them to engage social scientific studies. I then demonstrate that numerous social scientists caution against relying on their publications about the human since these results are of questionable generality and veracity. I next identify some research practices that are recommended by social scientists for restoring the credibility of their publication record. I also illustrate how theological ethicists can benefit from adopting these practices in their quest to provide a general and true account of the human. I conclude that theological anthropology is a rich locus for interdisciplinary engagement, though lasting work on this topic requires sacrificial commitment to the truth, honest willingness to scrutinize one’s sources, and patient attention to particularities.
December 11, 2021
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Elizabeth Sweeny Block
Christian Moral Freedom and the Transgender Person
first published on December 11, 2021
A false sense of freedom is often blamed for gender nonconformity. Transgender and genderqueer persons are accused of manipulating their bodies according to their will and due to a mistaken sense of freedom. This paper challenges this assumption and suggests that it is cisgender persons who ought to adopt a posture of genuine Christian moral freedom, which requires taking risks, seeing that new possibilities of life exist, and recognizing truth in the experiences and bodies of transgender persons. The paper begins by surveying recent theological scholarship on gender fluidity and gender transitions, which offers robust resources but does not address moral freedom, and Catholic magisterial responses to “gender ideology,” which hinge on the assumption that radical autonomy is to blame. The paper then draws on James Gustafson’s rich description of Christian freedom, which he pairs with hope, to suggest that cisgender persons should adopt the posture of Christian freedom that transgender and genderqueer persons already live.
December 8, 2021
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Hille Haker, William Schweiker, Perry Hamalis, Myriam Renaud
The Ethics of Radical Life Extension: Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox Christian, and Global Ethic Perspectives
first published on December 8, 2021
Biomedical technologies capable of sharply reducing or ending human aging, “radical life extension” (RLE), call for a Christian response. The authors featured in this article offer some preliminary thoughts. Common themes include: What kind of life counts as a “good life;” the limits, if any, of human freedom; the consequences of extended life on the human species and on the Earth; the meaning and value of finite and vulnerable embodied life; the experience of time; anthropological self-understanding; and human dignity. Notably, all four authors share serious concerns about RLE’s potential effects.
November 30, 2021
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Kate Ward
Human and Alienating Work: What Sex Worker Advocates Can Teach Catholic Social Thought
first published on November 30, 2021
In Catholic social thought (CST), work that is exploitative, immoral, or hopelessly monotonous can be labeled alienating: its performance makes the worker a stranger to her own, God-given human nature. CST traditionally understands sex work, which directs the human sexual faculties to ends other than the unitive and procreative, as a paradigmatic example of alienating work, and this paper will not disagree. Instead, I will show how accepting sex worker advocates’ claim that “sex work is work” reveals that while sex work is indeed alienating by CST’s standards, many forms of paid work available today are alienating in similar ways. Listening to sex worker advocates helps CST strengthen its critique of alienating work while acknowledging sex workers’ moral agency.
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John P. Burgess
Blessing as the Ground of Morality: Pavel Florensky and Political Resistance
first published on November 30, 2021
his essay argues that Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), one of Russia’s most creative religious philosophers, makes an important contribution to Christian social ethics by positing “blessing” as a central moral act. Drawing on Orthodox liturgical practices of blessing, Florensky redescribes reality; it is filled with God’s energies. Especially in letters from the gulag, after his arrest in 1933 for “counter-revolutionary” activity, Florensky calls forth the sacramental mystery of the natural world around the camps and of each person to whom he writes. In attending to them in their concrete particularity, he offers resistance to a totalitarian regime that would reduce them to raw, exploitable material.
November 10, 2021
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Nelly Wamaitha
The False Promise of Progress: Human Rights and the Legitimation of Inequality
first published on November 10, 2021
Modernity’s social betterment programs such as human rights depend upon a narrative of progress. Progress sustains the ideology that the problems of the non-Western and non-white world are caused by a lagging behind in time that prevents the embrace of the norms that deliver social progress and not by unjust structures of global political and economic power. Progress frames the problem of inequality as cultural rather than political. This occlusion of power means that human rights do not attempt to address important power differences between the Global North and the Global South. Because human rights discourse is undergirded by progress, material human rights frames and institutions actually prevent radical change and reproduce imperial domination. Human rights, therefore, cannot deliver on their promise of equality. This promise must instead be entrusted to an eschatological hope that rejects progress and is disruptive of ongoing oppressive power arrangements.
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Ebenezer Akesseh
Otherness With(Out) Boundaries: Implications of Self-Versus-Other in the Search for Common Ground on the Human
first published on November 10, 2021
Epistemic questions about what constitutes the “human” are intrinsically tied to discussions of “identity” and the dynamic tensions between universal and relative constructions of the “self” versus the “other.” In this paper, putting the writings of Pope Francis on migration in conversation with Paul Ricoeur’s concept of solicitude, which takes into account the “suffering other,” and “nameless” or “anonymous” faces, and Kristin Heyer’s discussion of civic kinship with its emphasis on embracing human difference, I examine the relations between “identity,” “self” and “otherness,” and assess their implications for discussions of solidarity.
November 6, 2021
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Jennifer A. Herdt
Of Wild Beasts and Bloodhounds: John Locke and Frederick Douglass on the Forfeiture of Humanity
first published on November 6, 2021
The doctrine of the image of God is often regarded as grounding human dignity in something permanent and unchanging that transcends our attitudes and behaviors. Yet we persistently encounter the argument that particular human individuals or groups have acted so as to forfeit their moral standing as fellow humans. They are bestialized, categorized as non-human animals, lifting ordinary restraints on punishment. I examine the logic of this argument in John Locke, Thomas Aquinas, and contemporary felony disenfranchisement, showing how it involves slippage between the unobjectionable notion that specific rights may in particular circumstances be forfeited, and the deeply troubling claim that one’s moral standing as human can as such be forfeited. I argue that an apparently similar rhetoric of dehumanization employed by Frederick Douglass, in contrast, refrains from stripping the opponent of moral considerability.
July 20, 2021
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Conor M. Kelly
From Quandary Cases to Ordinary Life: New Opportunities to Connect Social Ethics and Health Care Ethics
first published on July 20, 2021
In Christian bioethics, the call for a greater integration of social ethics and medical ethics is a popular refrain, yet lasting progress toward this goal has been elusive, in part due to the traditional emphasis on quandary cases in medical ethics. This article develops an alternative approach to moral discernment in health care, employing a theological interpretation of solidarity to promote greater social consciousness in ordinary health care decision making. This shifts the ethical analysis from abstract scenarios to everyday choices, elevating the moral significance of seemingly mundane concerns like antibiotic use and diet and exercise.
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Cara Curtis
“No One Left Behind”: Learning From A Multidimensional Ethic of Care in a Women’s Prison in the US South
first published on July 20, 2021
July 16, 2021
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Daniel J. Daly
How Many Heart Valves Should One Person Receive? The Ethics of Multiple Valve Transplants for Patients with IVDU-Induced Endocarditis
first published on July 16, 2021
This article argues that Catholic health care facilities should resist the emerging consensus in clinical ethics, which contends that patients suffering from intravenous drug use induced endocarditis should be denied multiple heart valve replacements. The article demonstrates that the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, as well as core concepts in the Christian moral tradition, such as human dignity, the preferential option for the poor, and the common good, reject this emerging consensus. Patients suffering from endocarditis who inject drugs should, in principle, be eligible for second, third, and even fourth valve replacements. While hospitals may protect and promote the common good by limiting access to multiple heart valve surgeries for this patient population, these limitations should emerge from evidence that such surgeries harm the common good of access to primary health care for all members of a community.
June 15, 2021
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Michael McCarthy
Beyond a Bourgeois Bioethics
first published on June 15, 2021
This essay draws on the work of Johann Baptist Metz to reimagine a Christian Bioethics that develops from the place of suffering. Beginning from the place of suffering resists the future offered within the scientific-technological paradigm. In turning to Metz, Christian bioethics should give greater attention to complex social structures that contribute to injustices and inequalities resulting in health disparities and unnecessary deaths.
June 12, 2021
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Theo A. Boer, A. Stef Groenewoud
Dutch Reformed support for Assisted Dying in the Netherlands 1969–2019 An Analysis of the Views of Parishioners, Pastors, Opinion Makers, and Official Reports of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands
first published on June 12, 2021
In the opinion of many, medical assistance in dying is advocated primarily by secular thinkers whereas Christians seem to be more skeptical. However, we conclude that Dutch euthanasia practice, the most liberal in the world, would not have been possible without the support of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands. We examine four sources that illustrate the nature and extent of that support: national surveys from 1970–2018, official church reports from 1972–2003, contributions to the public debate in the formative 1970s and 1980s made by protestant theologians and physicians, and a recent survey amongst Reformed pastors regarding their experiences with a parishioner’s euthanasia request. In the form of seven characteristics of Dutch Calvinism we explore the reasons for this early advocacy and try to understand why this support seems to be fading since the turn of the century.
June 4, 2021
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Lorraine Cuddeback-Gedeon
Sin, Sins, and Intellectual Disability: An Ethnographic Examination of Moral Agency and Structural Sin
first published on June 4, 2021
Conversations around intellectual disability and sin often rest on either the structural level, or culpability for specific actions. Yet, the effects of sin in the world cannot be reduced to culpability, especially in light of the far-reaching impact of structural sin. Using ethnographic fieldwork among adults with intellectual disabilities, I illustrate how people with IDD participate in structural and interpersonal sin alike, particularly how they resist sin through the exertion of complex agencies. Through the thick description of fieldwork, we gain better tools for recognizing the full, complex humanity of people with IDD—not dismissing them as either sinners or saints—while also recognizing all persons’ call to resist structural sin.
June 2, 2021
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Lisa D. Powell
Disability and Resurrection: Eschatological Bodies, Identity, and Continuity
first published on June 2, 2021
This article engages the debate around embodiment in the resurrected life, drawing from sources in disability theology, black theology, and womanist ethics. Do we retain “body marks,” as M. Shawn Copeland calls them in her consideration of the scars and wounds on black bodies? Or, as Nancy Eiesland and Amos Yong discuss it: do we retain our impairments as Christ did after his resurrection? I will describe the debate, highlight concern over continuity of identity, and use J. Kameron Carter’s work on theology and race to propose an alternative approach.
May 28, 2021
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Amy Levad
Of Tragedies and Myths Subsidiarity and Common-Pool Resource Institutions in Response to Environmental Degradation
first published on May 28, 2021
A pragmatic turn in Christian ecological ethics and theology suggests a practical approach that draws on the strengths of each of the dominant strategies for responding to environmental degradation: government regulation, privatization, and appeals to conscience. The principle of subsidiarity in Catholic social tradition (CST), which calls for a robust social order that integrates the roles of agents on various levels of society, while delegating specific responsibilities to each level, may provide normative direction for discerning when, how, and why to employ these strategies in response to environmental degradation. This principle recommends the development of effective intermediate institutions to mitigate excessive state and economic power and to serve as outlets for organizing and channeling individual agency, yet CST has not sufficiently fleshed out what such institutions look like, especially when responding to environmental degradation. The work of Nobel-winning political scientist Elinor Ostrom may correct this difficulty with her description of eight design principles of intermediate institutions in numerous ecological, social, cultural, political, and economic contexts.
May 27, 2021
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Joe Blosser
And It Was Good: Building an Ethics of Sufficiency
first published on May 27, 2021
To follow Jesus’s command to love our neighbors in our neoliberal age, Christians must cultivate new theological and economic stories that urge practices of sufficiency—ways of living with “enough.” The neoliberal version of the United States’s origin story of the American Dream, built on individual responsibility and meritocracy, knows no end to monetary accumulation. And the ways neoliberal rationality colors the Christian creation story can reinforce the drive toward endless accumulation. There are ways of living and practicing Christian stories, however, that can cultivate the kind of communities that form people to know how to say “enough.” This article argues that there is no genuine community, service to others, or love of neighbor if Christians cannot live out of these new stories that cultivate an ethics of sufficiency. Economically privileged Christians cannot love our lower-income neighbors if we continue to participate in a rationality that encourages limitless economic acquisition.
January 19, 2021
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Myung Su Yang
Luther’s Reformation and His Political and Social Ideas for Korean Church and Society
first published on January 19, 2021
Luther’s beliefs provide three avenues of change for the Korean church and Korean society at large. First, Luther’s argument about two different kingdoms can help the Korean church set itself free from the deeply rooted political attachment stemming from the ideological conflict with North Korea over the past six decades. Second, Luther’s understanding of the individual’s inner mind as the locus of revelation of the divine truth is expected to enhance an autonomous self-determination that is independent of the collective mindset of the multitude, which leads to the naissance of being truly individual. Lastly, Luther’s ethics of love will hopefully improve the public awareness concerning human rights of criminals and, through his vocation theory, give the vision of a unified organic society that Rises above the possessive individualism that spread widely during Korea’s rapid economic growth.
January 13, 2021
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Jennifer Beste
Justice for Children New Directions for Responding to the Catholic Clergy Abuse Crisis
first published on January 13, 2021
A major oversight in Catholicism’s clergy abuse crisis is its failure to examine how assumptions about children and norms concerning adult-children interactions contributed to child sexual abuse and bishops’ systematic cover-up. An adequate response must include new practices based on a revised child-centered account of what constitutes justice for children. In this paper, I develop an account of justice drawing on four sources: 1) Margaret Farley’s account of justice; 2) research findings from my ethnographic study observing and interviewing Catholic second graders about receiving the Sacrament of Reconciliation; 3) the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies; and 4) the Catholic tradition.
January 8, 2021
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James F. Keenan, S.J., STD
Vulnerable to Contingency
first published on January 8, 2021
Over the past forty years, the administrations of American colleges and universities have developed and expanded the ranks of contingent faculty as an alternative to the tenure line. While acknowledging the gross inequities that divide these two tracks, this essay attempts to awaken tenure-line ethicists through the concept of recognition to the conditions of their colleagues and then argues through the concept of vulnerability that faculty are deeply and unavoidably related, and concludes that through solidarity ethicists from both lines might work together toward the university becoming a more ethical workplace than it presently is.
January 6, 2021
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Marilyn L. Matevia
Creature Comfort Foundations for Christian Hospitality Toward Non-Human Animals
first published on January 6, 2021
Can human co-existence with wild animals can be mediated by an ethic of hospitality? Some Christian environmental and animal ethicists have outlined ways Christians can model a more expansive, imaginative, and informed hospitality toward non-human animals. This paper will explore philosophical and theological underpinnings for such a practice, to ask whether it can have any prescriptive “teeth” when the interests of humans and non-human, non-domestic animals collide in ways that humans perceive as costly. The paper will argue that a commitment to interspecies hospitality can indeed function as a biocentric and biblical form of justice that adapts and extends community to our fellow creatures.
January 5, 2021
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Joe Pettit
Blessing Oppression The Role of White Churches in Housing Apartheid
first published on January 5, 2021
This paper argues that white Christian churches participated in, benefited from, and promoted housing apartheid in the United States for at least thirty years, and that these actions have been significant causes of racial inequality through to the present day. Housing apartheid is defined primarily as housing policies that promoted opportunities in whites only communities and which denied and extracted opportunities from nonwhite, predominantly black communities. Blessing oppression is defined as the means by which white churches sustained and entrenched housing apartheid through the basic practices of church life whereby the minds and hearts of white Christians were put at ease as they participated in massive oppression. The paper closes with a consideration of reparations for the role white churches played in housing apartheid as a precondition for racial reconciliation within Christian churches.
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Ellen Ott Marshall
Maternal Thinking in U.S. Contexts of Gun Violence and Police Brutality
first published on January 5, 2021
This article retrieves Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking as a resource for analyzing contemporary activism by mothers advocating for gun control and police reform. Concerns about ethnocentrism and gender essentialism have discouraged engagement with maternal thinking. However, self-identified “moms” continue an historical pattern of protecting their children through public advocacy on social issues. Given the role that maternal identity plays in political activism, feminist ethics must continue to develop robust theoretical resources for analysis and critique. Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking should remain part of that repertoire.
December 31, 2020
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Kevin J. O’Brien
Climate Change and Intersectionality Christian Ethics, White Supremacy, and Atmospheric Defilement
first published on December 31, 2020
White climate ethicists have a responsibility to learn, teach, and write about the intersections between climate change and white supremacy. Learning from Andrea Smith’s understanding of white supremacy as three pillars—commodification, orientalism, and genocide—built from heteropatriarchy, this essay argues that white climate ethicists should focus on particular experiences rather than universal narratives; learn from histories of colonization, slavery, and genocide; and support coalitions that empower people of color and indigenous communities. A focus on the writings of scholars from marginalized identities leads to an understanding of climate change as atmospheric defilement.
December 8, 2020
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Matt R. Jantzen
Neither Ally, Nor Accomplice James Cone and the Theological Ethics of White Conversion
first published on December 8, 2020
This paper offers an intervention in recent debates about white anti-racism by revisiting James Cone’s treatment of this topic in his early writings. In the last decade, scholars and activists have sought to reimagine the conceptual framework of white anti-racism, criticizing the dominant paradigm of “the ally” and articulating an alternative: “the accomplice.” While these critiques of white allyship accurately expose the serious deficiencies of that paradigm, the failure of white allyship is a symptom of a more fundamental crisis within white anti-racism as a whole, one which the accomplice paradigm is equally unable to resolve. Cone’s early account of the relationship between black liberation and those racialized as white, which he articulates using the theological concept of conversion, offers important resources for a constructive account of conversion from whiteness as a way to imagine an ambiguous and paradoxical future for people racialized as white beyond the crisis of white anti-racism.
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Elise M. Edwards
A Womanist Consideration of Architecture and the Common Good
first published on December 8, 2020
Womanist religious thought centers the experiences of black women but addresses the holistic liberation of communities from multiple and hybridized religious, spiritual, and cultural identities, offering valuable insight for examining the moral aims of the common good and identifying challenges to the good of particular communities. This paper offers a womanist analysis of prevailing conceptions of the common good and accounts of architecture and urban planning’s relation to the common good and civic virtue within the work of Christian theologians. It explores the architectural implications of the common good from a womanist lens and articulates a liberatory vision of the common good and its relation to architectural design and construction. Womanist critiques and insights suggest that the spirituality and participation of common people are vital for shaping architecture for the common good, especially as it addresses whose interests are to be served and how common ground is pursued.
November 8, 2020
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Patricia Beattie Jung
Celebrate Suffrage
first published on November 8, 2020
2020 marks 100 years of women’s suffrage in the U.S. Considering this anniversary and the Christian presumption in favor of democracy, this essay invites readers to honor all those who worked for women’s suffrage in two specific ways. First, it invites them to tell the whole truth about the movement, both its many moments of grace and its moral failures. Second, it encourages readers to make the connection between this ambiguous legacy and ongoing forms of voter suppression in the U.S. and then to celebrate suffrage by finishing the fight for it.
May 21, 2020
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Jeremy Posadas
Reproductive Justice Re-Constructs Christian Ethics of Work
first published on May 21, 2020
This essay proposes an anti-work Christian ethics of work: that is, an ethics of work that breaks Christianity’s complicity with capitalism’s death-dealing ideology of work. Taking up feminist anti-work theory’s call to the “refusal of work,” the essay first clarifies the relationship between work and care within the capitalist work-system (a concept coined here by the author). It then argues that the activist framework known as reproductive justice—once it is expanded to the whole sphere of social reproduction—offers a moral norm adequate for an anti-work Christian ethics of work. This new norm resonates with the Christian account of Creation, in which ruach circulates for the joy-filled liveliness of all.
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Todd Whitmore
Holy Deviance: Christianity, Race, and Class in the Opioid Crisis
first published on May 21, 2020
In recent years, public discourse has largely embraced the idea that persons with addictions have a “brain disease,” and ought to be treated medically rather than judicially. This article first argues that this social shift is mostly the result of middle- and upper-class whites being among the addicted. The medical language is deployed so that such persons avoid the stigma of “deviance” commonly linked to addiction. Second, this article argues for a Christian “holy deviance,” whereby Christians become deviant by going out to those who are already marked by society as deviant, letting the latter know in word and deed that they are loved.
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Matthew Philipp Whelan
Agroecology and Natural Law
first published on May 21, 2020
This paper engages agroecology by drawing on natural law reflection. Agroecology considers the agricultural field as an ecosystem (an agroecosystem), designing and managing agriculture on this basis. My purpose is to show how certain strands of natural law reflection offer important tools for theological and ethical engagement with this approach to agriculture. More specifically, I argue that while agroecology can help concretize natural law’s claims about natural order, natural law can help further develop agroecological insights about ecological order and its implications for agriculture, as well as bring to the surface some of agroecology’s underlying anthropological assumptions and political implications.
May 20, 2020
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Ryan Darr
The Virtue of Justice and the Justice of Institutions Aquinas on Money and Just Exchange
first published on May 20, 2020
Justice, according to Thomas Aquinas, is a personal virtue. Modern theorists, by contrast, generally treat justice as a virtue of social institutions. Jean Porter rightly argues that both perspectives are necessary. But how should we conceive the relationship between the virtue of justice and the justice of institutions? I address this question by drawing from Aquinas’s account of the role of the convention of money in mediating relations of just exchange. Developing Aquinas’s account, I defend two conclusions and raise one problem. The conclusions are: (1) Aquinas does presuppose the need for just institutions in just relations; (2) Aquinas highlights the importance of an underappreciated consideration: the way institutions mediate just or unjust relationships. The problem, which naturally arises from bringing together the virtue of justice and the justice of institutions, is whether and how individuals can act justly in a context of structural injustice.
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Gerald McKenny
The Rich Young Ruler and Christian Ethics A Proposal
first published on May 20, 2020
In Christian ethics the Gospel story of the encounter of a rich young ruler with Jesus has been interpreted in two major ways: one that treats Jesus’ directive to the ruler as a counsel that goes beyond the commandments the ruler claims to have kept, and another that treats the directive as contained in the commandments and exposing his failure to keep them. I reconstruct Calvin’s version of the second interpretation, contrast it with Aquinas’s version of the first, and point out some problems with it. I then formulate a revised version that avoids the problems and amounts to a promising alternative for Christian ethics.
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James McCarty
The Power of Hope in the Work of Justice Christian Ethics after Despair
first published on May 20, 2020
This essay engages Miguel De La Torre’s proposal to “embrace hopelessness” and argues that Christians should hold on to hope. The author places De La Torre’s argument in conversation with others who have written on hope and hopelessness and excavates two main weaknesses in his argument: first, a definition of hope that does not stand up to a review of the literature on the topic, especially as advocated by scholars from oppressed communities, and, second, a proposal for hopelessness that does not address how it can contribute to sustainable social transformation. The author then defends hope by drawing on the theological labor and lived experience of oppressed people who utilize hope to empower transformative social action.
May 19, 2020
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Elisabeth Rain Kincaid
Professional Ethics and the Recovery of Virtue
first published on May 19, 2020
In my paper I argue that developments within legal ethics—specifically a return to emphasizing the importance of precepts for governing communities capable of forming virtue and for protecting the vulnerable—can contribute to discussions in theological ethics regarding the rule of precepts for the church’s formation of its members in virtue. This concern is especially timely given the recent sex abuse scandals in Protestant and Catholic churches, which have raised wide-spread concerns about the capacity of churches to form character and protect the vulnerable. I consider how this understanding of the relationship between the role of precepts and the community, drawn from legal professional ethics, has important analogical similarities to Aquinas’s description of the virtue of religion. I then consider how Francisco Suárez, SJ, develops Aquinas’s theory to explain how rules are developed within the community, not simply imposed from above, and serve to protect the vulnerable.
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Robyn Boeré
Can a Child Die a Good Death? Child Ethics and Mortality
first published on May 19, 2020
Jeffrey P. Bishop argues that contemporary understandings of the good death are predicated on conscious choice. This focus on rational conscious choice as the primary criterion has troubling implications for how we evaluate the death of children, whose capacity for autonomy is unclear. In this essay, I will explore ways in which the death of children creates silences, arising most notably from our ideas about the good death. In contrast, I will argue for a different model of a good death that is predicated on intersubjectivity, shared meaning-making, and presence, and which finds its foundation in Christian eschatology, which is not an escape from the present; rather, all our present actions find meaning in God. Our completeness must always and can only be found in God, and understood this way, children can die a good death.
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Stephanie C. Edwards
Pharmaceutical Memory Modification and Christianity’s “Dangerous” Memory
first published on May 19, 2020
Pharmaceutical memory modification is the use of a drug to dampen, or eliminate completely, memories of traumatic experience. While standard therapeutic treatments, even those including intense pharmaceuticals, can potentially offer individual biomedical healing, they are missing an essential perspective offered by Christian bioethics: re/incorporation of individuals and traumatic memories into communities that confront and reinterpret suffering. This paper is specifically grounded in Christian ethics, engaging womanist understandings of Incarnational, embodied personhood, and Johann Baptist Metz’s “dangerous memory.” It develops an ethical framework of Christian “enfleshed counter-memory” that responds to the specific challenge of pharmaceutical memory modification, and traumatic experience generally.
October 30, 2019
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Elizabeth Sweeny Block
White Privilege and the Erroneous Conscience Rethinking Moral Culpability and Ignorance
first published on October 30, 2019
This paper considers the problems that unconscious racial bias and social sin more broadly pose for moral theology’s concepts of the erroneous conscience and ignorance. It argues that systemic racism prompts us to reimagine the erroneous conscience and individual culpability for ignorance. I argue that the erroneous conscience is useful in protecting human dignity in the face of error and in acknowledging the many ways we err but also problematic because it equates error with concrete action and conscious decisions and does not account for responsibility for social sin. This paper asserts that people of privilege and white persons cannot be morally innocent, but the erroneous conscience as it has been understood in the theological tradition often implies that innocence is the goal of the moral life and only holds us accountable for conscious moral actions.
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