“What do gay Asian men want?”: Desiring otherwise in the work of Richard Fung

A vast literature on queer of color critique, and increasingly on queer of color geographies, has shed greater light on how queer people of color negotiate racialized sexual economies. This paper considers how cultural geography, informed by psychoanalysis and queer of color critique, might contribute additional sophistication and critical insight to conversations about sexual racism – by not only decrying sexual racism, but by shedding light on racialized people's complex forms of psychical agency, as well as political agency, in relation to it. It turns to the work of gay Trinidadian-Canadian artist and scholar Richard Fung, whose films and essays both proffer underrepresented images of racialized queer sexual subjectivities and grapple with the ways in which queer people of color can themselves become enlisted in racial-sexual hierarchies. Providing geographical and historical context for Toronto's stratified racial and sexual politics as they play out in ordinary life, I point to moments in which Fung's films both decry such inequality and meditate on alternatives that detour from dramas of mis/recognition by whiteness.     

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.     

Fitting Ethics to the Land: H. Richard Niebuhr's Ethic of Responsibility and Ecotheology

Much of ecotheology and environmental philosophy has moved deductively from theological and ethical constructs to questions of how we should relate to the natural world. Such approaches are limited in their ability to guide us toward appropriate environmental action for they do not necessarily fit the way the natural world actually functions. Niebuhr's ethic of response, on the other hand, begins with the concrete situation and is inherently ecological for it focuses on interrelationships in an on-going community. It is inductive in character and open to being informed by new findings in the natural and social sciences; thus it is exceptionally well suited to environmental problems, which involve complex scientific, social, and economic questions.     

Putting Religion Back Into Religious Ethics

This essay on Richard Miller’s Friends and Other Strangers (2016) locates its arguments in the context of how the practice of religious ethics bears upon debates about normativity in the study of religion and the cultural turn in the humanities. After reviewing its main claims about identity and otherness, I focus on three areas. First, while commending Miller’s effort to analogize virtuous empathy with Augustine’s ethics of rightly ordered love, I raise questions about his use of Augustine and his distinctive formulation of Augustinian “iconic realism.” Second, I suggest his discussion of public reason is at odds with the dialogical spirit of the book and may distract from the democratic solidarity required by our political moment. Third, more briefly, I highlight the practical implications of Miller’s vision for higher education at both the graduate and undergraduate level.     

The Cultural Turn: Empirical Studies and their Implications

This essay uses empirical studies to engage Richard Miller’s advocacy of a “cultural turn” in the study of religious ethics found in Friends and Other Strangers. The particular kind of empirical research I highlight here, cultural cognition, emphasizes the ways that belonging to a cultural group influences one’s reasoning when faced with controversial issues involving disputed facts. This approach underscores the significance of the cultural turn, but it also raises some important challenges for Miller’s accounts of moral psychology and public reason. I work to elucidate what those challenges are and point to some ways that taking cultural cognition seriously might open up fresh avenues for addressing perennial ethical issues.     

The home observation for measurement of the environment (HOME) scale: A review of research

Caldwell's Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) scale is perhaps the most widely used instrument to assess the quality of a young child's home learning environment. In this paper, the HOME'S psychometric properties and methodological uses are explored, and its utility as a research and clinical instrument is examined. Strengths of the HOME scale include the relatively wide range of information available pertaining to its psychometric properties and its use in studies of a variety of populations for a variety of purposes. Weaknesses include the fact that most research relating HOME scores to later child development is correlational. Several suggestions for future research are offered.     

HISTORICISM IN PRAGMATISM: LESSONS IN HISTORIOGRAPHY AND PHILOSOPHY

Abstract: Pragmatism involves simultaneous commitments to modes of inquiry that are philosophical and historical. This article begins by demonstrating this point as it is evidenced in the historicist pragmatisms of William James and John Dewey. Having shown that pragmatism focuses philosophical attention on concrete historical processes, the article turns to a discussion of the specific historiographical commitments consistent with this focus. This focus here is on a pragmatist version of historical inquiry in terms of the central historiographical categories of the object of historical inquiry and mode of historical periodization. After describing the basic historiographical consequences of pragmatism's historicism, the article moves to a discussion of the philosophical results of this historicism. The focus here is on the role that historical inquiry can play in the general philosophical perspective of pragmatism as well as on some recent texts that exemplify the dual pragmatist commitment to philosophy and history.     

Where Have All the Proportionalists Gone?

Interest in proportionalism as an important trend in Catholic moral theology seems to have faded in the recent decade. This has led some to view it as a movement that was somehow defeated. I suggest that proportionalism's influence can still be seen in contemporary Catholic ethics, most noticeably in the current interest in virtue ethics, casuistry, and feminist ethics. I argue that proportionalism encouraged a reappraisal of the methodology for evaluating moral action in a direction that was more hospitable to concerns about the particularity and context of the agent.