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21. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Brett Wilmot Scriptural Reasoning and the Problem of Metaphysics: Insights for Argument in Liberal Democracy
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THIS ESSAY PRESENTS AN EXTENDED MEDITATION ON THE DEVELOPING practice of scriptural reasoning insofar as it may contribute to our thinking about political discourse in the context of late-modern liberal democracies. Concerns are raised about the account of argument and practical reason expressed by practitioners of scriptural reasoning, particularly with respect to an antimetaphysical bias. Following Franklin Gamwell, I suggest that a coherent theoretical account of democracy should be open to the critical assessment of metaphysical claims. I conclude that scriptural reasoning does provide a helpful resource for thinking about argument across religious traditions in a democratic context but requires a clearer position on metaphysics to make a truly distinctive contribution to reforming our understanding of democratic politics in the context of religious pluralism.
22. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 1
Elizabeth A. Barre Within Reason: The Epistemic Foundations of Catholic and Muslim Arguments for Political Liberalism
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THIS ESSAY ARGUES THAT JUDGMENTS ABOUT THE NATURE AND function of human reason play analogous (though not identical) roles in Catholic and Muslim arguments for political liberalism. Focusing on the works of John Courtney Murray and three contemporary Muslim reformers, I note three similarities. First, thinkers in both traditions argue that it is humankind's unique ability to reason about the moral law that constitutes our dignity and provides the foundation for the right to religious liberty. Second, this ability to reason is what allows us to provide the publicly accessible justifications that the liberal principle of reciprocity seems to require. Finally, all four authors argue that their attempts to reform or develop their traditions are dependent upon and required by the dictates of human reason.
23. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 2
Sandra Sullivan-Dunbar Christian Love, Material Needs, and Dependent Care: A Feminist Critique of the Debate on Agape and "Special Relations"
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THE RECENT CONVERSATION WITHIN CHRISTIAN ETHICS ABOUT THE RELAtionship between universal obligations and particular, intensive relations—between agape and "special relations"—largely accepts Gene Outka's formulation that these are separate and competing moral claims that must be balanced within the Christian moral life. I examine the relationship between agape and special relations through the lens of dependency and dependent-care relations. Attention to dependent care and the material needs addressed within them raises questions about the sharp division between universal and particular obligations. Drawing on the work of feminist philosopher Eva Feder Kittay, I argue that an adequate understanding of Christian love must take account of both our fundamental human equality and the pervasiveness of dependency in human life. Such an understanding of Christian love reveals that agape is a matter of personal and social ethics.
24. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 2
Cristina L. H. Traina Children and Moral Agency
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CHILDREN ARE INCONSISTENTLY LABELED MORAL AGENTS IN SOME HIGHLY charged situations and denied that status in others. This essay draws on the writings of Nomy Arpaly, Lisa Tessman, and legal theorists to argue that both children and adults should nearly always be considered moral agents. But agency does not imply autonomy, ability to articulate rational reasons, or legal liability for either adults or children. Rather, all agents are dependent and conditioned. This quality divides them from a strict Augustinian vision in which adults and children are fully and solely responsible for their actions. The subtext of Augustine's Confessions suggests that Augustine's biography can as easily be interpreted according to the present framework as according to his own thematic of concupiscence.
25. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 2
Elizabeth M. Bucar Reading More than "Lolita" in Tehran: Ethical Genre in the Digital Age
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THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY, "READING MORE THAN LOLITA IN TEHRAN," IS meant to invoke Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, a memoir documenting how Western literary classics have the ability to change and improve the lives of people living under theocratic rule. In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran, Nafisi invited seven of her best women students to attend a weekly study of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and other authors she believed would provide the women with examples of how to successfully assert their autonomy despite great odds.
26. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 2
John Perry Are Christians the "Aliens Who Live in Your Midst"?: Torah and the Origins of Christian Ethics in Acts 10—15
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RECENT JEWISH—CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE HAS UNCOVERED THAT THE EARLY church's ethics were firmly rooted in Jewish halakhic thinking. This essay explores the topic through a study of the church's moral reasoning in Acts 10—15. We see the church readily employing distinctions that are now rarely invoked by Christian ethicists, such as between universal and particular moral law. These distinctions allowed the church to understand the ethical significance of the Torah not by imposing external categories on it (ceremonial versus moral) but through the Torah's own, internal distinctions. Thus, the church's understanding of the Torah can best be understood through the image of geirei toshav (aliens who live in the midst of the people). This image could help Christian ethicists understand their relation to pluralistic contexts because it was precisely the increased pluralism of gentile inclusion that prompted the church in Acts. I briefly consider the implications for a concrete case: the Episcopal-Anglican Communion's debate about homosexuality, which employs the Acts 10—15 narrative.
27. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 2
Terrence L. Johnson Rethinking Justice from the Margins: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Limits of Political Liberalism
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IN THIS ESSAY I USE W. E. B. DU BOIS AND HIS CATEGORY OF TRAGIC SOUL-life in an attempt to expand John Rawls's notion of public reason. As it stands, the divide between religion and politics within Rawlsian political liberalism inadequately attends to the role of moral beliefs, especially those used to justify and reinforce antiblack racism, in forming and fashioning political commitments. By introducing tragic soul-life and Du Bois's category of second sight, I plan to show how a reflective model of deliberation based on Du Boisian themes will allow social actors to interrogate the overlap between political and comprehensive beliefs without necessarily compromising democratic traditions on which rest political conceptions of justice.
28. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 2
Angela D. Sims Nooses in Public Spaces: A Womanist Critique of Lynching—A Twenty-first Century Ethical Dilemma
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LYNCHING, A MORAL PROBLEM THAT PROVIDES INSIGHT INTO AMERICA'S past and present, is more than "a rope and a bundle of sticks." Lynching was always intended as a metaphor to understand race relations in the United States. How, then, might we interpret the proliferation of nooses in various American locales in 2006 and 2007? In this essay I examine whether responses to a cultural symbol—the noose—can result in ethical possibilities that contribute to the common good.
29. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 2
Irene Oh The Performativity of Motherhood: Embodying Theology and Political Agency
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ANALYZED THROUGH THE WORK OF FEMINIST AND QUEER THEORIST JUDITH Butler, anthropologist Saba Mahmood, and philosopher Martha Nussbaum, motherhood complicates theories of performativity that separate sex from gender and that equate women's agency with progressive politics. Motherhood should be understood as performative, that is, entailing self-reflective agency but not entirely separable from women's bodies. While motherhood may be manipulated to support patriarchal institutions, experiences of motherhood also inspire fresh interpretations and critiques of anthropocentric Christian theology and Muslim religious texts. Given the political dimensions of motherhood, the appearance of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin as prominent politicians attests to the variety of performativity and the need to protect women's agency.
30. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 2
Keun-joo Christine Pae Western Princesses—A Missing Story: A Christian Feminist Ethical Analysis of U.S. Military Prostitution in South Korea
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THE PRIMARY GOAL OF THIS ESSAY IS TO BRING PUBLIC AWARENESS OF MILitary prostitution sprung up around U.S. military bases across the globe. With a focus on the lived experiences of Korean military prostitutes for American soldiers in South Korea ("Western princesses"), this essay argues that military prostitution should be considered a human reality in the realm of international politics: the U.S. empire building at the expenses of women's bodies. This argument further aims to foster Christian feminist—social ethics that reconstructs a Christian realistic approach to globalized militarism, the relation between sensuality and sexuality, and transnational solidarity for peace.
31. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 2
Joel Gereboff, Keith Green, Diana Fritz Cates, Maria Heim The Nature of the Beast: Hatred in Cross-Traditional Religious and Philosophical Perspective
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HATRED IS A PHENOMENON OF TREMENDOUS ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE, YET it is poorly understood today. This essay explores some of the ways in which hatred is conceptualized and evaluated within different philosophical and religious traditions. Attention is focused on the Hebrew Bible and on the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Aquinas, and Buddhaghosa. Subtle differences mark various tradition-rooted accounts of the nature, causes, and effects of hatred. These differences yield different judgments about hatred's value and imply different methods for addressing the problem of hatred.
32. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 29 > Issue: 2
Hak Joon Lee Toward the Great World House: Hans Küng and Martin Luther King Jr. on Global Ethics
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IN A CRITICAL CONVERSATION WITH HANS KÜNG'S GLOBAL ETHIC, THIS ESsay studies the contribution of Martin Luther King Jr.'s communal-political ethics for the theory and praxis of global ethics. While Küng's global ethic, due to its quasi-Kantian method, reduces thick religious descriptions into minimal moral codes (ignoring the structural dynamics of globalization, reifying grassroots religious movements), King's ethics points us toward a constructive global ethics that consists of four synthetic components: vision (the world house), principles (human rights), virtue (love, justice, etc.), and transformative political method (nonviolence), which more adequately explains the dynamic relationship of global ethics and the grassroots movements of a global civil society.
33. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 30 > Issue: 1
David P. Gushee What the Torture Debate Reveals about American Evangelical Christianity
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THE DISCOVERY OF DETAINEE ABUSE AT ABU GHRAIB IN 2004 FOLLOWED by the gradual disclosure or release of government documents signaling that decisive policy shifts by the U.S. government led directly to such abuses contributed to a dispiriting national debate about the morality of torture—a debate that continues today. An ongoing fracture between competing social-political-ethical visions in the evangelical world has been revealed and further exacerbated by this debate over torture. Politically conservative evangelicals restrict their policy engagement to issues such as abortion and gay marriage and either steer clear of the torture issue or actually defend torture and attack antitorture efforts; centrist and progressive evangelicals favor a broader agenda that has included opposition to torture. Employing analytical categories derived from a study of Christian behavior in Nazi Europe as well as from personal experiences, this essay recounts and analyzes the torture debate as it occurred in the American evangelical community. The analysis yields the conclusion that white American evangelicalism has displayed structural theological-ethical weaknesses that make this community profoundly susceptible to state (or at least Republican) abuses of power. In response to this integrity-testing moment in evangelical life, this essay calls for a renewed evangelical commitment to a Christ-centered vision of the dignity and rights of every human being.
34. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 30 > Issue: 1
Edward Collins Vacek Vices and Virtues of Old-age Retirement
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AS BABY BOOMERS BEGIN TO REACH RETIREMENT AGE IN 2010, THEY ARE faced with the prospect of twenty to thirty postwork years. Should this period have any goals or purpose other than be a very long vacation? Four gerontological theories propose alternative priorities for this time: continuity, new start, disengagement, and completion. Each has a place within a full life. Careful consideration of each theory exposes how certain vices and virtues mutate during this "third age" of life: integrity and dissipation; self-gratification and generosity; repentance, humility, and denial; and trust and detachment.
35. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 30 > Issue: 1
James M. Childs Eschatology, Anthropology, and Sexuality: Helmut Thielicke and the Orders of Creation Revisited
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IN MANY CHURCH-BODY DISPUTES OVER THE MORAL STATUS OF SAME-gender unions, the last line of defense against the affirmation of such unions is often an appeal to homosexual orientation as inherently "disordered," rendering same-gender unions unacceptable regardless of the loving and just qualities they may embody. On the basis of a biblical anthropology shaped by the eschatological orientation of the scriptures and further enhanced by contemporary Trinitarian discourse, this essay engages and challenges this traditional view as it has been developed in the theological ethics of Helmut Thielicke. In so doing, the essay raises a key metaethical question of the theological foundations that inform Christian sexual ethics in general.
36. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 30 > Issue: 1
Laura M. Hartman Consuming Christ: The Role of Jesus in Christian Food Ethics
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THIS ESSAY EXAMINES FEASTING AND FASTING IN LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN DEsires to eat as, with, and for Christ. Christ both fasted and feasted; Christians, in following his example, may embody him, encounter him, and eat in certain ways for his sake. In the Eucharist, Christians encounter and embody Christ, illuminating the ways that eating can be a holy practice. The Eucharist offers Christians transformative guidance and practical synthesis, allowing them to navigate the extremes of fasting and feasting. It encompasses and enshrines both, allowing both enjoyment and abstention to be transformed into a fulfilled practice of consumption. Consuming Christ in the Eucharist helps Christians find ways to sanctify their consumption in other areas of life.
37. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 30 > Issue: 1
Darryl M. Trimiew Political Messiahs or Political Pariahs?: The Problem of Moral Leadership in the Twenty-first Century
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POLITICAL MORAL LEADERSHIP IS GENERATED, SUPPORTED, AND BLOCKED by the political morality of the people. Moral communities must accept the clay feet of their leaders but carefully monitor the moral qualities of their leader's public policy. Currently this proper approach has given way to a skewed commitment to superficial personal morality. In earlier times, leaders were held to standards of personal morality and public policy both alike and different from those expected of leaders today. In this essay, I consider those similarities and differences to suggest a new moral index for public leadership.
38. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 30 > Issue: 1
Christiana Z. Peppard Poetry, Ethics, and the Legacy of Pauli Murray
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PAULI MURRAY (D. 1985) WAS AN ACTIVIST, LAWYER, AND PRIEST WHOSE AVocation was writing. In this essay I first contextualize Murray's life and works, and I analyze her poetry and ethical vision (informed also by her prose). I focus on three themes in her poetry: race and interlocking oppressions, the "dream" of America and historiography, and the creative ethical power of productive anger. I engage womanist scholarship as a conversation partner throughout the essay. Moving inductively from my analysis of Murray's poetry, I offer several constructive suggestions about the role and heuristic of poetry in contemporary theological and social ethics.
39. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 30 > Issue: 1
Patrick Clark Is Martyrdom Virtuous?: An Occasion for Rethinking the Relation of Christ and Virtue in Aquinas
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IN HIS NICOMACHEAN ETHICS, ARISTOTLE ARGUES THAT MOST DEATHS are contemptible and offer no opportunity for the exercise of virtue. Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, considers the publicly shameful death of the martyr to be not only the highest exemplification of the virtue of courage but also the greatest proof of moral perfection more generally. What accounts for this substantial divergence from Aristotle on the possibility of virtuous action in death? This essay investigates the theologically informed metaphysical and anthropological framework within which Aquinas situates his claims and then explores the implications of these claims for his broader ethical appropriation of Aristotelian virtue theory. It ultimately intends to show the extent to which Aquinas's conception of virtue depends upon a theological and specifically Christological understanding of human perfection.
40. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 30 > Issue: 1
Elizabeth Agnew Cochran Virtuous Assent and Christian Faith: Retrieving Stoic Virtue Theory for Christian Ethics
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ALTHOUGH STOIC THOUGHT HAS SHAPED THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION IN decisive ways, Christian ethicists largely overlook the insights Stoicism offers for contemporary Christian discussion of virtue. This essay expands and elaborates our retrieval of ancient ethics of virtue by exploring Stoic "assent" and its possible intersections with Christian ethics. Rather than being tragically fatalistic, Stoic assent functions as a response to divine providence that is compatible with theological commitments that find particular expression in historical Protestant traditions: the claim that salvation occurs by faith alone and a conviction that humans are both morally accountable and utterly dependent upon God. Stoic moral thought offers a framework for developing a morally rich account of the virtues that takes seriously these Christian beliefs.