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.     

Forget assimilation: introducing subjectivity to German–Jewish history

Between the Enlightenment and the Holocaust, a wide range of German-speaking Jewish subjects shared certain assumptions about a problematic associated with being Jewish and living in a non-Jewish German society (and the concomitant process of relative “assimilation”). The categories of identity and culture that undergirded this problematic became part of a shared lexicon of a German-Jewish “identity crisis”—a lexicon that was handed down to the historiography of German Jews that would develop after the community’s destruction. The author of this contribution challenges the validity of some of these categorical assumptions by setting them against the varied background of German-Jewish experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, offering a model of subjectivity (rather than identity) that might allow the historiography to break out of the cyclical repetition in which it currently finds itself. By examining specific exemplars, including Gershom Scholem, Edith Stein, Martin Buber, and others, the author models a reading strategy that would be appropriate for German-Jewish subjectivity.     

“Doing the Right and the Good”: Thinking Against Mass Incarceration

In 1952, Rabbi Eliezer Yehudah Waldenberg (a member of the Supreme Rabbinical Court of Israel) and Rabbi Ben Zion Meir Chai Uziel (the Rishon LeTziyon and Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel) addressed the question of incarceration in a Jewish state according to the halakhic tradition. A generation later, Rabbi Chaim David Halevi the Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv-Yaffo) also addressed this question. Their approaches shed light on the way we should be thinking about incarceration in general, and the overwhelming problem of the current moment in the United States: mass incarceration.     

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.