Dueling Realisms

Abstract

Abstract This final chapter points toward an alternative position that critically retrieves the realisms of Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sharon Welch, and Reinhold Niebuhr, and finds a middle way between the idealistic realism about moral grounding found in Ruether and some early feminists, and the radically relative political realism of Welch and some other postmodern feminists. This alternative joins an appeal to human self‐transcendence and divine transcendence with an affirmation of human boundedness and divine presence. At the same time, it takes seriously, Ruether's turn to creation and Welch's turn to community. In this alternative model – a feminist Christian realism – the author hopes to maintain both substantive grounding for moral claims and critical judgment of them.