As I have listened to incarcerated women over many years, I have learned about the ways they work to construct moral and meaningful lives against all odds. Trying to find forms of Christian ethical reflection to engage their (and my) experiences has helped me to explore ways of “doing” Christian ethics that attend carefully to “ordinary” life. I describe how women inside understand ethics as judgment and contrast this form of ethics to the moral work they do in relation to (...) themselves and each other. I conclude by suggesting some guideposts for a Christian ordinary ethics that attends critically to the particular practices of building meaningful lives in context, especially those locations requiring persons to “make a way out of no way.”. (shrink)

“Settled casuistry” refers to cases, such as an ectopic pregnancy, whose relevant moral principles and accompanying applications are established as morally legitimate. After the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization US Supreme Court ruling, fearful medical professionals in states with new, far-stricter abortion restrictions are no longer engaged in “best-practices” maternal medical care in problematic pregnancies. Legal exceptions, if they exist, are often poorly formulated, denied, or delayed. Often the accompanying political rhetoric is simply cast in a binary of (...) “pro-life” vs. “pro-death.” This essay considers several of these illustrative cases, which settled casuistry would have allowed for termination. A reconsideration of some of these poorly formulated legislative efforts by looking specifically at their underlying implicit theological, philosophical, and political assumptions, and with the insights of this settled casuistry, may help to refocus, refine, and/or in some cases reject these political legislative efforts by bringing them into greater concord with the common good. (shrink)

In justifying Russian aggression against Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin asserts that Ukraine is neither a distinct nation nor a viable state. In response, this essay will establish a Christian account of Ukraine’s right to self-defense not only via just war criteria but also in relation to its purpose theologically as a nation-state. This essay, after reviewing Christian ethical positions that either reject or embrace the nation-state, draws on the Niebuhr brothers and Karl Barth to develop key theological criteria for judging (...) whether particular nation-states are true to their divine purpose. While affirming the role of the nation-state in protecting a people’s distinct identity, Christians will call on the nation-state to direct its people outward, toward their shared humanity with the world’s other nations. The essay concludes that the Ukrainian nation-state is fulfilling these criteria, whereas the Russian nation-state is not. (shrink)

This essay returns to the famous sociological “typology” of Christian ethics in Ernst Troeltsch’s classic Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1912), in which “church,” “sect,” and “mystic” “types” are contrasted. It enquires whether the question of the significance of Christology for ethics is best not answered unilaterally, but more illuminatingly through this “typological” approach. Taking the near-contemporaries William Temple, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Howard Thurman as exemplars of celebrated Christologians who were also ethicists, it draws systematic comparisons between them on (...) the basis of their “type,” but also underscores that the particular efficacy of their witness relates intrinsically to the way that their distinctive “types” correlated with, and responded to, the challenging political circumstances which they confronted. (shrink)

One unique challenge in teaching Christian health care ethics involves helping students to appreciate the delicate context of clinical decision-making scenarios. Another challenge involves helping students to empathize with the perspectives and appreciate the expertise of various parties. Finally, students need clear examples of the dangers of reductive medical paradigms. Toward these goals, mock clinical ethics consultations can help students to value respectful ethical discourse and to build necessary virtues for effectively engaging in such dialogue, such as humility, gentleness, and (...) prudence. The goal of mock clinical ethics consultations is to achieve deeper understanding of the moral dimensions of an assigned scenario and the human relationships at stake. This practice can serve as a model for other classroom activities in broad fields of Christian ethics that invite students to cultivate virtues for charitable dialogue, to apply ethical analysis to concrete scenarios, and to consider the relationship of class content to personal vocation. (shrink)

What is the work that we do teaching and learning Christian ethics? This essay addresses the form and content of an answer to that question, suggesting that the content of our discipline implicitly and explicitly resists the form of the managed university within which it is often taught.

Ernst Troeltsch’s influential typology of church, sect, and mystical remains a useful way of classifying forms of Christian social ethics today. However, his assumptions about what it means for Christian social ethics to influence society make it difficult for his typology to recognize or explain many of the achievements of Christian social ethics since his death, including those of William Temple, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Howard Thurman. Nevertheless, Sarah Coakley demonstrates the profitability of the typology for tracking the relationships between Christology, (...) ethics, and social contexts. I close by considering how Temple, Bonhoeffer, and Thurman fare in holding these three aspects together. (shrink)

A recent Massachusetts bill seeks to incentivize living organ donation among the state’s incarcerated population by offering volunteers reduced sentences. While the incentive has been removed from the bill, the bill remains controversial. This essay argues that insofar as carceral conditions unduly motivate incarcerated people to participate, living organ donation in prison remains a morally hazardous initiative. The essay suggests that the pervasiveness of medical neglect in Massachusetts prisons not only makes organ donation unsafe but it also implicitly renders the (...) lives of those outside of prison more valuable than those inside. This falls short of Catholic teaching on human dignity. Drawing from the history of medical experimentation in US prisons, the essay posits how the state might unduly influence incarcerated people to become living donors by preying on their moral sentiments. In such instances, the self-gift of organ donation can be understood as a kind of exploited or coerced kenosis. (shrink)

Anthropology’s “ethical turn” opens space for dialogue with Christian ethicists engaged in the “ethnographic turn” using a common virtue-inflected language and set of concerns. While moral theologian Michael Banner has called for such a dialogue, there has been a lack of cross-pollination between Banner’s account and the broader ethnographic turn, which has turned to the practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu as its main social scientific interlocuter. In this essay, I argue that the limits of practice theory call for a diversification (...) of social scientific conversation partners in the ethnographic turn. I demonstrate how the anthropology of ethics offers one auspicious way forward in its ability to account for moral agency in everyday life. (shrink)

Most nonviolent resistance is a species of collective political action and therefore a form of collective power. In many cases, the use of power in nonviolent action is best characterized as a kind of intelligently used coercion. How then should ethicists think about the norms that govern the use of coercion in nonviolent actions? This essay critically examines the answers provided by the early Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey. Both analyzed nonviolent resistance in similar ways: they distinguished nonviolent action from (...) pacifism, noticed its coercive element demands justification, and sought to develop ethical norms to understand these forms of political action. Taken together, this essay suggests that Niebuhr and Ramsey can be interpreted as members of a non-pacifist tradition of theorizing nonviolence that suggests an unlikely convergence between theorists of nonviolent action and theorists sympathetic to just war thought. (shrink)

This essay critically examines the concept of the Anthropocene, a term referring to a proposed new geological epoch—the age of the human. I begin by foregrounding how the project of Western extractive colonialism has exercised significant influence in structuring the political ecology of the planet within this new era. Considering this influence, I maintain that the era is better understood as the age of “Man”—the fictive idealized human form that stands at the ideological heart of the (neo)colonial project. In order (...) to locate the figure of Man within the Christian imagination, I construct an analogy between the figures of Man and Cain, so that, through this analogy, the Anthropocene can be identified as the age of Cain. The essay concludes by considering the implications of this interpretation of the Anthropocene for contemporary Christian faith. (shrink)

This essay draws upon Dante and St. Catherine of Siena to flesh out the Foucauldian concept of counter-conduct. Dante and Catherine occupy an important place in early modern history, challenging the designs of medieval pastoral power by embodying a new, secular mixture of the active and the contemplative life. This essay, with Foucault as a guide, suggests that they offer us another way to be modern, a path of self-cultivation surpassing modern norms for nature, the self, and the project of (...) rational knowledge. (shrink)

How we envision God’s forgiveness shapes our thinking about human forgiveness as well. Whereas some contemporary Christians such as Miroslav Volf struggle to square victims’ demands with a God who forgives and keeps no record of wrongs, many early Christians expected God to fastidiously punish or reward every deed. In contrast to both extremes, I revisit recent philosophical work on purgatory, which emphasizes sanctification over satisfaction. This approach reveals how God’s forgiveness is consonant with restorative justice. By considering an alternate (...) vision of God’s justice, we can thereby reimagine how our forgiveness too is compatible with—and in fact necessitates—the work of moral repair. (shrink)

The 2023 theme for the Society of Christian Ethics invites us to consider what fuels our collective imagination in the United States today, its impact, and implications for the future of the field of ethics. American exceptionalism, racial anxieties and fear help feed influential myths that prevent the nation from “making real the promises of democracy,” much less approaching the Beloved Community (King). Whereas ethics often focuses upon critique, its scholars and practitioners are also invited to undertake the work of (...) repair, which entails attention to affect, art, and activism—particularly given the malformation of moral imagination. Such shifts have implications for pedagogy and the framing and terrain of the field of Christian ethics, as well. (shrink)

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s theology and rights-based activism remain highly relevant in a constitutional democracy. However, King’s use of human dignity in his early sermons as an extension of political rights faces serious challenges from Black leftist political writers and the Black Lives Matter movement. At issue is the extent to which human dignity should be examined as a distinct political, aesthetic, and moral category that must be explored and embraced more explicitly and wholeheartedly in Black politics and political (...) theory. Bracketing human dignity inside the category of political rights, which King often did in his early writings, undermines the comprehensive nature of antiblack racism and limits the scope and range of questions and resources we might employ to address the social ontology of Blackness. A sustained attention to human dignity provides an opportunity for new scholarly direction in the study of Black politics and political thought by expanding the boundaries of the political and creating space for morality and Black religion in the political (leftist) imaginary. (shrink)

Through bringing Christian ethics into conversation with original fieldwork and archival research on environmental justice activists, this essay develops an ecopolitical theology and practice of environmental justice as the work of transforming “sacrifice zones” into “sacred zones.” Sacrifice zones are places of concentrated environmental injustice, where harmful toxins and ecological degradation are channeled to secure the social and ecological flourishing of other places. During the movement against the environmentally destructive practice of mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia, leading activist (...) Robyn Kincaid borrowed from Martin Luther King Jr. and green economy visionary Van Jones to envision Appalachia’s transformation from a sacrifice zone into a sacred zone. This essay argues that Kincaid’s constructive conceptualization of sacrifice—“to make sacred”—holds promise for a Christian ethics and politics of environmental justice; develops its implicit theology; demonstrates its relevance beyond Appalachia; and contrasts it with climate politics as usual. (shrink)

Though 2023 marks the sixtieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, my reflections on the theme of the 2023 annual meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics, “Vision, Imagination, and Dreams in the Work of Ethics,” are inspired by King’s lesser known “Beyond Vietnam” speech. I connect my hopes for the future of Christian ethics to King’s still unrealized vision of social transformation. It is one where the US (and other empires) would affirm—not (...) subvert—each people’s right to self-determination and we scholar-activists would continue to search for connections between and among social issues even if others insist upon their discreteness. (shrink)

The physical, psychological, and spiritual violence against fat bodies in the US, committed in service of a racist, sexist, classist, and ableist vision of an idealized body size, is death-dealing. This essay develops a theo-ethical vision of fat liberation that rejects the trappings of the “religion of thinness” and celebrates the inherent worth of fat bodies through an incarnational theology that recognizes the image of God in every body size, the presence of body size diversity in creation, and the full (...) inclusion of all body sizes at the eucharistic table. (shrink)

This essay introduces a concept I call “burdened agency.” Burdened agency names a two-fold phenomenon in end-of-life ethics (with relevance beyond). First, the availability of control over the dying process may become an imperative to make choices about when and how death will occur. This is the burden of agency. Second, moral agency is increasingly burdened by “reflexivity.” No longer guided by norms that are taken-for-granted, individuals are, more or less, left to self-consciously negotiate the experience of dying on their (...) own. Increasingly we labor under the existential “weight” of ambiguity, instability, and uncertainty that accompanies highly reflexive moral action. (shrink)

Do American Christians have hope in community, within their congregations and in the wider society, and should they? Putting my fieldwork in five church communities in dialogue with Thomas Aquinas’s account of hope and with insights from congregational studies, I answer yes to both questions. Christian hope is best understood and lived not simply as a theological virtue but as a social virtue. In this understanding, connections forged with others, both inside and outside a church, can develop a community’s realistic, (...) forward-looking trust in social relationships and in the fate of society. I suggest four guidelines for church practices to build up social hope and make it more effectual. (shrink)

One cause of gentrification and displacement of multigenerational communities of color has been the increase of private equity firms buying affordable homes, upgrading them, raising rents, and evicting tenants. This essay focuses on housing financialization and the increasing shift from the use value of housing as a place to live to the exchange value of housing as a commodity and investment for corporate profit. After identifying the problem of gentrification and housing speculation in Oakland, California, the essay draws on ecowomanist/mujerista/feminist (...) sources to offer a theological foundation in support of housing as a social good for the freedom of households and communities to flourish. It also argues that religious organizations have a moral commitment and role to play in offering an alternative vision of community and in organizing for housing and racial justice. (shrink)

Christian ethics stands to benefit from its critics. I argue that James Baldwin should be placed among Ludwig Feuerbach, David Hume, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche as a salutary preface to Christian ethics, especially in his reflections on race and sexuality. Together these figures underscore some characteristic damages of some Christian beliefs. I show Baldwin’s astute treatment of Christianity in four distinctive voices and suggest the recovery of genres, the appreciation for recent achievements and unfinished tasks in the field, the (...) vigilance about ambivalent ethical implications inherent in Christian doctrine (such as eudaimonism and providentialism), and the unsentimental affective preparation as pedagogical gains of including Baldwin in Christian ethics syllabi. (shrink)