Traditionally there has been a great divide between those practitioners of comparative religion who work on discrete and identifiably religious traditions (such as Confucianism, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, etc.) and those who work on identifying aspects of ‘religious’ life that often go unnoticed because they are less traditional and therefore less recognizable as religion. There has also long been a predisposition not to view Greek materials as religious, and thus to secularize one form of thriving polytheism about which we know (...) a great deal. Combining those two methodological insights in a study of contemporary North American religious life, Gary Laderman offers a fresh look at what I will call the ‘practical polytheism’ of modern US society, one that examines cultural arenas as diverse as sport, music, celebrity, sexuality and death in a riveting analysis of current spiritual trends in a more multicultural North America. (shrink)

What kind of persons could engage in political torture? Not only the morally impaired who lack empathy or compassion, or even the merely obedient, but also the righteous who struggle with conscience, and the realists who set morality aside.

Based on extensive archival work, this essay assesses the contribution of a Palestinian liberation theology to a comprehensive view of peacebuilding that involves not only liberation from oppressive occupation but also a holistic vision and strategy for attaining just societal structures. Emerging out of the victim's viewpoint, a PLT is consistent with a multiperspectival approach to justice. It articulates a call for a holistic transformation of the interrelations between Jews and Palestinians, envisioning a just peace that must entail a re-framing (...) of geopolitical structures as well as ideological discourses that vindicate systemic and symbolic violence against the Palestinians. However, the author shows that a PLT is asymmetrical: while it challenges the theopolitical affinities between Christian and Jewish Zionists and the structural injustices and social mechanisms they endorse, it refrains from contesting the symbolic boundaries of a Palestinian national identity. This bears important implications for the broader debate concerning the role of religion in peacebuilding. The author argues that the limits of a PLT as a peacebuilding framework relate to its conceptual reliance on an unreconstructed secularist interpretation of a future Palestinian state and on its elective affinity with a supersessionist and theological orientation that, by definition, hermeneutically de-Zionizes the Bible and its interpretations. (shrink)

Despite constituting one of the most pressing ethical issues of our time, most white Christian ethicists and theologians fail to engage the issue of white supremacy in their work. As one of the most influential and prolific Christian ethicists of the past half‐century, Stanley Hauerwas represents this tendency, and provides specific reasons for his silence. This essay analyzes those reasons, and argues that a commitment to Alasdair MacIntyre’s understandings of tradition and narrative frames his view on race and prevents his (...) engagement of racism. It then highlights the ways this reflects the broader trends of silence, abstraction, and colorblindness among white Christian ethicists when it comes to the issue. Identifying these failures, the essay concludes by suggesting that Hauerwas’s first published essay in 1969, on Black Power, provides resources for theologically engaging the problems of white supremacy today. (shrink)

This paper contends that Ananda Abeysekara’s notion of un-inheritance, developed via a Derridean analysis of contemporary Sri Lankan politics and society, can act as a helpful supplement to the concept of justice. What one finds in Abeysekara’s analysis is an interpretation of justice as ultimately aporetic: justice both opens up to the possibility of its ever greater concrete realization and continually defers its completion. This paper begins by examining the aporetic character of justice as articulated by Derrida. It then proceeds (...) to Abeysekara’s account, situated as it is within a largely political consideration of Sri Lanka’s multicultural heritage and the recent conflicts that have arisen there. Abeysekara offers the notion of un-heritance as a way of thinking the possibility of justice precisely when political—and also religious—traditions come to an impasse, thus recognizing the inescapably aporetic structure of justice itself. (shrink)

In this paper I examine criticism of Hauerwas's critique of American democracy and liberalism, and of American violence and war, as sectarian and politically irrelevant. This twin account has the merit of engaging his critics from left and right. I show that his critique of American Christians, and their support of America's ways of promoting justice and freedom at home and in the world, has analogies with Foucault's genealogical project in France, and represents a more powerful critique of American imperialism (...) and militarism, and of a compliant church, than efforts to sustain the purchase of rights talk or liberal justice in contemporary theological ethics. (shrink)

In recent years liberals have had much to say about the kinds of reasons that citizens should offer one another when they engage in public political debates about existing or proposed laws. One of the more notable claims that has been made by a number of prominent liberals is that citizens should not rely on religious reasons alone when persuading one another to support or oppose a given law or policy. Unsurprisingly, this claim is rejected by many religious citizens, including (...) those who are also committed to liberalism. In this paper I revisit that debate and ask whether liberal citizens have a moral obligation not to explain their support for existing or proposed laws on the basis of religious reasons alone. I suggest that for most (ordinary) citizens no such obligation exists and that individuals are entitled to explain their support for a specific law and to persuade others of the merits of that law on the basis of religious reasons alone (though there may be sound prudential reasons for not doing so). My argument is grounded in the claim that in most instances advocating laws on the basis of religious reasons alone is consistent with treating citizens with equal respect. However, I acknowledge an exception to that claim is to be found when using religious reasons to justify a law also implies that the state endorses those reasons. For this reason I argue that there is a moral obligation for some (publicly influential) citizens, and especially those who hold public office, to refrain from explaining their support for existing or proposed laws on the basis of religious reasons. I conclude by suggesting that this understanding of the role of religion in public political discourse and the obligations of liberal citizens is a better reflection of our experience of liberal citizenship than that given in some well-known accounts of liberalism. (shrink)

In recent decades, cognitive and behavioral scientists have learned a great deal about how people think and behave. On the most general level, there is a basic consensus that many judgments, including ethical judgments, are made by intuitive, even unconscious, impulses. This basic insight has opened the door to a wide variety of more particular studies that investigate how judgments are influenced by group identity, self-conception, emotions, perceptions of risk, and many other factors. When these forms of research engage ethical (...) issues, they are sometimes called empirical ethics. This essay argues that the field of religious ethics would benefit from a more robust engagement with empirical ethics than it has thus far undertaken. In doing so, it offers a brief account of how issues of moral psychology and moral anthropology have been treated in religious ethics, and it highlights ways that the scientific findings challenge some prevailing norms in religious ethics. It ends by suggesting avenues by which religious ethics research could productively engage empirical ethics. (shrink)

This essay addresses the questions, “what good is religious ethics for?” and “what justification exists for the field?” in three steps. First, it canvases how religious ethicists have offered reasons for carrying out work in the field to identify anAnti‐Reductive Paradigmthat is guided by anEgalitarian Imperative. That imperative functions as a thin, minimal morality of inclusivity and equal respect that guides work in the field. Second, the essay considers the field's ends. Here the focus shifts from values that shape the (...) field'smethodsto values that can describe the field'spurposes. That shift requires us to think in terms of a thick rather than a thin morality, one with substantive rather than procedural virtues in mind. The essay offers a constructive, substantive proposal under the rubric ofCritical Humanism. Critical Humanism justifies the study of religious ethics as an enterprise that can expand the moral imagination through its encounter with difference. It is shaped by four values: post‐critical reasoning, social criticism, cross‐cultural fluency, and environmental responsibility. Third, the essay brings the two parts of the argument together by explaining how to connect such purposes to the thin morality of inclusivity and equal respect. One upshot of the essay is to have us think not only about values, but also about power as it pertains to scholarship in the guild; hence the attention to the ethics and politics of religious ethics. (shrink)

James Conroy’s Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Imagination, Education and Democracy implies three main aims: first, to celebrate aspects of imagination in education and politics; second, to challenge defensive closure in varieties of discourse, especially in the language of economic and monetary management in education and politics; and third, to open up, for reciprocal enrichment, situations and discourses pertaining to consideration of state funding for religiously affiliated schools. Liminality, characteristic of thresholds and borders, calls for interpretation and mediation, as well (...) as appreciation of uncertainties. Liminality of imagination is explored in contexts associated with this third aim, but also in other kinds of context associated with the first two aims. As well as offering critical assessment of the book, this review article indicates some scope for interpretation and development. (shrink)

James Conroy’s Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Imagination, Education and Democracy implies three main aims: first, to celebrate aspects of imagination in education and politics; second, to challenge defensive closure in varieties of discourse, especially in the language of economic and monetary management in education and politics; and third, to open up, for reciprocal enrichment, situations and discourses pertaining to consideration of state funding for religiously affiliated schools. Liminality, characteristic of thresholds and borders, calls for interpretation and mediation, as well (...) as appreciation of uncertainties. Liminality of imagination is explored in contexts associated with this third aim, but also in other kinds of context associated with the first two aims. As well as offering critical assessment of the book, this review article indicates some scope for interpretation and development. (shrink)

In recent years, Cesar Chavez’s life and legacy have been subjected to increased scrutiny. The ensuing reevaluations of Chavez, wittingly or not, are matters of ethical, as well as historical and biographical, concern. This article has two aims. First, it reconstructs Chavez’s account of exemplarity and uses it to assess his legacy. Second, it provides an account of exemplarity situated within social practices. As I argue, exemplarity operates through social practices, rather than mystically as posited by a contagion model. The (...) end result is an ethically nuanced reassessment of Chavez and an account of exemplarity that includes its social dimension. (shrink)

What is the cash value of Richard Rorty’s philosophy and politics of religion? This paper analyzes the political promise of Rorty’s shift from atheism to anticlericalism in the last decade of his life. It seeks to deliver primarily a concise summary of this shift, and of its transformative motivation. Then a critique of this shift is followed by the suggestion of a friendly amendment: its extension towards a pragmatic pluralism. The outlined Rortyan conception of a serene, and, at the same (...) time robust, politics of religion is proposed as a promising answer to the question of how secular liberal citizens should react to the “return of the gods.”. (shrink)

This essay is a close examination of one of Nahman of Bratslav's early and largely unexamined texts, Sefer ha‐Middot. The question it addresses is whether one can call this a study of “ethics” or, in Jewish nomenclature, musar, a work that seeks to cultivate human behaviors and describe ethical formation. In addition, it asks whether Sefer ha‐Middot can be called a text of “virtue ethics” given its focus on virtues and their enactment. The essay argues that Nahman's peculiar metaphysical notion (...) that all mitzvot are inextricably intertwined prevents any analysis of behavioral causality severing his “ethics” from any Aristotelian or Kantian tradition and brings him closer to Alasdair MacIntyre's notion of ethics as tied to traditional norms. And even with MacIntyre, the comparison is quite limited. Discussing “faith,” the “zaddik,” and “money,” the essay explores Nahman's view of how these and other virtues are cultivated and achieved. (shrink)

This paper discusses Jeffrey Stout's thesis that modern societies are "secular," not in the sense that religion has disappeared from them, but in a procedural sense having to do with what can properly be assumed by participants in moral or political discussion. I endorse this thesis, but argue that Stout employs a notion of justification (with regard to moral belief), which leans too far toward descriptivism or relativism. As an alternative account of the status of religion within "the hypercontext, modernity," (...) I commend Kant's view of the religious attitude as a fundamentally ethical one, destined eventually to dispense with any "historical vehicle" in the form of revealed doctrine or supernaturalism. Stout's discussion is weakened by its retreat from commitment to the unity of practical reason, though it does pay illuminating tribute to the democratic values of civility and attentiveness. (shrink)

Gillian Rose was a philosopher, social theorist, memoirist, and Jewish convert to Christianity who died an untimely death in 1995. She offers a novel account of faith, which grows out of her Hegelian philosophical background inflected by her reading of Kierkegaard and her rediscovered Jewish heritage. For Rose, faith is a mode of social practice. Rose's conception of faith is here reconstructed by translating her obscure jurisprudential idiom into the language of social practices and norms. The conception of secular faith (...) developed by Rose is shown to have implications for contemporary discussions of ethics and politics. The contemporary relevance of Rose's work is made clear through comparison with recent work by Robert Brandom, Robert Adams, and Patrick Deneen. (shrink)

If liberal Protestantism begins with suspicion of tradition, is “thick” liberal Protestant theology possible or must liberal Protestant theology always be “thin”? This review essay examines several recent contributions to “thick” theology that make use of, and speak to, social and political engagement. The books under review describe and reflect on the varied forms of Christian political activism and organizing that have emerged in recent years around issues of immigration, fair wages, and global justice. I argue that a distinction between (...) Christian activism and Christian organizing must be made, where the former denotes advocacy on behalf of a community and the latter means standing together with a community, bringing out the capacities of community members, and allowing oneself to be transformed in the process. Further, I reflect on whether liberal Christian theology necessarily results in liberal politics. (shrink)

Recent ethnographic studies of lived ethics, such as those of Leela Prasad and Saba Mahmood, present valuable opportunities for comparative religious ethics. This essay argues that developments in philosophical and religious ethics over the last three decades have supported a strong interest in thick descriptions of what it means to be human. This anthropological turn has thereby laid important groundwork for the encounter between these scholars and new ethnographic studies. Nonetheless, an encounter it is. Each side brings novel questions to (...) the other. The second part of the essay focuses on one of these questions: How, exactly, are these ethnographic studies to inform normative reflection on ethical questions? (shrink)

This article sketches an intellectual history of the distinction between Christian theology and Christian ethics. The twists and turns of that history have been obscured by a recent tendency to deny the distinction's usefulness, as part of a wider strategy for reasserting theology's relevance to modern social problems. By contrast, earlier theologians assumed the value of the theology/ethics divide, interpreting it through Aristotelian, neo-Kantian, and finally Marxist categories. The distinction fell into disrepute because theologians struggled to maintain the distinction consistently (...) and disagreed on the concerns implicated by it, variously using it to affirm the moral subject's agency, the divine/human difference, or the complexity of real people's circumstances. Nonetheless, the distinction has persisted as a useful shorthand for recognizing the limitations of Christian theology, qua a conceptual discourse, in fully apprehending its subject matter of the Christian life. (shrink)

This article gives an overview of the debate about the “restraint principle” that political liberals urge on those who are inclined to use distinctive moral and theological doctrines in public square debates about politics. It clarifies such central concepts as “public reason” while surveying the main arguments and highlighting three different proposals for possible convergence in this conflict.

ABSTRACT In recent issues of the Journal of Religious Ethics (2006, 2007), David Little has defended the contemporary regime of international human rights against what he thinks of as the relativizing influences of the genealogical “just‐so” story told by Jeffrey Stout in his Democracy and Tradition (2004). I argue that Stout is correct about just‐so stories, and that Little does not go far enough in his reclamation of liberalism against Stout's “new traditionalists.” The main weaknesses of Little's approach are his (...) insistence on the idea that human rights are to be thought of as natural rights, and that these in turn are to be thought of as self‐evident and self‐justifying. I argue that they are neither: they come to us via a Stoutian just‐so story, and that as part of a broader reclamation of liberalism, they can continue to serve as the basis for the kind of international liberal constitutionalism that Little advocates. (shrink)

In this paper I take up the ambivalence we rightly feel toward leaders by examining the relationship between charismatic authority and moral exemplarity. Drawing on the social theory of Max Weber, and in dialogue with a case study of an anti-militarism movement called the SOA (School of Americas) Watch, I demonstrate that through a “politics of sacrifice” leaders synchronize their own stories with those of communally recognized exemplars and act in ways that evidence a solidarity in the suffering of those (...) exemplars thereby generating their charismatic authority. While performing crucial strategic, motivational, and pedagogical roles, this charisma also introduces problematic temptations to authoritarianism that short-circuit the practical reasoning that exemplars supposedly help to form. In the end this leaves our sense of ambivalence intact. What is needed, I argue, are practices of critique that reopen the distance between leader and follower and thus allow the possibility of practical reason. (shrink)

A prominent political historian has recently identified unwarranted optimism and unwarranted pessimism as democracy's “dual dangers.” While this historical analysis highlights the difficulties that accompany democratic hope, our prevailing conceptual vocabulary obscures the resources needed to address them. This essay attempts to recover these resources by excavating insights from Thomas Aquinas, who supplies one of the most systematic accounts of hope in the history of religious and political thought. By appropriating the conceptual structure of Thomas's theological virtue of hope, this (...) essay reconstructs a democratic virtue that perfects acts of hoping in fellow citizens to achieve democratic goods and thereby enables citizens to respond properly to difficulties that tempt presumption and despair. (shrink)

One of the most vexing problems in contemporary liberal democratic theory and practice is the relation between ethics and economics. This article presents a way of bringing this relation into focus in the terms offered by two incredibly influential but too-often neglected twentieth-century political philosophers: John Dewey and Friedrich Hayek. I describe important points of contact between Dewey and Hayek that enable us to begin the project of reframing contemporary debates between ethical egalitarians and economic libertarians. Cautiously recognizing these commonalities (...) whilst remaining attentive to persisting differences enables us to better approach the difficult relations between morals and markets. Specifically, I argue for a Deweyan combination of fair trade and free trade motivated by taking seriously a Hayekian caution about states. The result is a democratic theory that importantly refuses to attribute too much political efficacy to the quintessential liberal distinction between public and private. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This essay illustrates the kind of moral analysis Jeffrey Stout advocates in "Democracy and Tradition" by way of examining a conversation among Muslims that took place between June and December 2002. Their debate centers on al-Qaìda's legitimacy as God's chosen defender of Islam, which is called into question due to the tension between al-Qaìda's military tactics and the concepts of honorable combat held within the Islamic tradition. This giving and taking of reasons in both defense and detraction of al-Qaìda's tactics (...) demonstrates the living reality of Islamic tradition--the ongoing process of striving to discern God's will in light of communal agreements about the authority of certain texts and the validity of established rules for interpreting them. (shrink)

Qur'an 3:104 speaks of “commanding right and forbidding wrong” as a constitutive feature of the Muslim community. Michael Cook's careful and comprehensive study provides a wealth of information about the ways Muslims in various contexts have understood this notion. Cook also makes a number of comparative observations, and suggests that “commanding” appears to be a uniquely Muslim practice. Scholars of religious ethics should read Cook's study with great appreciation. They will also have a number of questions about his comparative comments. (...) In this article, I suggest that scholars of comparative ethics should think less about the “uniqueness” of the materials examined by Cook, and more about the ways groups of human beings discipline their members, thereby constituting and maintaining themselves as communities of virtue. (shrink)

In this “Response to Critics,” Cathleen Kaveny continues the conversation in the JRE symposium centered on her recent book, Prophecy without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square. The book's central argument is that adequate discussion of contention in the contemporary public square requires attending to matters of rhetoric, particularly the rhetoric of prophetic indictment. Kaveny engages the comments of four interlocutors: Alda Balthrop-Lewis, James Childress, William Hart, and Martin Kavka. The first section, “Overarching Goals,” summarizes the objectives of the (...) book. The second section, “Methodology,” engages critics regarding methodological issues, highlighting Kaveny's commitment to a version of MacIntyre's tradition theory and her indebtedness to her legal training. The third section, “Structure,” responds to particular questions her interlocutors raise about the four parts of the book. The fourth section, “Larger Questions,” ponders the next stages of the academic and political discussion about contention in the public square. (shrink)

Careful readers of Wittgenstein tend to overlook the significance his engineering education had for his philosophy; this despite Georg von Wright’s stern admonition that “the two most important facts to remember about Wittgenstein were, firstly, that he was Viennese, and, secondly, that he was an engineer.” Such oversight is particularly tempting for those of us who come to philosophy late, having first been schooled in math and science, because our education tricks us into thinking we understand engineering by extension. But (...) we do not. I will illustrate this common tendency to misread Wittgenstein by examining three engineering concepts that have little significance for science but played important roles in Wittgenstein’s philosophical thinking. These are: method of projection, dynamical similarity, and satisfactoriness. The upshot of this analysis will be a strong challenge to the myth of his putative fideism because neither fideism nor its contrary simply would have occurred to Wittgensteinthe-engineer. (shrink)

In her effort to recast moral realism in the style of the later Wittgensteinian philosophy of language, Sabina Lovibond seeks to ground moral knowledge in a historical community and its rules of language. In Stanley Hauerwas’ writings, we find an account of Christian ethics that is similarly modeled on Wittgensteinian realism. The main problem with Wittgensteinian moral realism, as it is appropriated by both Lovibond’s and Hauerwas’ society-dependent accounts of morality, is that they are unable to resolve difficult issues created (...) by epistemic relativism. Both thinkers are vulnerable to epistemic relativism in two ways. First, with its contextualist approach to the justification of moral beliefs, their conception of moral realism makes any historical community the ultimate authority in all matters of morality. Second, their conception of moral realism also turns moral truth into a social property of a historical community, while denying the exclusive ownership of truth by one particular community. (shrink)

This essay seeks to clarify the meaning and nature of normativity in metaethics and offers reasons why comparative religious ethics (CRE) must properly address questions about normativity. Though many comparative religious ethicists take CRE to be a normative discipline, what they say about normativity is often unclear and confusing. I argue that the third‐wave scholars face serious questions with respect to not only the justification of moral belief but also the rationality of moral belief and action. These scholars tend to (...) view the justification of moral belief to be a matter of process (that is, discursive social practice) rather than evidence‐possession, thus overlooking crucial differences between the two. They also run the risk of confusing motivating and explanatory reasons with normative reasons for moral belief and action. Consequently, their account of normativity would be insufficient for determining the rationality of moral beliefs and actions as well as for justifying moral beliefs. (shrink)

This essay explores the degree to which public reason can sustain political liberalism's commitment to justice and pluralism without attending to the role of what Jeffrey Stout calls “cultural inheritance” in shaping and justifying political commitments. At issue is whether public reason is the best resource for guiding conversations on political matters that are enmeshed in religious commitments and moral beliefs. Unless public reason can account for cultural inheritance, and foster a deliberative context in which political actors might grapple with (...) the relationship between overlapping political claims and comprehensive doctrines, public reason will remain narrow and inadequate in a contemporary world where epistemic diversity is increasingly at odds with political liberalism's normative model of social cooperation and public deliberation. (shrink)

The fields of environmental ethics and of religion and ecology have been shaped by Lynn White Jr.'s thesis that the roots of ecological crisis lie in religious cosmology. Independent critical movements in both fields, however, now question this methodological legacy and argue for alternative ways of inquiry. For religious ethics, the twin controversies cast doubt on prevailing ways of connecting environmental problems to religious deliberations because the criticisms raise questions about what counts as an environmental problem, how religious traditions change, (...) and whether ethicists should approach problems and traditions with reformist commitments. This article examines the critiques of White's legacy and presents a pluralist alternative that focuses religious ethics on the contextual strategies produced by moral communities as they confront environmental problems. (shrink)

The paper discusses Rawls’ and Habermas’ theories of deliberative democracy, focusing on the question of religious reasons in political discourse. Whereas Rawls as well as Habermas defend a fully inclusivist position on the use of religious reasons in the ‘background culture’ or ‘informal public sphere’, we defend a moderately inclusivist position. Moderate inclusivism welcomes religiously inspired contributions to public debate, but it also makes normative demands on public argumentation beyond the ‘public forum’ or ‘formal public sphere’. In particular, moderate inclusivism (...) implies what we call a ‘conversational translation proviso’ according to which citizens have a duty to supplement religious with proper political arguments if – but only if – they are asked to do so by their co-discussants. This position, we argue, is more in line with the deeper intuitions behind Rawls’ political liberalism and Habermas’ deliberative model than is the fully inclusivist alternative. _Keywords_: conversational translation proviso, deliberative democracy, ethics of citizenship, Habermas, moderate inclusivism, public reason, Rawls. (shrink)

Returning to John P. Reeder's 1978 essay on “Religious Ethics as a Field and Discipline,” this essay explores debates surrounding the original intentions for the Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE) and for the field of religious ethics, as these have played out over the decades among an influential group of scholars involved with the JRE since its inception: Arthur Dyck, Ronald Green, Stanley Hauerwas, and Jeffrey Stout. While the JRE and its founding mission are in need of ongoing critique and (...) transformation, we might well still affirm the journal's ongoing importance as a site for the negotiation of a commons, the identification of possibilities for shared life, imagined beyond exclusion and domination. (shrink)

The probing readings of Putting On Virtue offered by Sheryl Overmyer, Darlene Weaver, and James Foster provide a welcome opportunity for further reflection on key questions: Was Aquinas really concerned with the status of pagan virtues? Can we properly understand a thinker whose driving questions are not the same as our own without taking up a stance of pure deference? Can an inquiry into hyper-Augustinian anxiety over acquired virtue assist us in arriving at an account of positive self-regard? Can an (...) account that stresses the graced character of all virtue formation be coherent? And can it do justice to the ways in which Christians reached for accounts of infused virtue precisely in order to affirm how grace overcomes the ways in which fortune hounds acquired virtue? I respond affirmatively to all of the above. (shrink)

Despite the fact that Stanley Hauerwas has not taken up many of the topics normally associated with virtue ethics, has explicitly distanced himself from the enterprise known as “virtue ethics,” and throughout his career has preferred other categories of analysis, ranging from character and agency to practices and liturgy, it is nevertheless clear that his work has had a deep and transformative impact on the recovery of virtue within Christian ethics, and that this impact has largely to do with the (...) ways in which his thought resists normalization. This essay traces the evolution of Hauerwas's reflections on virtue and the virtues over the course of his career, with special attention to how this has been bound up with an increasingly emphatic theological particularism that has remained ambivalent between what I term “comprehensive” versus “exclusive” particularism. I argue that it is important to distinguish between these, and suggest that grasping the destructive tendencies of “exclusive” particularism should cement our commitment to shouldering the responsibilities associated with comprehensive particularism. (shrink)

Moral exemplarism, which insists on the centrality of particular embodiments of exemplary virtue to the moral life, is currently receiving significant attention within moral philosophy as well as theological and religious ethics. This introductory essay situates the contributions made by this focus issue on moral exemplarity in relation to the history of attention to moral exemplars, the twentieth‐century turn to virtue, philosopher Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory, Stanley Hauerwas’s particularist embrace of Christian discipleship, Foucauldian turns to critique and self‐cultivation, and (...) the significance of exemplars in Jeffrey Stout’s democratic piety. Arguing for the critical importance of articulating the authority of exemplars, this essay points to the ways in which the present focus can assist us to navigate between the shoals of nostalgic deference to tradition and dismissive critiques of authoritarianism. (shrink)

Can the theology of Thomas Aquinas serve as a resource for reflection on democratic civic virtue? That is the central question taken up by Mark Jordan, Adam Eitel, John Bowlin, and Michael Lamb in this focus issue. The four authors agree on one thing: Aquinas himself was no fan of democracy. They disagree, though, over whether Aquinas can offer resources for theorizing democratic virtues. Bowlin, Eitel, and Lamb believe he can, and propose Thomistic accounts of tolerance, civic friendship, and democratic (...) hope, respectively. Jordan, in contrast, issues a cautionary note against such enterprises. This divergence is due in part to different judgments about what it would mean to claim certain resources as “Thomistic.” In part, too, it flows from a disagreement about whether Aquinas himself countenances genuine virtues among non-Christian citizens, and about whether Christians and non-Christians can be said to share even proximate ends. This conversation is an important one, since accounts of the democratic virtues constructed using Thomistic resources have the potential to move discussions of democratic and theological virtues beyond common impasses. (shrink)

Exemplars have the power to help people navigate various levels of moral struggle, from the relatively straightforward problem of lacking motivation to the much deeper problem of failing to see the moral realities that surround us. But there are also serious moral risks in the appeal to exemplars: we romanticize them, we make use of them in authoritarian ways, and we tend to forget how our choice of exemplars is conditioned by oppressive cultural formations. I argue that we need to (...) develop a social model of exemplarity, attuned to social contexts of our exemplars themselves as well as the social processes of constructing and appealing to exemplars. More particularly, I argue that we need to develop space for thinking about exemplary groups, not just exemplary individuals, in order to develop the strengths and avoid the weaknesses in exemplarist moral theories. (shrink)

In this reply, I take up the challenges the five respondents raised. In particular, I deal with the issues of truth, bivalence, tolerance, and justification.

In this paper, I provide a novel approach to the issue of religious diversity: I reject classical pluralist approaches to the issue, such as John Hick’s, and argue that their attempts to construe commonalities between the religions are contrived. The reason that they attempt to find commonalities at all costs is that they presuppose a bivalent notion of truth according to which that which is different is false. I suggest that, in order to get a robust theory on religious diversity (...) off the ground, we should rely on the notion of justification rather than that of bivalent truth. Justification is pluralizable, dependent upon the circumstances, whereas bivalent truth is not. Armed with a pluralizable notion of justification, we can acknowledge that other religious beliefs are genuinely different without necessarily being false: They can be justified, given the circumstances a believer of a different religion is in. Perceiving religious differences in this way allows to liberate the interreligious dialogue from the pressure to find commonalities between religions at all costs, to respect the religious Other in her Otherness, and to ‘mirror’ one’s own religion in light of other religions. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the difficult relationship between Rawls, religion and the values that religious believers might consider important in order to lead the good life. Contrary to many of Rawls’ defenders, I argue that at least some of the values that religious citizens are likely to hold cannot be accounted for under Rawls’ theory or under his conception of the good life. I argue that the model of goods which Rawls takes to be part of a thin theory (...) of the good is tied to his belief that under the Original Position justice can be derived from calculations of self-interest alone. To perform my critique, I consider the paradigmatic case of honour in so-called traditional societies. I argue that the way Rawls thematizes primary goods in A Theory of Justice , including concepts like esteem, cannot account for the way honour manifests itself inside traditional communities. I conclude the paper by considering how Rawls might be able to defend his theory against my objection, by considering the relationship between Rawls’ theory, and the rationalization and secularization of society. (shrink)

In recent years, leading public reason liberals have argued that publicly justifying coercive laws and policies requires that citizens offer both adequate secular justificatory reasons and adequate secular motivating reasons for these laws and policies. In this paper, I provide a critical assessment of these two requirements and argue for two main claims concerning such requirements. First, only some qualified versions of the requirement that citizens offer adequate secular justificatory reasons for coercive laws and policies may be justifiably regarded as (...) plausible liberal principles of public justification. And second, the requirement that citizens offer adequate secular motivating reasons for coercive laws and policies is untenable on multiple grounds. Public reason liberals should focus on assessing the justificatory reasons offered for and against coercive laws and policies rather than requiring citizens to offer adequate secular motivating reasons for such laws and policies. (shrink)

If social critique is to play a role in broad social transformation, then it must be able to engage with the terms that people use to understand their lives. This essay argues that we can find an important model for performing social critique in the quite different work of Jeffrey Stout and Judith Butler. For both, social critique must be immanent and it must make explicit the character of the norms by which people currently live. This model is especially important (...) in a situation where various moral and cultural traditions are confronting one another, and where it is necessary to work towards shared social and political goals. Stout and Butler present a method for achieving one's political goals by engaging with others on terms that they would recognize and seeking to transform the political structures they inhabit. Furthermore, their approaches provide helpful insights for further reflection on the critical possibilities in current ethnographic work. (shrink)

Herdt's Putting On Virtue has two chief aims. The first is to champion the virtue tradition against Christian moral quietism and modern deontological ethics. The second is to facilitate reconciliation between Augustinian and Emersonian virtue. To accomplish these tasks Herdt constructs a counter-narrative to Schneewind's Invention of Autonomy, in which Luther's resignation and Kant's innovation are tragic consequences of “hyper-Augustinianism”—a competitive conception of divine and human agency, which leads to excessive suspicion of acquired virtue. This review argues that Putting On (...) Virtue succeeds in its first aim but leaves its second intriguingly uncompleted. Despite this deficiency, however, this essay also argues that Putting On Virtue makes plausible Herdt's audacious suggestion that Augustinian and Emersonian perfectionism may be reconciled by bringing acquired and infused virtue under a single term. (shrink)