Contemporary Christian Ethics Research Articles

The Interplay of Ubuntu and Hospitality as Defining Tenets in African and South African Ethics: A Christian Ethics Reflection

The notion of Ubuntu as a moral theory in the South African and African contexts, presents attractive norms of an African world view that can be articulated and applied to contemporary Christian ethics. The proponents of Ubuntu perceive it as an African philosophy based on the maxim, ‘a person is a person through other persons’, whereby the community prevails over individual considerations. It is not merely an empirical claim that our survival or well-being is causally dependent on others but is in essence capturing a normative account of what we ought to most value in life. The shortcomings of Ubuntu should not preclude from reflecting on Ubuntu as a natural ethic potential that enforces and engenders hospitality, neighbourliness and care for all humanity. In this instance, Ubuntu should shift to liminal Ubuntu with Christ as a bond as Ubuntu seeks to restore African communal cultural behaviours. Hospitality should be practiced by doing or reflecting on things which might look insignificant such as, supporting the vulnerable, the marginalized and the migrants that come to South Africa from the neighbouring African countries that bear the brunt of xenophobic acts. This article seeks to appeal to the predominant influence of Ubuntu and Judeo-Christian ethos embedded in the South African psyche to the challenge posed by xenophobia. The article further argues for human dignity as understood by identifying and exhibiting solidarity with others.

Tenet of ubuntu in South (African) ethics

The notion of ubuntu as a moral theory in the South African and African contexts presents attractive norms of an African worldview that can be articulated and applied to contemporary Christian ethics. The proponents of ubuntu perceive it as an African philosophy based on the maxim, “a person is a person through other persons”, whereby the community prevails over individual considerations. It is not merely an empirical claim that our survival or well-being is causally dependent on others but is in essence capturing a normative account of what we ought to be as human beings. However, ubuntu has shortcomings that make it an impractical notion. Despite its shortcomings, ubuntu has natural ethic potential that enforces and engenders hospitality, neighbourliness, and care for all humanity. This article contributes to further conceptualisation and understanding of the notion of ubuntu and its relationship with hospitality in order to retrieve some principles that can be applied to effective and meaningful pastoral care. The principles drawn from ubuntu are juxtaposed with Christian principles and pastoral care to encourage embodiment of God by pastoral caregivers.

In Whose Interest? Ante-Bellum Abolitionism, the Bible, and Contemporary Christian Ethics

Abstract Christians look to Scripture to inform their ethical decision-making, believing that God speaks through it. However, disagreement as to what the Bible requires us to do can often lead to acrimonious splits within the church. So long as sharp divisions amongst Christians over ethical issues remain, injustices continue, and the reputation of the church is undermined. This article suggests that lessons may be learned from the story of the use of the Bible in the American Abolitionism debate which can help the contemporary church to discuss and perhaps even resolve some enduring ethical questions which are dividing Christians today.

Book Review: Doris M. Kieser, Catholic Sexual Theology and Adolescent Girls: Embodied Flourishing and Richard W. McCarty, Sexual Virtue: An Approach to Contemporary Christian Ethics

Book Review: Doris M. Kieser, <i>Catholic Sexual Theology and Adolescent Girls: Embodied Flourishing</i> and Richard W. McCarty, <i>Sexual Virtue: An Approach to Contemporary Christian Ethics</i>

Articles and Publications

Articles and Publications Julie C. Swierczek This edition of "Articles and Publications" uses the format of a bibliography rather than a bibliographic essay. Feedback about this change may be submitted to fha@haverford.edu. Abolition, Manumission, Slavery Carson, Marion L. "In Whose Interest?: Ante-Bellum Abolitionism, the Bible, and Contemporary Christian Ethics." Perichoresis 16, no. 1 (2018): 41-60. Daniels, Jason. "Protest and Participation: Reconsidering the Quaker Slave Trade in Early Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia." Pennsylvania History 85, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 239-265. Gerbner, Katharine. Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Holcomb, Julie. Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017. Israel, Adrienne M. "Free Blacks, Quakers, and the Underground Railroad in Piedmont North Carolina." North Carolina Historical Review 95, no. 1 (January 2018): 1-28. Kershner, Jon R. "Anthony Benezet's (1713–1784) Revolutionary Rhetoric: Slavery and Sentimentalism in Quaker Political Remonstrance." Quaker Religious Thought 130 (March 2018): 5-15. Kershner, Jon R. John Woolman and the Government of Christ: A Colonial Quaker's Vision for the British Atlantic World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Lasser, Carol. "Conscience and Contradiction: The Moral Ambiguities of Antebellum Reformers Marcus and Rebecca Buffum Spring." Journal of the Early Republic 38, no. 1 (Spring, 2018): 1-36. Makovi, Kinga Reka. "Structural Avenues for Mobilization—The Case of British Abolition." Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 2018. https://doi.org/10.7916/D81G1T2C Nash. Gary B., and Miles Albrook Stanley. "The Travail of Delaware Slave Families in the Early Republic." Slavery & Abolition. April 12, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2018.1462301 Peyper, Audrey. "Bound for Slavery? A Quaker Humanitarian Critique of Waged Labour at Koloa Plantation, Hawaii, 1836." Labour History no. 113 (November 2017): 79-102. Richardson, Sarah. "Abolitionist's Album Now a National Treasure." American History [End Page 73] 53, no. 2 (June 2018): 7. Richardson discusses the history of the 19th century photo album owned by U.S. Quaker abolitionist Emily Howland. Ritchie, Daniel. "'The stone in the sling': Frederick Douglass and Belfast Abolitionism." American Nineteenth Century History 18, no. 3 (2017): 245-272. Sassi, Jonathan D. "The Legacies of James McCarty: The Story of How Quakers Secured One Family's Emancipation and Its Ramifications for Revolutionary-Era Antislavery." Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 16, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 282-316. Winchester, Jonathan. "Friends in the Meetinghouse and Masters in the Fields: Seventeenth Century Quakers in the Slave Society of Barbados." M.A. thesis, East Carolina University, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10342/5343. Wood, Bradford J., and Larry E. Tise. "The Conundrum of Unfree Labor." In New Voyages to Carolina: Reinterpreting North Carolina History, edited by Tise Larry E. and Crow Jeffrey J., 85-109. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. American Civil War Whitacre, Paula Tarnapol. A Civil Life in an Uncivil Time: Julia Wilbur's Struggle for Purpose. Lincoln: Potomac Books, 2017. Wilson, Gregory P. The Adventures of Jonathan Roberts, the Union's Quaker Scout in Northern Virginia, 1861–1865. North Charleston, South Carolina: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2017. Anti-Quakeriana Chalmers, Hero. "'But Not Laughing: Horsemanship and the Idea of the Cavalier in the Writings of William Cavendish, First Duke of Newcastle." The Seventeenth Century 32, no. 4 (2017): 327-349. One of the populist works discussed is John Berkenhead's ballad "The Four-Legg'd Quaker," which is an example of the accusations of bestiality made by royalists in the 1640s and 1650s to satirise their opponents. Hitchcock, David. "'He is the Vagabond that Hath No Habitation in the Lord': The Representation of Quakerism as Vagrancy in Interregnum England, c. 1650–1660." Cultural & Social History 15, no. 1 (February 2018): 21-37. Reeve, Hannah. "Research Note: To What Extent Were Quakers Being Persecuted after 1670?" Quaker Studies 23, no. 1 (2018): 109-120 Tuccillo, Alessandro. "'La Liberte de Penser en Hommes' Quaccherismo, Tolleranza Religiosa e Virtú Politica Nell'histoire Des Deux Indes di Raynal." Studi Storici 57, no. 4 (October 2016): 753-772. In Italian. Focuses on the importance and circulation of Quaker myth in 18th-century European culture. [End Page 74] The Arts...

A Loss of Judgment: The Dismissal of the Judicial Conscience in Recent Christian Ethics

AbstractChristian ethicists have neglected conscience, understood as an individual's moral self‐awareness before a locus of accountability and judgment, over the last few decades. The aim of this essay is to suggest how this neglect came about. I draw on the work of Paul Lehmann and Oliver O'Donovan to illustrate how ethicists in the twentieth century became suspicious of conscience because of its association with the alleged ahistorical individualism of Immanuel Kant's work. I argue that a social‐historicist conception of conscience, such as H. Richard Niebuhr offered, attempts to save conscience from this suspicion. Ironically, however, Stanley Hauerwas's development of Niebuhr's historicist, communitarian approach to conscience, appears to have led to a dismissal of conscience. I conclude with a brief comment about what this dismissal has cost contemporary Christian ethics, namely the Christian tradition's basic commitment to the singularity of an individual's accountability before God.

Self-Knowledge and the Approximation of Divine Judgment: Conscience in the Practical Philosophy and Moral Theology of Immanuel Kant

Conscience as an individual’s moral self-awareness has received very little attention in recent decades. H. Richard Niebuhr developed a theory of conscience as moral self-awareness, but, after Niebuhr, interest in this particular understanding of conscience largely disappeared, generally because of its association with the practical philosophy and moral theology of Immanuel Kant. The common assumption is that Kant’s theory of conscience compliments his theory of autonomy: conscience is the means by which the autonomous individual rightly knows herself because it is the means by which she holds herself accountable to the moral order she has made for herself. In this essay I challenge this understanding of Kant’s theory of autonomy and, in turn, Kant’s theory of conscience. I argue that Kant understands conscience to be the knowledge we have of ourselves as we strive to approximate the knowledge God has of us as God holds us accountable to the moral law that we should believe God promulgates to us. I conclude that Kant’s theory of conscience is indeed valuable for contemporary Christian ethics because it draws attention to an important yet neglected biblical and theological witness—namely, that God intimately knows each individual and that each individual is singularly accountable before God.

Putting on Virtue Without Putting Off Feminists

Mary Wollstonecraft's account of virtue discourse and formation, which deploys ancient and medieval ethical resources for modern purposes, challenges a prevalent narrative in Christian ethics today. Several prominent Christian virtue ethicists have left the false impression that serious reflection on the virtues depends on pre-modern traditions and the eschewal of modern resources. Troubled by skeptical quandaries and the difficulty of adjudicating conflicting claims about virtue, they are concerned with securing a pre-modern court of appeals. Many feminists worry that these appeals unduly constrain because they naturalize what is contingent and fix what should be open to debate. Wollstonecraft does not share the skeptical concerns and so has no need for metaethical appeals. Adapting Edmund Burke's moral philosophy, her use of virtue discourse deploys his metaphor of “the wardrobe of the moral imagination” to more religious, radical, and democratic ends. This way of proceeding signals the possibility of a rapprochement between feminists of various stripes and those interested in deploying the discourse of the virtues for contemporary Christian ethics.

The Gift of Arguing with Mary Daly's White Feminism

The Gift of Arguing with Mary Daly’s White Feminism Traci C. West (bio) As a religious studies major in college during the late 1970s and early 1980s, I wrote a senior thesis on contemporary Christian ethics and theology. I decided that a fundamental goal of my thesis would be an exploration of the most radical critiques that I could find of racism and sexism in Christian theology and church practices. By my senior year in college, I had already taken the initial steps in my ordination process in the United Methodist Church. I had been impatiently waiting to begin this process since I was fifteen, when I first announced to a somewhat skeptical male pastor that I had the desire to become a minister. As a college senior I was excited about entering seminary the following year. While writing my senior thesis, I remained the stubborn, black feminist campus activist I had been throughout my previous years in college. I sought scholarly discussions for my thesis in Christian religious studies that substantively engaged politics and offered insights about systemic injustices. My conceptualization of systemic injustice was fed as much by my campus activism as by the texts that I had been studying for classes. My activism focused on anti-apartheid corporate divestment by my university, a procedure to address sexual harassment of women students by their professors, and other institutional justice issues that preoccupied me and a cohort of troublemaking students. For the most politicized critique of the church combined with the most expansive vision of post-Christian feminist religiosity I naturally turned to Mary Daly. I focused mainly on her The Church and the Second Sex with a New Feminist Post-Christian Introduction and her Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation.1 Therefore, at age twenty-one, I had the [End Page 112] astonishingly good fortune to devote a major portion of the academic energy my thesis requirement demanded on analyzing these innovative texts by Mary Daly. I celebrated the cutting-edge religious feminism in her work and rejected the white racial myopia also found there. No other author that I could locate so trenchantly and thoroughly assailed the deification of maleness in the church. Daly employed her wordsmithing genius to depict the history of women’s mistreatment by the institutional church. She seized upon some of the worst psychic fears attached to maleness in her repeated demand for “the castration of sexist religion.”2 She shocked audiences with her complete rejection of Christian idolization of maleness when calling for “the death of God the Father.”3 It is hard to recapture how shocking that language sounded to Christian ears in the 1970s. Most likely, it would still be shocking today if anyone dared to use this rhetoric among Christians. I found Daly to be at her best when she pointed out the utter absurdity of the patriarchal logic that saturated both church practices and long-standing Christian theological tenets. My nascent black feminism was inflamed by the boldness of her critiques. At the same time, I had sharp differences with some of the ideas I found in her writings. My ability to criticize white racist feminism in my chosen field of religious studies was launched as I discerned the right words to articulate my disagreement with Daly. It was a rare opportunity, I now realize, to have had her radical feminist ideas about religion to spark my dissenting reflections. Daly, like many other white feminist authors at the time, compared blacks and women as two categories of experience. She used this comparison to add dramatic flourish to her description of the evolution of her feminist ideas. To illustrate her views on the struggle for women’s equality in the church, for instance, she employed a racial analogy in one of her retrospective prefaces to The Church and the Second Sex. “Why, I wondered would anyone want ‘equality’ in the church? In a statement that I had given to the press only three or four woman-light years distant from now, I had explained that a woman’s asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person’s demanding...

The Problem of Luxury in the Christian Life

DESPITE ITS PROMINENCE IN BOTH BIBLICAL AND CLASSICAL LITERATURE, the moral category of luxury has been lost in contemporary Christian ethics. To address the spending of one's money as a moral act, I propose recovering the category. A survey of the history of the term illustrates its particular place in a set of economic virtues and vices, and suggests that its defenders in the eighteenth century rely on arguments that are antithetical to a virtue ethics per spective and are called into question by contemporary science and experi ence. But what counts as luxury? I conclude with a beginning casuistry in the context of the contemporary economy, suggesting that cheap goods may be luxuries but shared public goods are not.

A Spectrum Pedagogy for Christian Ethics: Respecting Difference without Resorting to Relativism

AbstractThis paper presents an overview of a newly developed spectrum pedagogy of Christian ethics that emerged from the authors' experience of teaching a contemporary Christian ethics course for seven years. A spectrum pedagogy is a comprehensive approach to teaching Christian ethics that combines the modeling of key dispositions using specific tools (issue‐specific spectrums and ethical theories) and learning experiences (engaging multiple positions and responding to concrete situations). The pedagogy gains its name from the issue‐specific spectrums used by instructors to orient students to contemporary debate on a given issue and by students in their ethical reflection. The goal of this pedagogy is to empower students to construct their own responses while respecting differing viewpoints without resorting to relativism. This article surveys the essential elements of a “spectrum pedagogy,” describes its implementation into a semester‐long course, and identifies multiple benefits of using this pedagogy.

Social Selves and Political Reform: Five Visions in Contemporary Christian Ethics – By C. Melissa Snarr

Social Selves and Political Reform: Five Visions in Contemporary Christian Ethics – By C. Melissa Snarr

Book Review: Social Selves and Political Reform: Five Visions in Contemporary Christian Ethics

Book Review: Social Selves and Political Reform: Five Visions in Contemporary Christian Ethics

Recognition and Social Justice: A Roman Catholic View of Christian Bioethics of Long-Term Care and Community Service

Contemporary Christian ethics encounters the challenge to communicate genuinely Christian normative orientations within the scientific debate in such a way as to render these orientations comprehensible, and to maintain or enhance their plausibility even for non-Christians. This essay, therefore, proceeds from a biblical motif, takes up certain themes from the Christian tradition (in particular the idea of social justice), and connects both with a compelling contemporary approach to ethics by secular moral philosophy, i.e. with Axel Honneth's reception of Hegel, as based on Hegel's theory of recognition. As a first step, elements of an ethics of recognition are developed on the basis of an anthropological recourse to the conditions of intersubjective encounters. These conditions are then brought to bear on the idea of social justice, as developed in the social-Catholic tradition, and as systematically explored in the Pastoral Letter of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice For...

Prospects of a Christian ethics of responsibility (Part 2): an assessment of three German versions

In the article three versions of a Christian ethics of responsibility, developed by three German theologians, Wolfgang Huber , Johannes Fischer and Ulrich Körtner , in response to the philosopher Hans Jonas’ s introduction of the ethics of responsibility as a completely new and much needed ethical approach in the technological age, are analysed and assessed. The purpose is to assess the prospects of a Christian ethics of responsibility. An analysis shows the disparate nature of the three versions, but also reveals a number of ways in which responsibility can and should fundamentally qualify contemporary Christian ethics. The conclusion is therefore that the prospects of a Christian ethics are much more promising than a superficial comparison of the three disparate versions of such an ethics would suggest.

Recognition and Social Justice: A Roman Catholic View of Christian Bioethics of Long-Term Care and Community Service

Contemporary Christian ethics encounters the challenge to communicate genuinely Christian normative orientations within the scientific debate in such a way as to render these orientations comprehensible, and to maintain or enhance their plausibility even for non-Christians. This essay, therefore, proceeds from a biblical motif, takes up certain themes from the Christian tradition (in particular the idea of social justice), and connects both with a compelling contemporary approach to ethics by secular moral philosophy, i.e. with Axel Honneth's reception of Hegel, as based on Hegel's theory of recognition. As a first step, elements of an ethics of recognition are developed on the basis of an anthropological recourse to the conditions of intersubjective encounters. These conditions are then brought to bear on the idea of social justice, as developed in the social-Catholic tradition, and as systematically explored in the Pastoral Letter of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice For All (1986). Proceeding from this basis, aspects of a Christian ethics of community service with regard to long-term care can be defined.

The Christological Ontology of Reason

Taking as a starting point the assertion of an ambiguity in the Lutheran tradition's assessment of reason, the essay argues that the Kantian unreserved confidence in reason is criticised in Bonhoeffer. Based upon a Christological understanding of reason, Bonhoeffer endorses a view of reason which is specifically Christian and yet maintains a universality. With a focus on Bonhoeffer's Ethik as the hermeneutical key to his theology, Bonhoeffer's notion is also discussed in light of contemporary Christian ethics. In this part it is particularly the role of reason within a public discourse which is treated in the essay. Here it is argued that Bonhoeffer may be appropriated in attempting to outline a Christological ontology of reason holding essential implications for the sources and conditions of public discourse.

How is Justice Restored?

Restorative justice is an approach to crime and punishment that seeks to bypass the dynamics of the courtroom. It features the opportunity for victim and offender to construct a mutually agreed-upon means of reparation. Its proponents frequently invoke three ethical claims in defence of the practice: that punishment is not a necessary response to crime, that justice must be understood in a contextual rather than a foundational sense, and that the character of the offender can be amended through the restorative encounter. Each claim will be analysed and critiqued from perspectives drawn from traditional and contemporary Christian ethics.

Putting Truth To Practice: Macintyre's Unexpected Rule

It is difficult to exaggerate Alasdair MacIntyre's influence on contemporary Christian ethics. Under his influence, many have sought to show the distinctive features of a Christian account of the virtues, even while discovering that they have needed to go further than MacIntyre himself does. In an attempt to illustrate why some Christian ethicists and theologians have noted MacIntyre's reluctance to follow through on some of his own projects’ most salient aspects, this article examines his 1994 lectures on truthfulness and lying. In particular, I ask why he unexpectedly proposes a rule that suffers from Kantian abstraction. Even though articulating rules can be a crucial task, Christian ethics can often do better. Rather than search for a rule or even practices that require truthfulness, I suggest instead that Christian witness be explored as itself a truth-telling practice.

Contemplative Ethics: Intimacy, Amor Mundi and Dignification in Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila

Accounts within the Christian mystical tradition of moral behavior in the lives of the great mystics are manifold, among them the suffering gentleness of Francis who tended to beggars, lepers, and the crippled; the speculative incisiveness of Meister Eckhart who demarcated the importance of helping those in need from the practice of mystical piety; and the verdant voice of Catherine of Siena who shamed men and popes by speaking about the suffering of the masses. Yet many studies on the relationship of mysticism and ethics repeat the often-stated idea that mystics display an unfortunate tendency to antinomianism, amoral behavior, or ethical apathy.1 The dissonance perceived to exist between mysticism and ethics is due in part to the definitions of mysticism employed, and to modern, academic appropriation. Scholars of mysticism have tended to adopt the essentialist, universalist definitions first posed by William James and others, associating mysticism with highly subjective personal encounters, ecstatic states of consciousness, and transient, ineffable experiences of nonordinary reality, to the neglect of the whole of the mystic's life of faith. A number of recent studies have critiqued this correlation of mysticism with extraordinary psychological states, and the privatization of the spiritual that emerges from it, as a philosophical construction that disregards or is blind to the overriding evidence of ethical concern in the lives and thought of the masters of religious history.2 Further, the field of contemporary Christian ethics focuses almost exclusively on the social dimension of moral conduct, and less on the mystical consciousness that may propel it; it is also based on an onto-theological assumption critiqued by many postmodernists, and on a post-enlightenment preoccupation with the individualized, autonomous self. Yet, the intrinsic unity of the spiritual and moral life was central to the patristic and medieval periods, and was even retained to a large extent in the Christian West until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when moral theology developed as a separate discipline distinct from dogmatic theology. [End Page 1] While in the history of Christian theology ethical thought often has been concerned with obligations, responsibilities, and acts, at the same time there exists another tradition within Christian moral thought that arises out of the contemplative life of prayer.3 Here, ethics comes from within, from the interior life of virtues in relationship with the world, yielding the fruits of responsibilities and deeds. It is from this mystical orientation that some of the greatest ethical precepts have been given form, and it is from them that we find a specific kind of ethical consciousness—an ethics of perfection—that emphasizes the attainment of deification, and is closely associated with the nascent monastic communities. Born out of constant prayer and reflection on divinity, this ethic of perfection was founded on the promise first established in Iranaeus of Lyons' famous phrase, later repeated by St. Athanasius: "God became man so that man might become God."4 Imitation of and participation in Christ's divinity was the foundation of moral perfection, for it was only through the development of selflessness and ardor for God that one could become deified, divine-like. While primarily focused on the inner life of prayer and virtue, the monks were exhorted to practice perfection in order to mirror the divine in the world. The whole of the monastic charism was to participate in Christ's life to the extent that one became a living example of God's presence in human affairs. The quest for inner perfection was for the sake of outer theosis, love for the world and an ethical concern for the spiritual integrity of others.5 Although this ethic of perfection did not address explicit social concerns—a unique development of modern culture—it was nonetheless directed toward similar obligations and goals. It was an ethical code of conduct that marked the life of the...