The Ethics of Stats

This essay argues for the importance and interest, within and beyond theological ethics, of the ethical questions faced by professionals who are called on to be producers of statistics (herein “stats”) for management purposes. Truth‐telling, in the context of demands for stats, cannot be evaluated at the level of the individual statement or utterance, nor through an ethical framework primarily focused on the correspondence between thought and speech. Reflection on stats production forces us to treat truth‐telling as contextual and political, and to engage with the idea that the capacity to tell the truth is learned or acquired in communities, societies and institutions. I develop this engagement through a rereading of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on “telling the truth” and Michel Foucault on parrhēsia, identifying and exploring the relationship between the responsible use of stats and the “cynical” protest against them.     

Response To Jason Springs

Jason Springs’s Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society is a masterful attempt to practice productive conflict and democratic dialogue in the face of static antagonisms and deep-seated divisions. In my response, I underscore Springs’s insistence on mediating between the moral imagination of Richard Rorty and the prophetic critique of Cornel West. For the author of Healthy Conflict, any hope in the survival of democracy relies on balancing critique of domination with constructive proposals for a more just and equitable world. On the one hand, Springs rejects any strong distinction between moral imagination and socio-political critique; in fact, he argues for their intertwinement, especially in the work of West. At the same time, there are moments when he suggests an opposition between expanding the moral imagination and engaging in the critical enterprise, especially as he identifies the limits in Foucault regarding normativity and democratic struggle. I respond to this slippage by arguing that Foucault, and critical theory more broadly, open up possibilities for rethinking ethics, politics, and our relationship to the violence that sustains the order of things.     

Wrestling with the Heterotopia: Jordan Burroughs and His Post-Match Interview at the 2016 Olympics

ABSTRACT

This essay applies Michel Foucault’s conception of the heterotopia to the context of the sport of wrestling. In particular, it examines the social and spatial structures of the sport, exploring homophobia and masculinity in a wrestling context as well as analyzing the physical and theoretical space of the wrestling mat. This groundwork is used to inform a reading of an interview given by American wrestler Jordan Burroughs after being eliminated from the 2016 Olympics. After examining this interview as occurring somewhere on the fringes of the heterotopia, between the space of the athlete and that of the spectator, this essay attempts to link a Foucauldian understanding of the athletic arena to a framework of athletic defeat as a self-transformative endeavor.