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201. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 38 > Issue: 1
Emily J. Dumler-Winckler Personal Responsibility in the Face of Social Evils: Transcendentalist Debates Revisited
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American transcendentalists were eager to oppose structural evils such as slavery and poverty. The 1840s were characterized by experiments and debates about whether and how such evils could be opposed. Orestes Brownson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, following Thomas Carlyle and William Ellery Channing, set the terms of this debate. In the end, despite their different anthropologies, ecclesiologies, and prescriptions for opposing evil, they agree that spiritual reform is integral to sociopolitical reform. This transcendentalist debate illuminates the role of personal responsibility and reform in efforts to oppose structural evil in our own time.
202. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 38 > Issue: 1
Sarah MacDonald, Nicole Symmonds Rioting as Flourishing?: Reconsidering Virtue Ethics in Times of Civil Unrest
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From Black Power to Black Lives Matter, political resisters protesting systemic racism have used riots and other manifestations of outrage as a way to grasp at flourishing. Yet such a tactic seems antithetical to the core concept of flourishing as recognized within virtue ethics. Building on the work of womanist and feminist ethicists and moral philosophers who have defended anger as a morally apt, even virtuous response to injustice, we reconsider the relationship between a community’s flourishing and public manifestations of anger and rage. We argue for expanding the moral response to rioting as a tactic of political resistance, and we suggest that more culturally particular understandings of both virtue and flourishing can open space to better see the role anger may play in a community’s flourishing.
203. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 38 > Issue: 2
Preface
204. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 38 > Issue: 2
David P. Gushee Christian Ethics: Retrospect and Prospect
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This SCE presidential address attempts an interpretation of the history of American Christian ethics that is simultaneously an intellectual autobiography. Seven types of Christian ethics receive attention: ecclesial-formational, Protestant social ethics, Niebuhrian, Catholic, evangelical, Hauerwasian, and liberationist. The discipline is described as methodologically fractured and professionally endangered, especially in the case of its founding strand, Protestant social ethics. The essay ends with a call for mutual respect and support among Christian ethicists, sustained attention to one another’s work, and shared efforts to advance the discipline.
205. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 38 > Issue: 2
Eboni Marshall Turman, Reggie Williams Life in the Body: African and African American Christian Ethics
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African and African American Christian ethics comprises an assemblage of disciplines and traditions that address the embodied experiences of black people and provide moral guidance for life in community. Its progenitors helped to establish it as a field of ethical inquiry despite marginalization and hostility and in contrast to dominant ethical traditions that privilege concepts over encounters with embodied life. African and African American Christian ethics privileges embodied encounter as the location for determining a moral hermeneutic in order to recalibrate our understanding of communal relationships toward healthier norms, for the sake of the entire community’s survival and wholeness.
206. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 38 > Issue: 2
Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, María Teresa Dávila, Victor Carmona, Teresa Delgado US Latino/a Contributions to the Field: Retrospect and Prospect
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The 2018 SCE meeting focused on the theme “Retrospect and Prospect” in order to build greater understanding of the discipline of Christian ethics in its varied cultural, methodological, and confessional forms. Latino/a ethics in the United States, by embodying a cooperative methodology (teología en conjunto) grounded in a liberative reading of the Christian Scriptures that employs a hermeneutics of suspicion, seeks to articulate an emancipatory and inclusive vision that yields distinctive forms of social and political action while working toward the common good. This essay provides a brief introduction to and history of Latino/a contributions to the field of Christian ethics, defines key themes that unite its various proponents, and identifies future trends.
207. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 38 > Issue: 2
Brett McCarty Medicine as Just War?: The Legacy of James Childress in Christian Ethics
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What do medicine and war have to do with each other? This question is explored through the writings of James Childress, whose early contributions to just war theory illuminate his work in bioethics. By considering the conceptual influences of just war theory on Childress’s bioethics, the contributions and limits of his approach can be set in relief through normative engagement with certain areas of medicine. In particular, Childress’s just-war-inspired bioethics befits the practice of surgery; but oncology, as a medical analogue to total warfare, requires significant transformation in order to be disciplined by Childress’s approach. Childress offers a coherent schema for navigating moral conflict in a fallen world, but he does not provide a substantive account of the peaceable end toward which medicine as just war aims.
208. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 38 > Issue: 2
Ki Joo (KC) Choi Asian American Christian Ethics: The State of the Discipline
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This essay provides a brief history of how Asian American Christian ethics came to be and sketches the main themes and questions with which this new theological-ethical discipline has grappled since its inception. It then provides an account of two interrelated issues that continue to shape the development of Asian American Christian ethics: (1) whether there is a distinctive Asian American perspective and (2) how the racial marginalization of Asian Americans in Christian ethics and society as a whole might inform this perspective. This essay proposes that as long as Asian Americans continue to be made invisible as model minorities, the goal of racial and social justice will fall short.
209. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 38 > Issue: 2
Matthew Elia Ethics in the Afterlife of Slavery: Race, Augustinian Politics, and the Problem of the Christian Master
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The recent renaissance of Augustinian ethics remains mostly silent about the central place of slavery in Augustine’s thought. Although Augustinians appear confident his insights can be excised from his legitimation of the institution of slavery, two facts challenge this assumption: First, slavery constitutes not simply one moral issue among others for Augustine but an organizing, conceptual metaphor; second, the contemporary scene to which Augustinians apply his thought is itself the afterlife of a slave society. Thus, to bear faithful witness in a racialized world, Augustinians must grapple with slavery as Augustine’s key conceptual metaphor, one that animates his thought and subtly reproduces the moral vantage of the master.
210. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 38 > Issue: 2
M. Therese Lysaught, Michael McCarthy A Social Praxis for US Health Care: Revisioning Catholic Bioethics via Catholic Social Thought
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Catholic health care has long been a key place where the Church embodies its social doctrine. However, the moral methodology that shapes Catholic bioethics relies on an act-based approach to decision making, which is rooted in the pre–Vatican II manualist tradition, focusing primarily on clinical issues related to the beginning and end of life. This essay argues that given the doctrinal status of Catholic social thought (CST), Catholic bioethics must revisit its scope and methodology. It proceeds in three steps: (1) a meta-analysis of traditional Catholic bioethics, validating the claim made above; (2) an overview of the limited literature published since 1980 engaging Catholic bioethics and CST; and (3) a map of a Catholic bioethics informed by CST generated from a dual starting point. The essay concludes by focusing on both the places where marginalized persons encounter Catholic health care and the ethical issues presented, including race, health care disparities, immigration status, and gender inequality, as well as the interrelated perspective of the common good, expanding the array of issues to include environmental degradation, unions, health care financing, and more.
211. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 38 > Issue: 2
Nathaniel Van Yperen Nature Elicits Piety: James Gustafson among the Wolves
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This essay explores James Gustafson’s theocentric ethics for the work of constructing an adequate Protestant Christian ethic of the wild. Two critical questions arise in conversation with his ethics: (1) When the category of natural evil is rendered incoherent, what are the significant consequences for piety in Christian ecological ethics? (2) How does Gustafson’s theocentric ethics, which emphasizes experience, help us to refigure gratitude in ecological ethics? The essay explores these questions in the context of the debate over the reintroduction and conservation of wolves in the American West.
212. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 38 > Issue: 2
Susan A. Ross Aesthetics and Ethics: Women Religious as Aesthetic and Moral Educators
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This essay examines the particular contributions of three communities of women religious for the ways in which they incorporated concerns for the moral formation of their students together with a focus on beauty. These communities not only provided a basic “Catholic moral education” but also aimed to develop persons who saw their responsibility as building a better world that was not only good but also beautiful. Given recent attention to the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, this essay shows how the work of women religious makes a significant contribution to this field.
213. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 38 > Issue: 2
David M. Lantigua Liberal Domination, Individual Rights, and the Theological Option for the Poor in History
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The theory and practice of liberalism has historically justified the dispossession of non-European peoples through the ideological deployment of individual rights—private property being the most prominent. Rather than discarding rights language altogether owing to its colonialist background, the theological option for the poor in the postconciliar Church of Latin America establishes a criterion of authenticity that contributes to its prophetic renewal. The methodological turn toward the poor evident in the liberation theology of Ignacio Ellacuría can wrest rights from its crippling association with political, economic, and cultural forms of liberal domination as seen in the Americas. Latin American theologians provide historical and constructive resources for demythologizing the sacred right to private property in liberalism’s neocolonial present and historical past, as typified by John Locke. Specifically, the theme of integral liberation outlines the material, social, and transcendent dimensions of justice for the dispossessed as an ecclesial alternative to liberal individualism.
214. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 38 > Issue: 2
Janna L. Hunter-Bowman Constructive Agents Under Duress: Alternatives to the Structural, Political, and Agential Inadequacies of Past Theologies of Nonviolent Peacebuilding Efforts
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This essay explores the viability of theologies of nonviolent peacebuilding through reflection on constructive agents under duress. John Howard Yoder’s messianic theology was once a default model of peacebuilding in Christian ethics, but he mixes eschatologies, with problematic results. This essay extends insights from participant observation in Colombia to suggest that if we relate distinct accounts of messianic and gradual eschatologies without mixing them, we articulate a relationship between church and state that is fruitful for theological peacebuilding. This relationship is best described as an interplay that allows for transformative displacement.
215. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 39 > Issue: 1
Sarah E. Fredericks Climate Apology and Forgiveness
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Christian ethicists rarely study apology or forgiveness about climate change, possibly because it is just another sin that God may forgive. Yet apology between humans may be critical to avoiding paralysis after people realize the horror of their actions and enabling cooperative responses to climate change among its perpetrators and victims. Climate change challenges traditional ideas and practices of apology because it involves unintentional, ongoing acts of diffuse collectives that harm other diffuse collectives across space and time. Developing concepts of collective agency and responsibility enable a reconceptualization of apology for an era of climate change. While more work is needed to understand and implement such ideas, this paper lays the groundwork for future studies of collective apology and forgiveness by identifying general features of climate apologies including their symbolic dimensions and connection to ongoing changed actions.
216. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 39 > Issue: 1
Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas ‘Oh Say Can You See?’: Womanist Ethics, Sub-rosa Morality, and the Normative Gaze in a Trumped Era
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This article employs an intersectional analysis of ethical discourse guiding the US context in the era of Trump. Illustrating the viability of intersectionality for the broader utility of Christian social ethics, this essay explores the contemporary development of surreality and sub-rosa morality indicative of the current political situation in the United States in the wake of Donald Trump’s political ascendancy from the reality TV boardroom of The Apprentice to the Oval Office of the White House. Faced with the escalating nature of lies and deception emanating from the Trump administration, this article provides the moral rationale for civil disobedience as well as suggesting prescriptions for a redemptive ethic intended to remedy the legitimation crises which have become the defining ethos of our time.
217. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 39 > Issue: 1
Grace Y. Kao Toward A Feminist Christian Vision of Gestational Surrogacy
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Although increasing in usage, surrogacy remains the most controversial method of assisted reproductive technology. Many Christian ethicists have either objected tout court or expressed strong reservations about the practice. Behind much of this caution, however, lies essentialist assumptions about pregnant women or an overemphasis on the statistical minority of well-publicized disasters. The question remains whether Christian ethical reflection on surrogacy might change if informed by social scientific studies on the surrogacy triad (i.e., surrogates, surrogate-born children, and intended parents). I offer a feminist Christian framework for surrogacy comprised of seven principles drawn from this literature, the reproductive justice paradigm (RJ), human rights, and Reformed theo-ethical norms (viz, covenant, fidelity, stewardship, self-gift). I ultimately advance surrogacy under certain conditions as a moral good and focus on “altruistic” arrangements—including my own—without concluding that only non-commercial contracts could pass ethical muster.
218. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 39 > Issue: 1
Patrick M. Clark The Particularity of Sanctity: Why Paradigms of Exemplarity Matter for Christian Virtue Ethics
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This paper draws upon the meta-ethical insights of Bernard Lonergan and Raimond Gaita to bolster the foundational claims of Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory. I aim to refine Zagzebski’s approach by pointing out how a community’s inevitable prioritization of a given paradigm of moral exemplarity plays a decisive role in the trajectory of its ethical reasoning. I conclude by arguing that within the Christian community, encounters with sanctity should determine the identification of virtues rather than vice versa.
219. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 39 > Issue: 1
Scott Bader-Saye The Transgender Body’s Grace
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Both in church and culture, discussion of sexual orientation has far outpaced discussion of gender identity, leaving the churches with limited resources to respond to “bathroom bills” or to walk faithfully with transgender persons in their midst. This paper draws on the work of Rowan Williams and Sarah Coakley to argue for understanding gender transition as an eschatological formation ordered to the body’s grace. In critical conversation with Oliver O’Donovan, John Milbank, and David Cloutier, the paper offers a constructive, non-voluntarist theological proposal for transgender affirmation in the service of participation in the triune life that exceeds gender.
220. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics: Volume > 39 > Issue: 1
Tisha M. Rajendra Burdened Solidarity: The Virtue of Solidarity in Diaspora
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This paper will compare the presentation of solidarity in mainstream Christian ethics with the practices of solidarity as described in recent novels about immigrant and refugee experiences. The practice of solidarity in diaspora communities illuminates aspects of solidarity that have been hidden in mainstream Christian ethics. 1) Solidarity can be a “burdened virtue” that does not necessarily lead to flourishing. 2) Solidarity is practiced by “narrative selves” that inherit identities, relationships, and obligations.