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1. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
David M. Craig Religious Values in the Health Care Market: Stories and Structures from Catholic and Jewish Hospitals
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USING QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWS AT CATHOLIC AND JEWISH HOSPITAL organizations, this essay contrasts the market-driven reforms of consumer-directed health care and physician entrepreneurship with the mission-driven structures of religious nonprofits. A structural analysis of values in health care makes a convoluted system more transparent. It also demonstrates the limitations of market reforms to the extent that they erode organizational structures of solidarity, which are needed to pool risks, shift costs, and maintain safety nets in a complex and expensive health economy.
2. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
Jonathan Tran Transgressing Borders: Genetic Research, Immigration, and Discourses of Sacrifice
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UTILIZING MICHEL FOUCAULT'S CONCEPTION OF "PLAGUE" AS A DESCRIPtion of states of exception, this essay analyzes America's plans to genetically screen illegal immigrants. It argues that liberal democratic theory presupposes the exceptionalism of the nation-state and hence justifies sacrifices to appease the tragic order of things. The use of genetic technology in current American immigration policy instantiates these "necessary" sacrifices, extending agency and visibility in a never-ending struggle to foreclose every manner of contingency. In contrast, I offer a "doxological" view of space that, eschewing this tragic economy, re-imagines the world by resisting foreclosure and "laboring" to remain open. After theorizing the genetic screening of illegal immigrants through Foucault's "plague" and Hans Jonas' work on sacrifice, I articulate the globalized nation-state as the exception for violence and conclude with political theology's more capacious view of space and cultural identity.
3. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
James P. Gubbins Positive Psychology: Friend or Foe of Religious Virtue Ethics?
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THIS ESSAY OUTLINES THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RELIGIOUS VIRTUE ethics and positive psychology—a field that has grown exponentially since its inauguration in 1998 by Martin Seligman, then president of the American Psychological Association. This essay shows how positive psychology, through its comprehensive classification of human virtues in Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification, opens the possibility of dialogue between empirical psychology and religious virtue ethics; considers some internal and external challenges to positive psychology's approach; and examines one of positive psychology's virtues, the virtue of humanity, and indicates how a Thomistic religious virtue ethics presents a more compelling account of this virtue. The conclusion provides a brief answer to the question, Is positive psychology friend or foe?
4. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
Judith W. Kay The Exodus and Racism: Paradoxes for Jewish Liberation
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THE EXODUS STORY HAS BEEN A SOURCE OF BOTH IDENTIFICATION AND conflict for American Jews and blacks. As a source of identification, blacks saw themselves as Hebrew slaves pitted against white Pharaohs, while blacks' plight resonated with Jewish immigrants. As a source of tension, the Exodus story obscured how Jews were caught between blackness and whiteness. Jews were neither Pharaohs nor slaves but instead functioned as agents of the ruling elites over blacks. Jewish vulnerability derives from potential abandonment from below and above, a type of oppression not captured by the Exodus story. When Jews combat racism and forge black—Jewish alliances, they reduce their susceptibility to becoming isolated from potential allies. Combating racism thus is central to Jewish liberation. White Christians have an important role in preventing anti-Semitism from disrupting efforts to eliminate racism and build an effective black—Jewish coalition.
5. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
Audrey R. Chapman Health Care Reform: The Potential Contributions of a Faith-based Approach
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THERE IS WIDESPREAD DISSATISFACTION WITH THE HEALTH CARE SYSTEM in this country. This essay outlines why. It then reviews and evaluates the contributions of the faith community to the discussions of health care reform to assess whether the perspective and contributions of religious actors are distinct from secular approaches. Finally, it proposes different emphases for the religious community's future involvement with health care reform.
6. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
James F. Keenan From Teaching Confessors to Guiding Lay People: The Development of Catholic Moral Theologians from 1900—1965
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TWENTIETH-CENTURY CATHOLIC MORAL THEOLOGIANS HAVE ABANDONED their long-standing primary task of being teachers of priests who need specific interpretations of the law to hear confessions properly. By 1965 they had become guardians of the personal consciences of lay people seeking to become disciples of Christ. This shift was occasioned by a sustained debate between manualists and revisionists in which they argued about the primary locus of moral theology (whether in actions or in persons), about the locus of moral truth (whether in normative, magisterial teaching or in personal judgments of conscience), and about the objectivity of moral truth (exclusive or inclusive of the moral agent).
7. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
Alejandro Crosthwaite Aparecida: Catholicism in Latin America and the Caribbean at the Crossroads
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CELAM'S APARECIDA DOCUMENTS NOTED THAT THE CHURCH IN LATIN America has neglected the countless builders of the influential and baptized society. Does this apparent change in pastoral strategy mean a shift from a "preferential option for the poor" to a preferential option for the elites? Is this a reflection of the struggle between bishops who hold onto a "Christendom" and managerialist vision and those who presuppose a "class struggle" in their sociopolitical commitments? Or is it a movement toward a more inclusive and balanced praxis, reaffirming the laity's specific political vocation to order the world's temporal goods according to the common good?
8. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
Ana T. Bedard Us versus Them?: U.S. Immigration and the Common Good
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THEOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON IMMIGRATION HAVE LARGELY FOCUSED ON mandates to love the stranger and protect human rights. The U.S. and Mexican bishops' pastoral letter "Strangers No Longer" is no different. However, this ethical focus leaves Christians without sufficient theological guidance when seeking to balance concern for immigrants and U.S. citizens alike. This essay examines undocumented immigration to the United States through the lens of the common good, using a contemporary Catholic feminist understanding of the common good. It examines the impact of immigration on this country and makes policy recommendations that are consistent with the common good. Many of the recommendations are consonant with the bishops' recommendations, but one important recommendation missed by the bishops is that efforts to promote a liberal immigration policy must be accompanied by efforts to promote just wages and working conditions for all low-wage U.S. workers.
9. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
Grace Y. Kao, Ramón Luzárraga, Darryl Trimiew, Christine E. Gudorf Managing Diversity in Academe
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THE OCCASION FOR THE ESSAYS RESPONDING TO MANAGING DIVERSITY IN academe follows in response to a challenge issued by Miguel De La Torre in a 2006 plenary panel regarding the invisibility of minority scholars' work in SCE publications. That 2006 panel, which included presentations by De La Torre, Melanie Harris, Gabriel Salgado, and Darryl Trimiew, stimulated discussions in both the Women's Caucus and the meeting of the Board of Directors; this set of essays from a 2008 plenary session and a concurrent session held later in the meeting is the result of those earlier discussions. The two sessions both address diversity: these essays feature minority voices presenting specific proposals for how minority scholarship should and should not be used by majority and other minority scholars; the concurrent session featured a discussion by majority scholars on what whites must do to diversify the society. Our hope is that these essays and the discussions they generate will shed more light on this extremely complex and important issue for the SCE and the institutions in which members work.
10. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
Laura A. Stivers Making a Home for All in God's Compassionate Community: A Feminist Liberation Assessment of Christian Responses to Homelessness and Housing
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THE AMERICAN DREAM INCLUDES OWNING A HOME, ANDTHE BIGGER THE better. Christian responses to homelessness and housing vary. Some Christian organizations focus on fixing the person and the behaviors that contribute to homelessness. Others promote home ownership for low-income households. Employing aspects of Traci West's feminist liberationist ethical methodology, I will assess how these approaches buy into our culture's dominant ideology on housing or offer prophetic disruption. Then I will outline an advocacy approach that addresses the multiple causes of homelessness and prophetically aims to make a home for all in God's compassionate community.
11. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 28 > Issue: 2
William R. Montross Jr. Go, Witness, and Speak
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WITHTHE OVERWHELMINGLY DISPROPORTIONATE NUMBER OF BLACK MEN on death row, some argue that today's death penalty executions in the United States are the equivalent of legalized lynching. Others may charge this equivalence as hyperbole, but the numbers betray a system of racialized injustice that people of good will ought to reject today as did like-willed people of the churches, synagogues, and community organizations of the years leading up to the civil rights movement and beyond. This essay exposes the factors of race and poverty that lead to determinations of the guilt or innocence and the likelihood of a death or life sentence to those convicted of capital crimes.
12. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Gloria Albrecht Detroit: Still the "Other" America
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THIS ESSAY PRESENTS A PARTICULAR HISTORY OF DETROIT, ONE THAT, BY analyzing the sites and uses of unshared social power, provides an ethical analysis of the processes by which Detroit has become the poorest big city in the United States. Of necessity this story must weave together a variety of elements: economic forces and the theories that justify them, public policies and the politics that underlie them, white racism, sexism, and the spirit of resistance that found its voice in the streets, in radical philosophic and economic theories, in union activism, and in some Christian churches. In this history can be heard the voices of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, the liberal cry for civil rights, and the radical demand for workers' rights. Today, as these same destructive economic and political choices reach into the homes of Detroit's and other cities' white suburbanites, these Detroit voices prophetically challenge business as usual.
13. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Christine Firer Hinze Reconsidering Little Rock: Hannah Arendt, Martin Luther King Jr., and Catholic Social Thought on Children and Families in the Struggle for Justice
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TO ADDRESS THE ROLE OF CHILDREN AND FAMILIES IN STRUGGLES FOR justice, we must bear in mind not "family" in the abstract but particular families in particular times and places. The decisions and actions of particular families—certain African American and white families with children of high school age in Little Rock, Arkansas, during the academic years 1957 and 1958—prompted the controversy I reconsider here, between the German-born political philosopher Hannah Arendt and African American participants and leaders in the southern civil rights movement, most famously represented by Martin Luther King Jr.
14. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Ki Joo Choi The Deliberative Practices of Aesthetic Experience: Reconsidering the Moral Functionality of Art
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THIS ESSAY PROPOSES A CONCEPTION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN art and ethics that moves away from popular causative understandings. Turning to select themes treated in the work of the literary theorist Elaine Scarry, the moral and aesthetical theology of Jonathan Edwards, and finally the philosophical reflections of Marcia Muelder Eaton, a more positive theoretical account of the moral relevance of art and various aesthetic experiences emerge. Central to this account is the observation that art objects, specifically those objects that can be judged as beautiful, provoke a number of deliberative practices. These practices range from the solitary to the relational. Special emphasis on the latter practices provide the conceptual space to reflect more imaginatively about the significance of art for the building of political community and the task of Christian ethics more generally.
15. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Christine Gudorf Heroes, Suicides, and Moral Discernment
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THIS ESSAY PROPOSES THAT EVERYDAY REFERENCES TO HEROES AND suicides share a lack of critical common sense, and that ethicists should initiate critical discourse on these issues to lift the level of popular reflection. The absence of critical discourse serves the interests of powerful social groups and organizations to the disadvantage of other social groups. The absence of critical discourse is further supported by broad social suspicion of decision making by ordinary individuals resulting in social preference for trusting elites, even when the arguments supporting such preferences are recognized as flawed or untrue.
16. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Richard O. Randolph Human Health and Environmental Health Are Interdependent: Removing an Unnatural Partition within Christian Bioethics
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Although the term "Bioethics" literally means "Life Ethics," there is a frequent differentiation of Christian bioethicists into those focusing on medical issues versus those focusing on environmental issues. Yet, many challenges to human and environmental health are interdependent, suggesting the need for greater collaboration. After exploring the historical trajectories that have led to these two distinct foci in Christian ethics, this essay will argue for a greater collaboration between the two specializations and make some suggestions concerning how collaboration may be facilitated. As an illustration of this thesis, I examine avian influenza as a case study.
17. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
C. Melissa Snarr Waging Religious Ethics: Living Wages and Framing Public Religious Ethics
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IN THE PAST DECADE, RELIGIOUS ACTIVISTS HELPED PASS LIVING WAGE legislation in 177 municipalities across the United States. Drawing on concepts from social movement theory, this essay analyzes the framing success of these religious actors, particularly their mediation of theological inheritances, language, and rituals for broader political audiences. Much of the success of religious actors comes from their universalizing of ethical tropes such as "worker dignity" that resonate with dominant United States' culture while simultaneously not disrupting neoclassical economic ideals (such as independence from the welfare state). This approach entails significant ideological risks, for example, promoting independence from government as an ultimate value, but this framing strategy does introduce, at minimum, an effective triage mechanism in the U.S. capitalist economy and, optimally, a pathway for citizen economic education that funds future transformative politics. The essay concludes with suggestions for future framing for the movement.
18. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
M. Therese Lysaught Medicine as Friendship with God: Anointing the Sick as a Theological Hermeneutic
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A THEOLOGICAL BIOETHICS NEEDS, FIRST, A THEOLOGICAL POLITICS. THE thesis of this essay rests on the claim that the contours of a theological politics are found in the nature of sacramental practices. More specifically, a theological politics of medicine is found in the sacramental practice of anointing of the sick. Anointing provides a radically theological hermeneutic—a theologically robust vision for interpreting medicine that, if enacted, can powerfully make real God's work in the world. Such a vision is embodied in one particular twentieth-century exemplar—the organization called Partners In Health (PIH) and its cofounder, Paul Farmer. Farmer and PIH, I argue, live the theologic and theological politics of medicine embodied in the practice of anointing. What is more, they show—against those who would accuse such an approach of being naively idealistic—that such a theological politics is possible, powerful, and can even change the world.
19. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Patrick T. McCormick Saving "Citizen" Ryan: Supporting a Just War or Just Supporting the Troops?
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THE JUST WAR THEORY OBLIGES CITIZENS OF A DEMOCRACY TO OPPOSE war unless it is being waged as a last resort and their nation possesses a just cause, the right intent, legitimate authority, and the probability of success without inflicting disproportionate harm. However, several contemporary Hollywood combat films suggest that the only real moral duties in wartime belong to soldiers, who are to defend and protect their comrades in arms. At the same time, by consistently presenting the obligation to "support the troops" as the public's principal wartime duty and as the final answer to any criticism of the war, proponents of the Bush administration's war in Iraq have exported this "warrior's ethic" home from the battlefield and substituted it for the just war theory. As a result, citizens are no longer expected to critique their government's call to arms but are instead expected to exhibit loyalty to the troops by supporting the war.
20. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Mark Popovsky Coping with Multiple Uncertainties: A Jewish Perspective on Genetic Testing for Breast Cancer and Prophylactic Interventions
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THIS ESSAY APPLIES CONCEPTS AND VALUE JUDGMENTS FROM WITHIN the Jewish tradition to the range of questions raised by genetic testing for BRCA1/2 mutations as well as possible prophylactic interventions to prevent breast cancer; in so doing, it models a Jewish methodology for approaching contemporary situations through the lens of classical Judaism. It notes the Jewish tradition's robust skepticism about the value of partial knowledge and its repeated admonitions against predicting future events based on incomplete data. The essay also weighs Jewish tradition's strong imperative to aggressively pursue good health against Judaism's equally strong reluctance to attempt to predict future events based on partial data. This essay offers few definitive conclusions about Jewish law; instead, it shows that Jewish tradition can tolerate and support several different choices simultaneously. Jewish sources can guide individuals through the decision-making process without prescribing specific behaviors.