Theological Ethics Research Articles

Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality by James D. Hunter

Reviewed by: Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality by James D. Hunter Jude P. Dougherty HUNTER, James D. and Paul Nedelisky. Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. xv + 289 pp. Cloth, $26.00 Chapter 1 of this book opens with the sentence, "Can science be the foundation of morality?" By chapter 2 it is clear that the book is less an attempt to answer that question than it is about contemporary discourse on the relationship between science and morality. Hunter and Nedelisky believe that the conversation about the science of morality has, in fact, taken on a life of its own and has become a discernable academic discipline. Morality may be nothing but common sense. It is its justification that throws people off. Hunter and Nedelisky early on in their volume give Hume's dictum, "You can't go from what is to what ought to be," the status of an epistemic law. That is nonsense. There are laws of nature, which no physicist, chemist, or biologist is likely to deny, and there is a natural moral law, articulated time and again through the ages by the Hebrew prophets. But if you limit recognition of that law to description and prediction, you are not likely to find it. Hume in so limiting was right on that point. What is at issue is: are we so limited? Recognition of a natural moral law has much to do with recognition of God's existence and with what is held to be the good. Agnosticism is a willful position. There is evidence for the existence of God, and nature's order is evident to anyone who is not willfully blind. The American philosopher, logician, and mathematician acclaimed as the founder of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce, will say the existence of God is self-evident. If one starts with the Greeks rather than the British empiricists, one is likely to have an entirely different attitude toward the moral order. Plato reasoned to a summum bonum responsible for the order in nature and worthy of veneration, Aristotle to a self-thinking intellect, to a first efficient cause, and to an ultimate final cause. These ideas were picked up and developed by the Stoics and philosophers who came later. Christians had no difficulty identifying these marks as attributes of the revealed God who created heaven and earth. A significant portion of this volume is devoted to a second-hand account of scholasticism, supposedly superseded by the Enlightenment. What the authors call "scholasticism" is now called "realism," as distinct from idealism and positivism. Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were realist, so too in the twentieth century were the physicists Lise Meitner, [End Page 794] Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi. And in the philosophical orbit, so too George Santayana, Alfred North Whitehead, and John Dewey, just to name a few. Clearly, Hunter and Nedelisky hope to find what they call "a worldly secular ethics grounded in a broadly naturalistic foundation replacing an other-worldly theological ethics." What they find instead is an endless discussion and debate on whether such is possible. In their words: "Despite all the optimism of the Enlightenment, none of the valiant efforts to find a scientific foundation for morality quelled the quiet, unsettling, yet growing plausibility of moral skepticism." Hume's skepticism about knowledge in general had the unintended effect of supporting moral skepticism. Eventually Hunter and Nedelisky are forced to admit that "empirical science has given us nothing remotely close to a foundation for morality." An informative chapter is devoted to E. O. Wilson's sociobiology. In 1975, Wilson published a book under the title, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. In it he attempted to show how social behavior is tied to evolutionary or genetic factors. He was convinced that an evolutionary explanation of human behavior, if pursued, would in principle be more fruitful than any philosophical endeavor. With some obeisance to the then newly emerging brain science and neurobiology, Wilson's own study of animal behavior, by analogy, led him to believe that Darwin's theory of natural selection accounted for selfishness in individuals...

Locating the ‘Lordless Powers’ in Ireland: Karl Barth, Novels, and Theological Ethics in the Aftermath of the Celtic Tiger

Theological reflection on economic ethics often follows the tradition of the social sciences in describing economic reality in econometric terms. The numerical imagination of the social sciences is not always an elegant dialogue partner for theological ethical reflection. This can be seen to be the case when we draw upon Karl Barth’s discussion of ‘lordless powers’ to describe the dramatic economic reversal endured in Ireland over the last decade. In this article, I propose that literature represents an important additional dialogue partner for theological reflection. Four Irish novels are proposed as potential grounds for considering the relevance of the lordless power discussion in an Irish context.

Magisterium, Theologians, and the Need for Dialogue

Throughout history there have been theological tensions between official church teachers and church theologians, creating at times a divide between both the magisterium and theologians and also between theologians of different methodological approaches. We offer as examples of tension the declarations by the USCCB's Committee on Doctrine (CD) on the “inadequacies in the theological methodology and conclusions” of our book and of the books of three other contemporary theologians. These examples afford us the opportunity both to consider the theological tensions in general and to propose a solution to them. We establish some ecclesial context for dialogue with the CD, calling attention to four factors in this context: first, recent patterns of discourse between theologians and the magisterium in statements issued against particular theologians; second, an important change in the Catholic concept of church; third, an equally important change in how Catholic theologians set about doing theological ethics; and fourth, the reaffirmation of the importance of conscience by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s and, more recently, by Pope Francis.

의사조력자살과 신학적 윤리

의사조력자살과 신학적 윤리

Capizzi, Joseph E. Politics, Justice, and War: Christian Governance and the Ethics of Warfare. Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 223 pp. $96.00 (cloth).

Capizzi, Joseph E. <i>Politics, Justice, and War: Christian Governance and the Ethics of Warfare</i>. Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 223 pp. $96.00 (cloth).

Making Sense of Eighty Years of Theological Ethics

This article surveys all the contributions in ethics on these pages over the past eighty years and is divided into four historical parts: the first three years; the years from 1943 to 1964; the years Richard McCormick wrote from 1964 to 1984; and the years beyond McCormick. It surveys a period from neo-Scholastic manualism at the eve of World War II to the contemporary era, where methods for attaining moral objectivity are complex. This survey notes shifts in theological method, the movement of the center from the personal to the social, the transition from an exclusively clerical authorship to a much broader array of authors, and a shift in readership from priest confessors to professional theologians.

Joseph A. Selling, Reframing Catholic Theological Ethics

Joseph A. Selling, <i>Reframing Catholic Theological Ethics</i>

Uporište etičke egzistencije Srba i sučeljavanje sa nemoralnim pojavama u savremenom sportu

The entire field of ethics (as a discipline of philosophy) is loaded with various issues, different approaches, schools and opinions (as the very field of philosophy, after all). Unlike ethics in general, theological ethics keeps a serious distance from most of those issues. Its starting belief is that whole moral and moral norms rest on God's revelation, which eliminates any relativity in moral understanding. In other words, God is considered as an ultimate foundation of ethics because man in his essence is far from any perfection. Interaction between the meaning of human and ethical existence (which is based on faith in the Holy Trinity) is discussed in the paper in order to reveal a true origin of ethical existence of the Serbs. In addition, those universal ethical principles are confronted (in the field of sport in particular) with various deviant phenomena in society and sport (phenomenology of immorality in sport).

Prayer after Augustine: A Study in the Development of the Latin Tradition by Jonathan Teubner

Reviewed by: Prayer after Augustine: A Study in the Development of the Latin Tradition by Jonathan Teubner Adam Ployd Jonathan Teubner Prayer after Augustine: A Study in the Development of the Latin Tradition Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018 Pp. viii + 257. $88.00. The word "after" in the title of Jonathan Teubner's Prayer after Augustine ought not to be read as meaning simply "subsequent to" or "chronologically following." Rather, it should evoke the more substantial sense of "in the footsteps of" or "in the manner of." Teubner's monograph on prayer in the Augustinian tradition is not so much about how the practice or theory of prayer developed in the centuries immediately following the death of Augustine—although he devotes careful work to unearthing the legacy of Augustine in the writings of Boethius and Benedict—as it is about the way theological tradition is transmitted and adapted, the "kinematics," as he puts it. From this multi-layered study emerges an astute rendering of Augustine's understanding of prayer, a new approach to the early Augustinian tradition independent of the perennial Pelagian focus, and a theory of tradition that challenges the reigning options in modern theological ethics. The historical meat of Teubner's study is divided into two parts, each with four chapters. Part I examines how Augustine's understanding of prayer develops diachronically in his writings. Chapter One, "Learning to Pray," examines Augustine's earliest works, especially the Soliloquia, De moribus, and De magistro. Through these texts Teubner traces the development of Augustine's understanding of prayer from a Platonic reaching of the ratio toward God to a reflexive turning inward upon oneself as unknown. In Chapter Two, "Prayer as Acceptance of Time," Teubner demonstrates how Augustine comes to reject a view of immediate ascent in favor of an eschatologically fulfilled ascent whose temporal delay cultivates a purified desire through a life of patience in time. This argument develops through readings of De vera religione and De sermone Domini in monte that highlight the practices of scripture reading and communal prayer that embody and enliven [End Page 152] this theory. Chapter Three, "Prayer as Reception of the Other," fleshes out this vision of purifying prayer by unpacking Augustine's understanding of the totus Christus. Highlighting Augustine's use of the verb induere, Teubner focuses on the Enarrationes in Psalmos, through which he illustrates how prayer is both the means for incorporation into the totus Christus and the fruit of such incorporation, as Christian existence becomes defined by a dialectic of desire and patience nurtured by the grace of the Holy Spirit. Part I concludes with Chapter Four, "Prayer as the Hope of Wisdom," in which Teubner comes to Ep. 130 and the De trinitate. His reading turns upon two terminological pairs—scientia/sapientia and deprecari/precari—which he reads as mutually informing. Deprecari represents the prayer for purification while precari signifies the desire for participation in God. Scientia pairs with deprecari inasmuch as it is linked with the humility of Christ's incarnation, the very humility that Christians must take on (induere) if they are to reach the sapientia for which they desire (precari). Thus, Teubner concludes his analysis of Augustine's approach to prayer by highlighting not only the tension of desire and patience but also the virtue of hope that sustains the Christian within that life-long tension that is the life of prayer. In Part II, Teubner traces the influence of this Augustinian approach to prayer within the writings of Boethius and the Rule of St. Benedict. Each figure receives two chapters, one for what Teubner terms "Augustinianism 1" and another for "Augustinianism 2," categories he describes in the introduction: "Augustinianism 1 refers to the citation, reference, and particular allusion to a writing from Augustine's pen. . . . Augustinianism 2 is the use of certain general orientations and constellations of thought from Augustine without necessarily sharing specific doctrinal positions" (15). In chapter 5, "The Augustinianism 1 of the Opuscula sacra," Teubner argues that "Boethius' very mode or practice of inquiry is influenced by Augustine's use of prayer in De trinitate and Ep. 130" (128). That is to say, following Augustine, Boethius emphasizes the nature of prayer...

Katie's Canon: Enfleshing Womanism, Mentoring, and the Soul of the Black Community

Katie's CanonEnfleshing Womanism, Mentoring, and the Soul of the Black Community Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas (bio) When I think about Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon, I cannot help but acknowledge the great debt I owe—and so it's a privileged obligation to pay tribute to her life, lessons, and legacy, which made my own womanist beginnings possible. In essence, I am speaking of the "origin story" of when and where I first met Dr. Cannon. I first began pondering the relationship between faith and ethics as a schoolgirl, while listening to my grandmother teach the central affirmations of Christianity within the context of a racially segregated society. My community of faith taught me the principles of God's universal parenthood, which engendered a social, intellectual, and cultural ethos that embraced the equal humanity of all people. Yet, my city, state, and nation declared it a punishable offense against the laws and mores for blacks and whites to "travel, eat, defecate, wait, be buried, make love, play, relax and even speak together, except in the stereotyped context of master and servant interaction."1 It was 1991 when I discovered and read those words and the 174 pages that followed them. As I stood amid the stacks of Candler School of Theology's Pitts Theological Library, I became wrapped up in the work, witness, and words of Katie Cannon's definitive text Black Womanist Ethics. Prior to this chance encounter, I did not even know the name Katie Cannon. But her explicit naming of her approach as "womanist ethics" quickened my soul, opened my mind, and set my feet on a course toward becoming the womanist ethicist I am today. "Womanism," as Katie Cannon framed it, took my mind to where my soul had always been. [End Page 101] After receiving word from Religion Department Chair John Raines that I had received the Future Faculty Fellowship at Temple University, I promptly shared my excitement with Dr. Cannon. She was a bit hesitant during that conversation because she was unsure whether I would accept admission to Temple's graduate program given that I had more competitive offers elsewhere but, as I affirmed to her on the phone that day, "I'm not applying to a school, I'm applying to be mentored by you." At that time, I had no idea that I was the first student of hers to make this appeal. But she was to be the first black woman teacher-mentor I would experience in my academic career. As in all things, she took note of it and wrote me the following words in a letter before I met her in fall 1993: Greetings from Kannapolis, NC! I write to you from my parents' kitchen table where I shared with my mother, Ms. Corine, that you are to be my first doctoral student. I want to be the first to offer congratulations to both of us! It's apparent that you really want to study womanist ethics. . . . The particular usefulness of womanist ethics is (1) to know and do justice to the moral resources and tradition of Black women's lives; (2) to help black women remember, redeem and reproduce the moral wisdom that they utilize; and (3) to engage Black women and other feminists of color who have given up on the community of faith so we might gain new insights concerning the reasonableness of theological ethics in deepening our character, consciousness and capacity in our collective struggle for survival. These are my criteria, and this is the work, I believe, both our souls must have. In my mind, the real-life palpability, scholarly precision, and engaging pedagogy of her womanist work captured and distilled the most essential truths about human nature, in general, and black women, in particular. That's why I think Katie Cannon was bigger than life to so many of us. It's no surprise that we liken so many of her professional exploits to epic superhero sagas. Each one of us writing in this section can attest to Katie Cannon being a superhero—boldly going where so many others had never gone before in order to articulate the truths that some called...

Doing Asian Theological Ethics in a Cross-Cultural and an Interreligious Context. Edited by Yiu Sing Lúcás Chan, James F. Keenan, and Shaji George Kochuthara

Doing Asian Theological Ethics in a Cross-Cultural and an Interreligious Context. Edited by Yiu Sing Lúcás Chan, James F. Keenan, and Shaji George Kochuthara

Beyond a Northern Paradigm

Notwithstanding the commitment to the inclusion of historically underrepresented communities, Christian ethics continues to be dominated by the voices, concerns, norms and methodologies of scholars from the northern hemisphere. This paper analyses the state of the field through the lens of the Catholic Theological Ethics in a World Church network whose mission is to promote international exchange. It assesses the lacunae arising from the northern-centric nature of Christian ethics as practiced in the northern hemisphere, highlights the inflection points, and considers the likely re-prioritization of concerns that will flow from the systemic inclusion of the multiple, diverse voices of majority world scholars.

Christian Sexual Ethics and the #MeToo Movement

These three reflections look at the theological and ethical implications of sexual violence in light of the attention brought by #MeToo. The first explores ethnographic interviews which indicate that Church leaders, teachers, and parents contribute to rape culture by leaving sexual violence unaddressed in Christian sexual education, arguing that it must be reconstructed to eliminate the Church’s participation in a culture that promotes gender-based violence. The second notes that feminist scholarship has made the case that rape and “unjust sex” are associated with what is considered acceptable heterosexuality, require the category of “cultural sin” to account for the social responsibility of persons. Finally, the third explores how a feminist political theological ethics of “dangerous memory” is required to critique of the structures and systems that violate women’s selves and bodies.

Katie Geneva Cannon Incarnate

Katie Geneva Cannon Incarnate Mary E. Hunt (bio) Katie Geneva Cannon arrived on the theological scene before there was one. The field was relatively staid—lots of tweed jackets with elbow patches, pipes, beards, dry lectures, and old-school ties. She and our entire cohort of women in religious studies who came of age together in the 1970s and 1980s changed all that. Her legacy is multivalent—scholarship, style, spirituality, and solidarity. The theological scene, indeed the world, is different and better because of her. I met Kate at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in the 1970s when she was a doctoral student in Hebrew Bible (Old Testament in those days) and I was first a master's student at Harvard Divinity School and later a doctoral student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She was eventually dismissed from the program that had never had an African American woman graduate before. Union Professor Beverly Wildung Harrison talked Katie into continuing her very promising work in ethics, and thus began an illustrious scholarly career that changed the very face of the field. Dr. Cannon's womanist theological ethics, expressed in books, articles, teaching, and mentoring, is now a well-established scholarly approach. It has many adherents in both academia and the Christian ministry, especially in black churches. Womanist work is studied widely and now carried on by colleagues at the Center for Womanist Leadership, Dr. Cannon's capstone project. Womanist scholarship is anything but dry. Founded on solid intellectual ground, it includes the arts, music, and ministry in a vibrant, accessible combination of preaching, teaching, and activism. The night I met her, a party was raging at Union in New York. I recall vaguely that she was the disc jockey. In any case, she brought style to that scene as she did to every place she went. She was hip; I was not. She wore wonderful clothes to my jeans and T-shirts. She knew pop music, could dance, and loved literature; I could pretty much only tell Beethoven from the Beatles, danced pitifully like an Irish white girl, and was just beginning to branch beyond theological writing to inform [End Page 109] my work. We were still in our early twenties, but already our life experiences had shaped us profoundly and differently. It took me decades to understand how deeply racism cuts into the human fabric, and how gender, class, sexuality, and race condition people's possibilities. She knew all of that then. Kate went on to become the first African American woman ordained in the United Presbyterian Church in 1974, then got her doctorate at Union. Pioneers never have it easy. I no longer underestimate the toll on body and soul that such "firsts" take, recalling the premature passing of my friends mujerista religious innovator Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Argentine queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid, and now Katie. Katie's family in Kannapolis, North Carolina, was always very much on her mind. Only later did I learn that part of her scholarship money went to support them. Her years in New York, and later, Boston, Philadelphia, and Richmond meant that she lived in very different circles. Still, she always stayed close to family; the struggles and achievements of her nieces and nephews were part of everyday conversation. She had deep reverence for the values and commitments that she learned at home in that town named for Cannon Manufacturing, where mill workers produced sheets and towels. Her experiences there became the "fiber" of womanist ethics. Months before the illness that took her life far too early, we had some conversations about prayer and spirituality. She told me she was a great fan of labyrinths. I acknowledged that I like to walk them too. Because she had some mobility problems at the time, I found a small, pocket-sized labyrinth, one that could be prayed while seated, a little version a minister could take on pastoral visits. I had one sent to her but never heard if it arrived. Then she got sick. Now, I wonder if she ever used it, moving from margin to center and back again just as she did so frequently in...

Forbearance: A Theological Ethic for a Disagreeable Church. By James Calvin Davis

Forbearance: A Theological Ethic for a Disagreeable Church. By James Calvin Davis

Bioethics and Reason in a Secular Society: Reclaiming Christian Bioethics

Bioethics evolved from traditional physician ethics and theological ethics. It has become important in contemporary discussions of Medicine and ethics. But in contemporary secular societies the foundations of bioethics are minimal in their content and often rely on procedural ethics. The bioethics of particular communities, particularly religious communities, are richer than the procedural ethics of a secular society. Religious bioethics, situated within religious communities, are richer in content in general and in the lived reality.

TRANSUMANISMO E PÓS-HUMANISMO: UMA APROXIMAÇÃO ÉTICO-TEOLÓGICA

O presente artigo pretende recolher elementos teológicos para uma relação entre a Teologia cristã, transumanismo e pós-humanismo. Enfoca especial­mente os temas da natureza humana e da Ética Teológica, ante a importância que adquiriu o movimento trans- e pós-humanista no ambiente científico e tecnológico. A partir de uma descrição histórica dos conceitos identifica-se o transumanismo como momento da aplicação massiva dos recursos da ciência e da técnica para a melhoria e aumento (enhancement) das condições e das capacidades humanas. O pós-humanismo, por sua vez, representa o resultado, na forma de uma nova condição de ser, qualificada como pós-humano. Mostra-se, num segundo momento, com recurso a K. Rahner, como a natureza humana, em seu sentido antropológico, se revela capaz de transformações, desde que se mantenha sua qualidade essencial de autonomia, relacionalidade, liberdade e responsabilidade diante do Mistério Divino. No terceiro momento, mostram-se algumas exigências éticas para uma avaliação do trans- e pós-humanismo.

James Calvin Davis, Forbearance: A Theological Ethic for a Disagreeable Church

James Calvin Davis, <i>Forbearance: A Theological Ethic for a Disagreeable Church</i>

Ethnography, Ecclesiology, and the Ethics of Everyday Life: A Conversation with the Work of Michael Banner

This article begins by introducing recent work by Michael Banner, who advocates the use of social anthropology generally (not just the anthropology of Christianity) for the Christian ethics of everyday life. His use of ethnography in Christian theological ethics is then situated in relation to recent discussions in ecclesiology and ethnography. Situated thus, Banner’s work forms the springboard for a brief discussion of what is at stake for theological ethics in turning to ethnographic research. While some dangers are highlighted, a way forward is offered for the fruitful use of ethnographic research in this field.

Forbearance: A Theological Ethic for a Disagreeable Church, by James Calvin Davis

<i>Forbearance: A Theological Ethic for a Disagreeable Church</i>, by James Calvin Davis