In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:204 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Blood on a Blackberry Darlene Taylor The road bends. In a place where a girl was snatched, no one says her name. They talk about the bloody slip, not the lost girl. The blacktop road curves there and drops. Can’t see what’s ahead so, I listen. Insects scratch their legs and wind their wings above their (...) backs. The road sounds safe. Every day I walk alone on the schoolhouse road, keeping my eyes on where I’m going, not where I’ve been. Bruises on my shoulder from carrying books and notebooks, pencils and crayons. Pebbles crunch. An engine grinds, brakes screech. I step into a cloud of pink dust and weeds. The sandy taste of road dust dries my tongue. Older boys, mean boys, cursing beer-drunk boys laugh and bluster—“Rusty Girl.” They drive fast. Their laughter fades. Feathers of a bent blue bird impale the road. Sun beats the crushed bird. Cutting through the tall, tall grass, I pick up a stick to warn. Songs and sticks have power over snakes. Bramble snaps. Wild berries squish under my feet. The ripe scent makes my belly grumble. Briar thorns prick my skin, making my fingertips bleed. Plucking handfuls, I eat. Blood on a blackberry ruins its taste. Pencils, crayons, books spill. Backwards I fall. Pages tear. Lessons brown like sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg. Blackberry stain. Thistles and nettles grate my legs and thighs. Coarse laughter, not from inside me. A boy, a laughing boy, a mean boy presses. Berry black stains my dress. A snake hisses. I run. Home. I kneel. Well water pumps, washing away sin. The sun burns through kitchen windows, warming, baking. I roll my purple-tipped fingers into my palms. Darlene Taylor 205 “Sweetchild,”grandmotherwillsay.“Smartgirl.Whatdid you learn today?” On the schoolhouse road.... (shrink)

Self love is an inescapable problem for ethics, yet much of contemporary ethics is reluctant to offer any normative moral anthropologies. Instead, secular ethics and contemporary culture promote a norm of self-realization which is subjective and uncritical. Christian ethics also fails to address this problem directly, because it tends to investigate self love within the context of conflicts between the self's interests and those of her neighbors. Self Love and Christian Ethics argues for right self love as the solution of (...) proper self-relation that intersects with love for God and love for neighbor. Darlene Fozard Weaver explains that right self love entails a true self-understanding that is embodied in the person's concrete acts and relations. In making this argument, she calls upon ethicists to revisit ontological accounts of the self and to devote more attention to particular moral acts. (shrink)

In response to John Bishop's (2007) account of passionally caused believing, Dan-Johan Eklund (2014) argues that conscious non-evidential believing is (conceptually) impossible, that is, it's (conceptually) impossible consciously to believe that p whilst acknowledging that the relevant evidence doesn't support p's being true, for it conflicts with belief being a truth-oriented attitude, or so he argues. In this article, we present Eklund's case against Bishop's account of passionally caused believing, and we argue that it's unpersuasive, at least to those who (...) accept permissivism about evidence, that is, that it's possible for there to be more than one rational response to a given body of evidence. We do this through a novel application of a case of nurtured belief, that is, of a person holding a belief simply because she was caused to do so by her upbringing, and we use it to show exactly where Eklund's argument goes wrong. We conclude by drawing a general lesson drawn from this debate: if permissivism about evidence is true, then belief being truth-oriented is consistent with non-evidential believing being possible. (shrink)

Largely due to the difficulty of observing behavior, empirical business ethics research relies heavily on the scenario methodology. While not disputing the usefulness of the technique, this paper highlights the importance of a careful assessment of the fit between the context of the situation described in the scenario and the knowledge and experience of the respondents. Based on a study of online auctions, we provide evidence that even respondents who have direct knowledge of the situation portrayed in the scenario may (...) develop significantly different assessments of the level of unethical behavior. Further, those assessments may be conditioned in different ways by the same moderating variables. We conclude that care should be exercised when recruiting respondents to choose only those who can be expected to understand the scenario in its true context and that separate analyses should be conducted for groups of respondents who have different perspectives within that context. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred legal and policy attacks against foundational public health authorities. Act for Public Health — a partnership of public health law organizations — has tracked legislative activity since January 2021. This article describes that activity, highlighting 2023 bills primarily related to vaccine requirements and policy innovations undertaken in the wake of the pandemic. Finally, we preview a legal framework for more equitable and effective public health authority.

Contemporary Roman Catholic ethics endeavors to take sin seriously by offering theologies of sin that emphasize it as a force and as a basic, personal orientation. Such efforts rightly counter the Catholic tradition's earlier reduction of sin to sins, and sins to external acts and moral culpability. But perhaps they go too far in this regard. By engaging Charles Curran, this study argues that inattention to sins undermines the theological referent of sin as a discourse that concerns more than moral (...) culpability, obscures God as the source of freedom and value, and neglects the way in which acts express and sustain sin and fashion a personal orientation. Drawing on the work of Jean Porter, the essay shows that attention to sins highlights the historicity, particularity, and provisionality of human acts because of the theological referent and analogical character of sin and sins. (shrink)

In this article, I consider how recent work on the philosophy of group-agency and shared-agency can help us to understand what it is for a church to act in worship. I argue that to assess a model’s suitability for providing such an account, we must consider how well it handles cases of non-paradigm participants, such as those with autism spectrum disorder and young infants. I suggest that whilst a shared-agency model helps to clarify how individuals coordinate actions in cases of (...) reading or singing liturgy, it does not handle non-paradigm cases well and so cannot be considered a suitable model of group liturgical action. Instead, I suggest that a model of groupagency, in which a plurality of action types can contribute to the actions of a group as a whole, is better suited to explaining a church’s actions in worship. (shrink)

People of faith, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, worship corporately at least as often, if not more so, than they do individually. Why do they do this? There are, of course, many reasons, some having to do with personal preference and others having to do with the theology of worship. But, in this paper, we explore one reason, a philosophical reason, which, despite recent work on the philosophy of liturgy, has gone underappreciated. In particular, we argue that corporate worship enables (...) a person to come to know God better than they would otherwise know him in individual worship. (shrink)

The recitation of creeds in corporate worship is widespread in the Christian tradition. Intuitively, the use of creeds captures the belief not only of the individuals reciting it, but of the Church as a whole. This paper seeks to provide a philosophical analysis of the meaning of the words, ‘We believe…’, in the context of the liturgical recitation of the Creed. Drawing from recent work in group ontology, I explore three recent accounts of group belief and consider the potential of (...) applying these to the group belief contained in the Creed. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 4, Page 553-566, July 2022.

We present a new understanding of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist on the model of Stump’s account of God’s omnipresence and Green and Quan’s account of experiencing God in Scripture. On this understanding, Christ is derivatively, rather than fundamentally, located in the consecrated bread and wine, such that Christ is present to the believer through the consecrated bread and wine, thereby making available to the believer a second-person experience of Christ, where the consecrated bread and wine are the way (...) in which she shares attention with him. The consecrated bread and wine are then, in a sense, icons of Christ. (shrink)

Is it permissible to believe that God does not exist if the evidence is inconclusive? In this paper, we give a new argument in support of atheistic belief modelled on William James’s The Will to Believe. According to James, if the evidence for a proposition, p, is ambiguous, and believing that p is a genuine option, then it can be permissible to let your passions decide. Typically, James’s argument has been used as a defence of passionally caused theistic belief. However, (...) in the existing literature, little attention has been given to topic of passionally caused atheistic belief. Here, we give much needed attention to the issue of how areligious passions can justify atheistic belief. Following James, we argue that if atheism is a genuine option for an agent, it is permissible to believe that God does not exist based on her hopes, desires, wishes, or whatever passions incline her to disbelieve. After defending the coherence of passionally caused atheism, we go on to suggest why this position is a tenable one for the atheist to adopt. (shrink)

Despite the increase in the acceptance of responsible investing in general, the global community is still witnessing unprecedented levels of practices that can only be categorized as “unsustainable”. It appears, then, that either the inroads made by the RI community have not kept up with the increase in unsustainable practices, or, that the RI process itself has been ineffective at producing meaningful change. The current study aims to investigate the practices used by pension plan sponsors to determine how they may (...) enable, or interfere with, the adoption of implementation of RI. We adopt Framing Theory, specifically the idea that particular frames find alignment when they resonate with their targets, by either bridging, extending, amplifying or transforming a domain. We extend research to include understudied practices by performing an analysis of 60 public pension funds in Canada. We find evidence of disconnect between the financial frame which dominates practices for compliance and evaluation, and the social frame of RI as a source of change. If the aim of RI is to produce long-term change, then a consideration of whether it aligns with extant practices is critical. We discover a variety of frame alignment tactics already employed in practice. We also find that, even within the dominant financial frame, opportunities for frame extension, amplification and transformation do exist, and examine how these are more possible depending on how the asset management structure is designed. (shrink)

Through the lens of her meandering faith journey, this essay reviews the work of the celebrated Canadian writer Gabrielle Roy. A metaphor Roy used in an interview, that of life as a prison and the artist as a bird singing between the bars, provides a common theme in the shifting religious attitudes of her writings. At times her attitude grows bitterly satirical, with a “broad steak of anti-clericalism” (The Cashier). But Roy’s spirituality shows through in how she was affected by (...) her two sisters’ illnesses and deaths. If a prison, life was still able to grant “sacramental moments” pointing to a “radiant world beyond this one.”. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to show that analytic philosophy can contribute to the theological discussion of ecclesiology. By considering recent analytic work on social ontology, I outline how we might think of the Church as one entity, constituted by many disparate parts. The paper begins with an overview of the theological constraints for the paper, and then proceeds to examine recent work on the philosophy of social ontology and group agency. Drawing on this literature, I outline three models of (...) social ontology from the history of philosophy and suggest reasons why all of them fail to provide an account of the Church’s agency. Finally, I develop an alternative model which, I suggest, better fits the conditions stipulated. (shrink)

How can participating in a liturgy allow us to know God? Recent pathbreaking work on the epistemology of liturgy has argued that liturgy allows individuals to gain ritual knowledge of God by coming to know-how to engage God. However, since liturgy (as it is ordinarily practiced) is a group act, I argue that we need to give an account to explain how a group can know God by engaging with liturgy. If group know-how is reducible to instances of individual know-how, (...) then the existing accounts are sufficient for explaining a group’s knowing-how to engage God. However, I argue, there are good reasons to suppose that reductive accounts of group know-how fail. In this paper, I propose a non-reductive account of common ritual knowledge, according to which the group knows-how to engage God in liturgy. (shrink)

Is it possible to worship a non-personal God? According to some, the answer is no: worship necessarily involves addressing the object of one’s worship. Since non-personal gods cannot acknowledge or respond to address, it must be conceptually inappropriate to worship such gods. I object to this argument on two fronts. First, I show that the concept of worship used is too narrow, excluding many cases that obviously count as instances of worship. And, secondly, drawing on recent work on the philosophy (...) of object knowledge, I argue that addressing non-personal gods might not be as conceptually confused as it first appears. Thus, it at least possible to worship a non-personal God. (shrink)

'Political Bodies/Body Politic' draws on feminism, gender studies, and queer theory to examine how myth, symbol and ritual express belief systems. The book explores the operation of gender in a variety of social and historical contexts, ranging from feminist speculative fiction and systems of belief to popular culture and ancient historical texts. 'Political Bodies/Body Politic' makes an original contribution to religious and feminist studies in its examination of gender in human communication and belief systems.

Søren Kierkegaard’s claim that having faith requires being contemporary with Christ is one of the most important, yet difficult to interpret claims across his entire authorship. How can one be contemporary with a figure who existed more than two millennia ago? A prominent answer to this question is that contemporaneity with Christ is achieved through a kind of imaginative co-presence made possible by reading Scripture. However, I argue, this ignores what Kierkegaard thinks about Christ as a living agent, and not (...) a merely historical agent. By drawing on Kierkegaard’s discussion of Christ’s true presence in the sacrament of Communion, I argue that contemporaneity with Christ should be understood in the same way as any other intersubjective relation. That is, I argue, that just as relating to any living person as contemporary requires a kind of two-way attention-sharing, relating to Christ as contemporary, on Kierkegaard’s account, requires a kind of two-way attention-sharing with Christ. (shrink)

Jennifer Herdt's Putting On Virtue argues for the theological and normative superiority of noncompetitive accounts of divine and human agency. Although such accounts affirm the indispensability and sovereignty of divine grace they also acknowledge human agents as active participants in their own moral change. Indeed, Herdt contends we cannot coherently describe the human telos as entailing a transformation of character without affirming that human agents meaningfully contribute to that change. Nevertheless, a recurrent worry in Putting On Virtue is that persons (...) may view their growth in virtue as a personal achievement and that the pleasure of positive self-regard will displace disinterested—and hence truly virtuous—moral aspiration. This discussion of Herdt's volume sympathetically canvasses her argument. It then looks briefly at the reflexive structure of human agency to consider the relationship between the human telos and the transformation of character, and to encourage a more generous attitude toward positive self-regard. (shrink)

Persons and actions in Christian ethics -- Disruption of proper relation with God and others : sin and sins -- Intimacy with God and self-relation -- Fidelity to God and moral acting -- Truthfulness before God and naming moral actions -- Reconciliation in God and Christian life.

In philosophy and in religious ethics, accounts of mercy are typically developed in relation to justice. The essays in this focus issue each insist on an integral connection between mercy and justice, yet each reconfigures that relationship by arguing that mercy is best understood as a normative response to others in their need. Defining mercy as our response to others’ need highlights the value of mercy as an effective public virtue, grounded in realism about the human condition and focused on (...) reparative and restorative action. (shrink)

Apologies are morally significant with regard to their form, function, and freight. Nevertheless, little work in Christian ethics considers apologies. Philosophical and social scientific literature on apologies focuses on the conditions for making valid apologies and the efficacy of apologies in moral repair but ignores the import of apologies for the offender. This literature is ill equipped to specify the relation between persons and their moral failures, minimizes the difficulty of understanding our own moral failure, does not adequately treat the (...) relationship between explanation and apology, and neglects the way that apology making may comprise a process of moral repair for the offender. Relevant resources in Christian moral tradition can inform and enrich ethical consideration of apologies. (shrink)

The Christian life, concerned with both spirituality and doctrine, aims not at rationally defensible truth but at life-transforming love. Greater understanding of the truth will not settle the restlessness in a human spirit; only the redemptive power of relationship with God can calm the soul. The crux of Kierkegaard's presentation of Christianity is not that doctrine is unimportant, but that it is ultimately insufficient for a life lived in relationship with God. In Contemporary with Christ, Joshua Cockayne explores the (...) Christian spiritual life with Søren Kierkegaard as his guide and analytic theology as his key tool of engagement. Cockayne contends that the Christian life is second-personal: it seeks encounter with a personal God. As Kierkegaard describes, God invites us to live on the most intimate terms with God. Cockayne argues that this vision of Christian spirituality is deeply practical because it advocates for a certain way of acting and existing. This approach to the Christian life moves from first-reflection, whereby one acquires objective knowledge, to second-reflection, whereby one attains deeper self-understanding, which fortifies one's relationship with God. Individuals encounter Christ through traditional practices: prayer, the Eucharist, and the reading of Scripture. However, experiences of suffering and mortality that mirror Christ's own passion also enliven this life of encounter. Spiritual progress comes through a reorientation of one's will, desire, and self-knowledge. Such progress must ultimately serve the goal of drawing close to God through Christ's presence. Engaging philosophy, theology, and psychology, Cockayne invites us to join in a conversation with Kierkegaard and explore how the spiritual disciplines provide opportunities for relationship with God by becoming contemporary with Christ. --C. Stephen Evans, University Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Baylor University. (shrink)

In this article, we give much needed attention to the nature and value of corporate prayer by drawing together insights from theology, philosophy, and psychology. First, we explain what it is that distinguishes corporate from private prayer by drawing on the psychological literature on joint attention and the philosophical notion of shared situations. We suggest that what is central to corporate prayer is a “sense of sharedness,” which can be established through a variety of means—through bodily interactions or through certain (...) environments. Second, we argue that corporate prayer, when understood as a kind of shared situation, enables common knowledge, as well as a kind of alignment between participants. Through this process, participants’ attention is focused on the same target and affiliation between participants increases. Thus, we suggest, one benefit of understanding corporate prayer as a shared situation is that it establishes and deepens a sense of community in such a way that common purposes and goals can be enacted more effectively. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the relationship between the production and the value of Big Data. In particular I examine the concept of social media ‘prosumption’—which has predominantly been theorized from a Marxist, political economic perspective—to consider what other forms of value Big Data have, imbricated with their often speculative economic value. I take the example of social media firms in their early stages of operation to suggest that, since these firms do not necessarily generate revenue, data collected through user (...) contributions do not always realize economic value, at least in a Marxist sense, and that, in addition to their speculative value, these data have value beyond an economic valence. Instead I argue that in addition to their function as systems for accumulation, social media and their associated data have an affective value, related closely to their economic value, and demonstrate the efficacy of social media as systems designed for the appropriation and circulation of user attention. (shrink)

Reviewing works by James Alison, Alistair McFadyen, Andrew Sung Park, Ted Peters, and Solomon Schimmel, the author suggests that the status and (dys)function of the discourse/doctrine of sin highlight tensions between theology and ethics in ways that suggest the character, limits, and promise of religious ethics. This literature commends attention to sin‐talk because it helps religious ethicists to render more adequately the dynamics of human agency, sociality, and culture and because it raises questions about the nature and task of theology, (...) faith, and morality. Yet these volumes also indicate that religious ethics should pay more attention to particular sins. (shrink)

In this article, I summarize recent work on the philosophy of liturgy. In part 2 of this article, I consider how liturgy can provide a way of knowing God personally. I outline accounts of acquiring phenomenal knowledge, practical knowledge, and propositional knowledge by participating in liturgy.