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.     

BRICOLAGE AND THE PURITY OF TRADITIONS: Engaging the Stoics for Contemporary Christian Ethics

This essay is a response to C. Kavin Rowe's critique of my 2011 argument that certain dimensions of Roman Stoic ethics are at work in Jonathan Edwards's moral thought. Rowe raises questions about the act of selectively retrieving ideas from a philosophical tradition to support constructive work in another tradition. I argue for the importance of acknowledging how Christian thought has been shaped by what Jeffrey Stout describes as moral bricolage, the selective retrieval of ideas from various traditions, and I contend that this bricolage can continue to be a fruitful means through which Christian ethics engages external traditions. Moreover, the importance of Stoicism's retrieval in early modern philosophy makes the work of eighteenth‐century theologians such as Edwards a particularly valuable resource for exploring the plausibility of Christian engagement with the Stoics.     

Rac(e)ing from Death

In response to recent events that demonstrate the persistence of racial trauma, this essay revisits James Baldwin's claim that racism is a symptom of fundamental human tendencies and constraints. For Baldwin, we cannot understand the legacy of racism if we do not take seriously all too human attempts to evade, and deflect, death and its intimations. To flesh out this component of Baldwin's thought, I engage with the thought of Georges Bataille, an author who thinks generally about the fraught relationship between the preservation of life and our responsiveness to suffering. To test the insights that Baldwin provides on racial matters, this essay engages recent discussions in black studies and queer theory around futurity, racial difference, and the category of the human. I maintain that we must think “the human” and racial difference together, as a tension‐filled relationship, in order to understand the limits and possibilities regarding our efforts to change the order of things.     

Let Black People Be: A Plea for Racial Specificity in the Afterlife of Africanized Slavery

This article introduces a new term, “anti‐blackness supremacy,” in order to supplement existing theological discourse about the ethical life of racism. To a much greater extent than the terms “racism, ” “white privilege” or even “white supremacy,” this term also better positions scholars to address what I identify as the two most pressing problems in anti‐racist discourse: first, the inability to diagnose the relation between classism and racism without reducing one into the other; and second, the tendency to treat racism as a monolithic evil that falls upon all people of color equally and in the same way. The former error has distorted political discourse for decades; the latter misconception intensifies as the United States undergoes demographic shifts in the wake of immigration from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Both of these errors arise from a pervasive misunderstanding of the slave regime that has set our current racial system in motion. In truth, slavery primarily represents not a mechanism of profit extraction, but a relation of a unique type of power. The term “anti‐blackness supremacy,” I contend, corrects both of these misperceptions, affirming both the singularity of black oppression and its fundamental connection to enslaving power. In so doing, it enables ethicists to disarm an older racial foe while thwarting the ascension of a newer one.     

CHRISTIANITY,SCIENCE, AND THREE PHASES OF BEING HUMAN

The alleged conflict between religion and science most pointedly focuses on what it is to be human. Western philosophical thought regarding this has progressed through three broad stages: mind/body dualism, Neo‐Darwinism, and most recently strong artificial intelligence (AI). I trace these views with respect to their relation to Christian views of humans, suggesting that while the first two might be compatible with Christian thought, strong AI presents serious challenges to a Christian understanding of personhood, including our freedom to choose, moral choice itself, self‐consciousness, and the relevance of God to our beginning, being, and ending.     

Is Natural Law a Border Concept Between Judaism and Christianity?

With the passing of disputations between Jewish and Christian thinkers as to whose tradition has a more universal ethics, the task of Jewish and Christian ethicists is to constitute a universal horizon for their respective bodies of ethics, both of which are essentially particularistic being rooted in special revelation. This parallel project must avoid relativism that is essentially anti‐ethical, and triumphalism that proposes an imperialist ethos. A retrieval of the idea of natural law in each respective tradition enables the constitution of some intelligent common ground for ethical cooperation in both theory and practice between the traditions. This essay also suggests how the constitution of this common ground could include Muslims as well. The constitution of this common ground enables religious ethicists to present more cogent ethical arguments in secular space, but only of course, when those who now control secular space are open to arguments from members of any religious tradition.     

Creaturely Solidarity

This essay examines several recent contributions to the growing literature on animal ethics from Christian perspectives. I categorize the four books under review in one of three ways depending on the scholars' methodological points of departure: (1) a reconstruction of the place of other animals in Christian history through a selective retrieval of texts and practices; (2) an identification of a key Christian ethical principle; and (3) a reconsideration of foundational doctrines of systematic theology. On the premise that social ethicists are interested in not only understanding the world, but also changing it, I observe that these authors have offered different answers to the following three questions: (1) whether the theoretical basis for reform is ultimately grounded upon notions of human sameness or difference with other animals; (2) whether scholar‐activists should emphasize logic over passion or values over interests (or vice versa) in their calls for transformation; and (3) whether moral motivation for their targeted audiences is best served by reliance upon secular argumentation and interdisciplinary research or upon the distinctive claims of revelation and other tradition‐specific norms. I conclude by offering my own thoughts about which approaches might prove more effective than others.     

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

Christian 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.     

Doing Justice to Difference: Stanley Hauerwas and Public Theology

Stanley Hauerwas’s theology is widely read as a rejection of the world in favor of the church, and thus the antithesis of politically-engaged, publicly-minded theologies like Reinhold Niebuhr's. However, Hauerwas's critical work can be more fruitfully understood as an effort in disambiguating concepts like “love” and “justice.” Attending to the role language plays in Hauerwas's thought shows how neo-Anabaptist theology acts as a corrective to, not a rejection of, public theology. Charles Mathewes's The Republic of Grace is one example of a neo-Augustinian political theology that takes Hauerwas's conceptual clarifications seriously.     

CONSENT,CONVERSION, AND MORAL FORMATION: Stoic Elements in Jonathan Edwards's Ethics

The contemporary revival of virtue ethics has focused primarily on retrieving central moral commitments of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and the Neoplatonist traditions. Christian virtue ethicists would do well to expand this retrieval further to include the writings of the Roman Stoics. This essay argues that the ethics of Jonathan Edwards exemplifies major Stoic themes and explores three noteworthy points of intersection between Stoic ethics and Edwards's thought: a conception of virtue as consent to a benevolent providence, the identification of virtue as a singular and transformative good, and an account of moral formation as simultaneously self‐directed and received. Common ground between Edwards and the Stoics illustrates the value of recognizing Stoic moral thought as a philosophical framework that can enhance and undergird Christian ethicists' understandings of moral development and the nature of virtue.     

Moralism and Anti-Moralism: Aspects of Bonhoeffer’s Christian Ethic

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's thinking about ethics and Christianity is a fascinating attempt to combine different, and often conflicting, strands in the Christian intellectual tradition. In this article, I outline his thinking, analyse the advantages and disadvantages in his approach, and relate it to developments in contemporary philosophy. His critique of an excessive stress upon principles and abstraction in opposition to a concern for concrete circumstances is, I argue, best seen as a necessary critique of what I call moralism rather than morality. It is also related to recent philosophical theories of particularism and the debates about ‘emergency ethics’ in current philosophy. On the negative side, Bonhoeffer has a tendency to treat non-Christian ethics as necessarily relativist and at times is excessively influenced by the elements in Christian theological tradition that are hostile to the natural and to non-Christian philosophy. In addition, his invocation of ‘the Divine mandates’ seems to have undesirable implications for some genuine values in liberal democratic theory and practice.     

Queer Muslims: between orthodoxy,secularism and the struggle for acceptance

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to concentrate on responses by Muslim scholars to both the Orlando incident and the United States Supreme Court Judgment on same-sex marriage. I first provide some comments on the Orlando incident in relation to the issue of Muslims, violence and homophobia. More importantly and central to my argument, I consider what the import of these responses are for Muslims – especially Muslims who identify as LGBTIQ or at least experience same-sex sexual attraction or participate in same-sex sexual conduct – and also what do such responses suggest about the prospect of same-sex sexuality being seriously considered, understood and accepted within the contemporary Islamic tradition and the possible consequences thereof. I make the case that the Islamic tradition, by way of its self-identified and proclaimed scholarly interpreters and representatives, urgently need to engage with the issue of same-sex sexuality in a more robust, dynamic and imaginative manner or risk a deepening epistemological crisis.     

Tradition,Authority, and Immanent Critique in Comparative Ethics

Drawing on resources from pragmatist thought allows religious ethicists to take account of the central role traditions play in the formation and development of moral concepts without thereby espousing moral relativism or becoming traditionalists. After giving an account of this understanding of the concept of tradition, I examine the ways in which understandings of tradition play out in two contemporary examples of tradition‐based ethics: works in comparative ethics of war by James Turner Johnson and John Kelsay. I argue that a pragmatist approach to tradition‐based ethics allows for a nuanced and flexible understanding of moral traditions, and one that holds great promise for international consensus‐building around shared ethical norms for the use of armed force.     

With a Sword Pointing to the East,West, South,and North

In his In Defense of War, Nigel Biggar argues for an account of war based in Christian love. In the process, he opposes Christian pacifists, the British Left, liberal accounts of just‐war, and accounts of just‐war based on self‐defense. Although framed in terms of love, his account pivots around punishment, which is further explicated by a thorough review of the recent war in Iraq, the invasion of which he deems justified. This review compares Biggar's monograph to prior iterations of a love‐based approach to just war by Paul Ramsey and Oliver O'Donovan. Biggar's contributions regarding love, punishment, and policy analysis are recognized, as well as his attempt to carry on the tradition of the ‘mournful warrior’. As a model for the kind of scrutiny that Christian ethicists should bring to bear on serious social issues, Biggar's monograph is excellent. However, the political stance and – largely implicit and unstated – political theology operating behind this book are, in the end, disconcerting.     

Christian Ethics,Religious Ethics,and Secular Ethics: A Contemporary Reappraisal

In this essay, I argue that Christian ethicists should not think of themselves as religious ethicists. I defend this claim by arguing that the concept of religious ethics, as it has come to be understood as a discipline that is distinct from secular ethics, is incoherent. In part one, I describe the fraught attempts by theologians in the 20th century to identify the distinctiveness of Christian ethics. In part two, I argue that certain accounts of natural law unwittingly reinforce a problematic conception of secular ethics. Part three examines some trends in religious studies and comparative religious ethics to highlight problematic conceptions of religion. Drawing together these strands of inquiry, I contend that that the secular-religious dichotomy in contemporary ethics should be rejected, but by the same token, I suggest that comparative ethics remains a worthwhile enterprise.     

On hating in the first person plural: thinking psychoanalytically about racism, homophobia, and misogyny.

On the basis of personal, cultural, and clinical references, misogyny, homophobia, and racism are conceptualized as structured forms of hatred grounded in a defensive use of the first person plural voice. This use of hatred defends against dangers associated with desires linked to the first person singular. In these hatreds, "I want" is defensively transformed into "we hate." Disidentification from and hatred of the object appear where identification and yearning had been. Along with this defensive move into plurality, with these forms of hatred comes the use of what is conceptualized as the "hermeneutics of transparency." Here the hated qualities of the objects in question are sensed to be transparently obvious, a matter not of thought but of perception. The underlying premises of these hatreds are then contrasted with the underlying premises of psychoanalysis. Effective psychoanalytic work with these hatreds entails resisting the moral pressure to disidentify from them, while bearing the often profound discomfort linked with identifying with them.     

Postmodern Thought and Christian Education

This article examines the impact of postmodern thought on Christian education. It briefly defines postmodern perspectives and their impact on reasoning in a Christian context and examines specific postmodern positions on the notion of truth and its validity or rationality. Education has been impacted by postmodern thought by an opening of thinking about the ways of knowing which include more than empirical or technical ways of knowing. Postmodernism argues that meaning is negotiated rather than being exact and limiting. As popular trends and popular culture bring postmodern thought to everyone, the impact on the thinking of Christian students and educators is examined to encourage discovery of what fits in Christian thought and what does not. The impact of what postmodern thought means and does in higher education is discussed as a challenge for all educators. A comparison in a Christian context, of modern and postmodern positions, examines what is good from modernism and what is not, as well as what is good about postmodernism in order to know what to keep and what to discard. As postmodernism opens the way for acceptance of multiple perspectives, Christian educators are challenged to examine their own systems of thought and to know how best to deliver instruction in a Christian context.     

On White Ignorance,White Shame,and Other Pitfalls in Critical Philosophy of Race

This article examines Samantha Vice's essay ‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’ (2010), which sparked a storm of controversy in South Africa, as a starting point for interrogating understandings of whiteness and racism that are dominant in critical philosophy of race. I argue that a significant body of philosophical scholarship on whiteness in general and by white scholars in particular obfuscates the structural dimension of racism. The moralisation of racism that often permeates philosophical scholarship reproduces colourblind logics, which provide individualistic explanations for structural problems, thereby sustaining white dominance. In the process, I show that notions of white guilt, white habits, white ignorance, white invisibility, white privilege, and white shame as they are theorised in much critical philosophy of race share a crucial limitation: they minimise white people's active interest in reproducing the racist status quo. Studies, such as Vice's, that frame racism as a moral dilemma while silencing its institutionalisation and the central cause for its existence and longevity – that is, white people's investment in maintaining economic, political, and symbolic power – further naturalise white supremacy.     

Grief,Death, and Longing in Stoic and Christian Ethics

The Stoic rejection of the passion of grief strikes many ethicists writing on dying as inhuman, selfish, or lacking appreciation for the world. This essay argues that Stoics rejected grief and the fear of death because these passions alienated one from the present through sorrow or anxiety for the future, disrupting one's ability to fulfill obligations of care for others and to feel gratitude for the gift of loved ones. Early Christian writers on death, such as Ambrose, maintained much of the substance of Stoic doctrine but transformed it through their belief in the resurrection and their corresponding revaluation of the future. While these writers rejected grief as an affective response to death, they affirmed longing for lost loved ones. These authors provide an example of how contemporary religious ethicists can use Stoic insights for recovering the tradition of the art of dying.