Witnessing Whiteness in the Ethics of Hauerwas

Despite constituting one of the most pressing ethical issues of our time, most white Christian ethicists and theologians fail to engage the issue of white supremacy in their work. As one of the most influential and prolific Christian ethicists of the past half‐century, Stanley Hauerwas represents this tendency, and provides specific reasons for his silence. This essay analyzes those reasons, and argues that a commitment to Alasdair MacIntyre’s understandings of tradition and narrative frames his view on race and prevents his engagement of racism. It then highlights the ways this reflects the broader trends of silence, abstraction, and colorblindness among white Christian ethicists when it comes to the issue. Identifying these failures, the essay concludes by suggesting that Hauerwas’s first published essay in 1969, on Black Power, provides resources for theologically engaging the problems of white supremacy today.     

Comparative Religious Ethics and the Politics of Christian Identity

I present a brief historical narrative of the legacy of Christian ethics in comparative religious ethics (CRE) that attempts to make sense of the tensions within the field from the perspective of the politics of identity with reference to its changing content and practices—its internal history—and what might be called the background conditions—its external history—that shaped not only the content and methods of CRE but also its self‐understanding. Given the politics of Christian identity and the historical development of religious ethics within the American academy, I recommend that scholars of CRE adopt a more confessional mode of inquiry that makes explicit their ultimate commitments.     

THEOLOGICAL ETHICS, THE CHURCHES, AND GLOBAL POLITICS

Several discourses about theology, church, and politics are occurring among Christian theologians in the United States. One influential strand centers on the communitarian theology of Stanley Hauerwas, who calls on Christians to witness faithfully against liberalism in general and war in particular. Jeffrey Stout, in his widely discussed Democracy and Tradition (2004), responds that religious people ought precisely to endorse those democratic and liberal American traditions that join religious and secular counterparts to battle injustice. Hauerwas, Stout, and many of their interlocutors envision liberal U.S. culture as the context of Christian social ethics. The ensuing debate rarely incorporates Catholic scholars, feminist scholars, scholars of color, or international and liberationist voices. Their inclusion could enhance an understanding of the role of the church in society, and support a common morality in the face of global pluralism. More importantly, it could broaden the scope of discourse on religion and politics to envision global Christian social ethics.     

FORMATION,GRACE, AND PNEUMATOLOGY: Or,Where's the Spirit in Gregory's Augustine?

Eric Gregory's Politics and the Order of Love takes up an audacious project: enlisting Saint Augustine in order to “help imagine a better liberalism.” This article first provides a summary of Gregory's argument, focusing on his emphasis on love as a “motivation” for neighborly care, and hence democratic participation. This involves tracing the theme of motivation in the book, which is tied to his articulation of liberal perfectionism and an emphasis on civic virtue. In conclusion I raise the question of whether his project has ignored a key aspect of Augustine's account of love, namely, the role of the Holy Spirit, thereby demarcating the limits of Gregory's “rational reconstruction” of Augustine.     

后马克思主义思潮的批判性探讨

后马克思主义是近年引起较多注意的一种国外左派理论动向,它对马克思主义采取了超越“补充”的姿态,在理论上也表现出十分明显的含糊性：一方面,它把马克思主义的批判精神作为最重要的资源之一动员为一种反抗资本主义的激进个人政治话语;另一方面又扭曲了马克思主义的历史使命,并与自由主义意识形态产生了复杂的共谋。后马克思主义是传统西方马克思主义在20世纪70年代终结后的又一种新的历史动向,它在当代学术中的急剧生长,充分反映了当代资本主义的复杂变化,也在理论上为当今马克思主义哲学发展提供了一些基本教训。     

SPIRITUAL INTELLIGENCE: PROCESSING DIFFERENT INFORMATION OR PROCESSING INFORMATION DIFFERENTLY?

This article introduces the concept of spiritual intelligence in terms of a natural human ability to take a different perspective on reality rather than an extraordinary ability to engage with a different/supernatural reality. From a cognitive perspective, spiritual intelligence entails a re-balancing of the two main modes of human cognition, with a prioritization of the holistic-intuitive mind over the conceptual one. From the psychological and phenomenological perspectives, it involves a different kind of engagement with information: slower, more participatory, less objectifying, and not focused entirely on problem solving. The article ends with a reflection on the theological implications of the proposed model and how such an account of spiritual intelligence as knowing differently might relate to theological anthropology and the theology of the spirit and the spiritual.     

Exemplarity Between Tradition and Critique

Moral exemplarism, which insists on the centrality of particular embodiments of exemplary virtue to the moral life, is currently receiving significant attention within moral philosophy as well as theological and religious ethics. This introductory essay situates the contributions made by this focus issue on moral exemplarity in relation to the history of attention to moral exemplars, the twentieth‐century turn to virtue, philosopher Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory, Stanley Hauerwas’s particularist embrace of Christian discipleship, Foucauldian turns to critique and self‐cultivation, and the significance of exemplars in Jeffrey Stout’s democratic piety. Arguing for the critical importance of articulating the authority of exemplars, this essay points to the ways in which the present focus can assist us to navigate between the shoals of nostalgic deference to tradition and dismissive critiques of authoritarianism.     

THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY AND THE RHETORIC OF EXCESS

If militarism violates the ideals of liberty and justice in one way, and rapidly increasing social stratification violates them in another, then American democracy is in crisis. A culture of democratic accountability will survive only if citizens revive the concerns that animated the great reform movements of the past, from abolitionism to civil rights. It is crucial, when reasoning about practical matters, not only to admit how grave one's situation is, but also to resist despair. Therefore, the fate of democracy depends, to some significant degree, on how we choose to describe the crisis. Saying that we have already entered the new dark ages or a post‐democratic era may prove to be a self‐fulfilling prophecy, because anyone who accepts this message is apt to give up on the hard work of organizing and contestation that is needed to hold political representatives accountable to the people. This paper asks how one might strike the right balance between accuracy and hope in describing the democracy's current troubles. After saying what I mean by democracy and what I think the current threats to it are, I respond to Romand Coles's criticisms of reservations I have expressed before about rhetorical excess in the works of Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Richard Rorty. This leads to a discussion of several points raised against me by Hauerwas. A digression offers some of my reasons for doubting that John Howard Yoder's biblical scholarship vindicates Hauerwas's version of pacifism. The paper concludes by arguing that Sheldon Wolin's work on the evisceration of democracy, though admirably accurate in its treatment of the dangers posed by empire and capital, abandons the project of democratic accountability too quickly in favor of the romance of the fugitive.     

IS LIBERAL NATIONALISM INCOMPATIBLE WITH GLOBAL DEMOCRACY?

Abstract: To respond to globalization-related challenges, many contemporary political theorists have argued for forms of democracy beyond the level of the nation-state. Since the early 1990s, however, political theory has also witnessed a renewed normative defense of nationhood. Liberal nationalists have been influential in claiming that the state should protect and promote national identities, and that it is desirable that the boundaries of national and political units coincide. At first glance, both positions—global democracy and nationalism—seem to contradict each other. We do not share this oppositional picture. Developing a more harmonic picture of nationalist ideals and cosmopolitan visions is the aim of this essay.     

Radical Democratic Communities Always-in-the-Making

This article explores the centralpragmatist and feminist philosophical assumption thatknowers can not be separated from what is known, thatthere is a dialectical relationship between socialbeings and ideas that is dynamic, flexible, andreciprocal. The author seeks a closer examination ofconstructive thinking in relation to the practice ofthinking constructively within social communities. She discusses social communities that constructknowledge as radical democratic communitiesalways-in-the-making, and the skills of communicatingand relating which help knowers be able to activelyparticipate in the construction of knowledge. Giventhe fallibility of the pluralistic subjects, she showsthe importance of addressing cultural influences andpolitical power in theories about thinking. Sheargues for the value of embracing pluralistic anddemocratic commitments on epistemological grounds aswell as moral grounds.     

Impure temporalities in the history of political philosophy: the historiography of dēmokratia in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain

ABSTRACT

Building on Bernard Williams’ thesis about the intertwining of history and political philosophy, the essay explores how the problem of the history of dēmokratia after the late-eighteenth and over the nineteenth-century in Britain constituted a primary and critical field in which the philosophical meaning of democracy was debated. Configuring a new temporal perspective grounded in the relationship between ancient and modern democracy, historiographical works by John Gillies, William Mitford, and George Grote put forth an understanding of the concept as a battlefield, involving several conflicting meanings, narratives and historical forces. This historiographical tradition highlighted the tensions underpinning the definition of democracy in the long-term temporal frame linking antiquity and modernity. So even more than contemporary philosophical and political writings, historical understanding constituted a unique concept of democracy that both concentrated and dispersed meaning; it was not just one vision of democracy, among others, but one that acquired the paradoxical power to forge some semantic stability and coherence over time, and to accentuate the threat of the concept’s break up into distinct political premises and historical moments that constituted it.     

UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS AS A SHARED POLITICAL IDENTITY IMPOSSIBLE? NECESSARY? SUFFICIENT?

Abstract: Would a global commitment to international human rights norms provide enough of a sense of community to sustain a legitimate and sufficiently democratic global order? Sceptics worry that human rights cannot help maintain the mutual trust among citizens required for a legitimate political order, since such rights are now too broadly shared. Thus prominent contributors to democratic theory insist that the members of the citizenry must share some features unique to them, to the exclusion of others—be it a European identity ( Habermas and Derrida 2003 ) or a national public culture generally shared only by the members ( Miller 1995, 2000 ). This essay considers and rejects these arguments. While stable, democratic redistributive arrangements do require trust and institutionalised means of trustworthiness; they need not rely on norms or values that distinguish members from non-members: such exclusion is not required. Thus human rights may be part of a common political identity.     

The Public Has to Define Itself

In the article texts by John Dewey, JürgenHabermas and Richard Rorty are discussed in thelight of different meanings of the Public. Thisis done by discussing foundational andnon-foundational claims on a philosophy ofpragmatism and democracy, and by looking atdifferent meanings of intersubjectivity. Onecrucial difference I am pointing at, is thatwhile Dewey's intersubjectivity is stemmingfrom philosophical arguments as well aspolitical, Habermas's intersubjectivity isrestricted to the level of (an almostscientific) philosophical abstractargumentation without any concrete language ofpolitics. When it comes to Rorty I stress thathe is far closer than Habermas to Dewey'spragmatism, especially his ambition to includethe specific individuals and to stressindividuality in a philosophy of communicationand public conduct.