Book Review: The Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology, and the Imagination of the Human

Abstract

The Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology, and the Imagination of the Human. By Michael Banner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. xiii + 223 pp. $35.00 (cloth).Michael Banner, in this book form of his 2013 Bampton Lectures, argues for three innovations in Christian ethics. First, and most significantly in Banner's view, he aims to reorient Christian moral discourse toward what he calls (p. 3). For too long, he contends, moral theology has seen simple naming of the good and bad as sufficient fulfilment of its obligations in limited but difficult situations like abortion or the use of military force (p. 202). Rather, ethics should concern itself events across the whole course of human experience, without necessarily neglecting its treatment of hard cases. One might think that Christian ethics could find assistance from moral philosophy in this regard, but that discipline proves even more remote from everyday life due to the abstracted reflection of both Kantian deontological ethics and utilitarianism, according to Banner. His alternative proposal-the second innovation-is deep engagement social anthropology, specifically the ethnography's textured portrayal of the human motives and desires that underpin moral choices. The third innovation is his method, the crafting of an everyday ethics through the lens of Christ's own life as the paradigmatic human. His method is, in short, ethics as Christology.The moments of Christ's life as narrated in the Nicene Creed thus become the foci of Banner's everyday ethics. Conception, birth, suffering, death, and burial each receive their own chapter, as does the act of remembrance-itself an objective of the creed. In addressing conception, for example, Banner draws from Augustine and certain erstwhile Christian baptismal liturgies to argue that Christianity reconstructs kinship around spiritual solidarity rather than blood ties. This spiritual kinship challenges the modem preoccupation conceiving a biological child through fertility treatments, emotionally taxing as they may be, rather than considering options like adoption (chapter 2). Later in his discussion of suffering, he employs ethnographies to criticize modem humanitarianism, which too often responds to crises through curious spectatorship (p. 90). Instead, conceiving suffering through Holy Week remembrances of Christ's sufferings implores Christians to nurture sympathy and to involve ourselves the sufferings of others, which he aptly portrays in the compassion practiced in Christian L'Arche communities. His chapter on expanding forgiveness in acts of communal remembrance (chapter 7) proves especially poignant, especially his moving account of a Greek village that remembers its dead by coupling their names with the adjective ? …