By focusing on the importance of power relationships between states and emphasising the tendency to injustice and tyranny in any unchecked power, Christian realism in the middle of the twentieth century made sense of an international order structured by rivalry between nuclear superpowers. These lessons remain important for international politics, but a pluralistic Christian realism will have to give more attention in the future to relationships between the state and other primary social forces, especially business and religion. The classic political (...) problem of providing sufficient order without destroying freedom remains central, but it takes on different contours in a world no longer structured by rival superpowers. (shrink)

This is a new assessment of the work of the twentieth century's best-known public theologian. Reinhold Niebuhr's ability to make sense of international politics, racial tension, labour unrest, and cultural transformations gained him a wide audience, but his responsiveness to changing times was grounded in a remarkably consistent theology. Today, Christian realism remains an important way to understand politics and society in theological terms, but the enduring themes of Niebuhr's work must also be related to new generations of thinkers in (...) theology, politics, law, and philosophy. Robin W. Lovin traces its key themes so as to identify the political, moral, and theological realisms on which Niebuhr's persuasive and subtle depiction of human nature rests. In that context, a complex, dialectical, Niebuhrian approach still appears as a vital and lively alternative to the oversimplified accounts of politics and justice that have dominated recent decades. (shrink)

Comparative ethics raises theoretical and methodological problems important for all ethical studies. Five essays in this focus section provide introductions to the ethics of specific indigenous cultures and suggest implications for further comparative studies. In this introduction, we review these findings and discuss their relevance to the concept of ethical naturalism which we have previously offered as a basis for comparative work.

Comment on “Systemic Social Innovation” critiques the paper as being neither particularly systemic not innovative. It lists a dozen examples of systemic collaborations now underway that are more transformative. The Comment also takes issue with the article’s creation of a fifteen-part taxonomy that it asserts is necessary to assess transformative collaborations and urges readers to engage in a little less talk and a lot more action.

In this introductory essay, the authors develop implications for ethical theory which relate to the three studies of cosmogony and ethics in the Focus articles by Guberman, Campany, and Read. They suggest that the dialogue between theory and description which Green and C. Reynolds urge in their Focus article should be understood as a search for adequate forms of ethical theory that must go on in both ethics and comparative studies, as well as in interdisciplinary conversations between them. In considering (...) the descriptive studies in this focus section, and in the collection "Cosmogony and Ethical Order," the authors conclude that the type of ethical theory which will prove most useful for further studies in comparative ethics will be a form of ethical naturalism. (shrink)

This essay traces Christian thinking about sacred and secular authority during the early centuries of the Roman Empire. Christian martyrdom, interpreted by apologists such as Tertullian, established a place for Christianity in Roman society and gave it authority against imperial power. From this confrontation there emerged a differentiation of religious and civil authority that provided a starting point for later constitutional ideas of separate and balanced powers and distinctions between state and civil society. A comparative perspective reminds us, however, that (...) at their beginnings, Islam and Christianity faced quite different questions about religious and political authority. (shrink)

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a (...) compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

The authors relate the major groups involved in the desegregation of Boston's public schools to divergent understandings of rights in America's political and religious traditions. After an initial historical review, the authors suggest that the desegregation controversy may be understood as a conflict between a natural law theory of rights which requires remedial action to correct injustices and a traditionalist theory which sanctions prevailing liberties. In Boston, one natural law position is represented by black parents and the Federal court's desegregation (...) orders. Another position is represented by many white parents, who base their opposition to desegregation on a traditionalist notion of natural law. The authors suggest that any permanent resolution of the conflict must address these divergent understandings of natural law, as well as the political realities peculiar to Boston. (shrink)

Recent studies of Reinhold Niebuhr's life and work demonstrate his continued importance in theology, ethics, and political thought. Historical studies by Heather Warren, Mark Kleinman, and Normunds Kamergrauzis provide new assessments of Niebuhr's role as a political and religious leader in his own time and trace the consequences of the movements in which he participated. They also show us more clearly how his work was connected to the ideas and programs of his contemporaries. Colm McKeogh offers a more systematic treatment (...) of Niebuhr's political realism in relation to just war theory. Niebuhr's intellectual legacy remains disputed, with Stanley Hauerwas and Langdon Gilkey offering radically different assessments of his theology. Hauerwas sees in Niebuhr a close connection to the religious liberalism of William James that precludes any authentic Christian witness. Niebuhr's empiricism reduces God to a necessary feature of human consciousness. Gilkey notes Niebuhr's early use of James' psychology, but discerns a theology of history that is central to Niebuhr's mature work. In that theology, the ground of hope necessarily lies beyond human consciousness, and indeed beyond history itself. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRecent studies of Reinhold Niebuhr's life and work demonstrate his continued importance in theology, ethics, and political thought. Historical studies by Heather Warren, Mark Kleinman, and Normunds Kamergrauzis provide new assessments of Niebuhr's role as a political and religious leader in his own time and trace the consequences of the movements in which he participated. They also show us more clearly how his work was connected to the ideas and programs of his contemporaries. Colm McKeogh offers a more systematic treatment (...) of Niebuhr's political realism in relation to just war theory. Niebuhr's intellectual legacy remains disputed, with Stanley Hauerwas and Langdon Gilkey offering radically different assessments of his theology. Hauerwas sees in Niebuhr a close connection to the religious liberalism of William James that precludes any authentic Christian witness. Niebuhr's empiricism reduces God to a necessary feature of human consciousness. Gilkey notes Niebuhr's early use of James' psychology, but discerns a theology of history that is central to Niebuhr's mature work. In that theology, the ground of hope necessarily lies beyond human consciousness, and indeed beyond history itself. (shrink)

Are religion and public life really separate spheres of human activity? Should they be? In this book, Robin W. Lovin criticizes contemporary political and theological views that separate religion from public life as though these areas were systematically opposed and makes the case for a more integrated understanding of modern society. Such an understanding can be underpinned by 'Christian realism', which encourages responsible engagement with social and political problems from a distinctive perspective. Drawing on the work of Rawls, Galston, (...) Niebuhr, and Bonhoeffer, Lovin argues that the responsibilities of everyday life are a form of politics. Political commitment is no longer confined to the sphere of law and government, and a global ethics arises from the decisions of individuals. This book will foster a better understanding of contemporary political thought among theologians and will introduce readers primarily interested in political thought to relevant developments in recent theology. (shrink)

The works of H. Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr provide an appropriate starting point for renewed attention to the idea of responsibility in Christian ethics. While responsible choice and ‘the responsible society’ were important themes in ecumenical Protestant ethics in Britain and the US from the 1930s to the late 1950s, the idea has been neglected in recent decades. German theology, however, has considered Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s wartime writings on the ‘venture of responsibility’ and a biblical theology of judgment and responsibility in (...) light of a growing literature in philosophy and social thought that structures the moral life around a technological society’s responsibility for the human future. These different ways of thinking about responsibility invite further theological and ethical reflection on their history, their disagreements, and their possibilities for the future. (shrink)

"This work traces the development of social ethics in European Protestantism from Barth's early dialectical theology (ca. 1920) through Bonhoeffer's Ethics, written during World War II. In this development, two major approaches to social ethics emerge: a theological radicalism, championed by Barth, which emphasizes the difference between Christian action and ordinary moral reflection; and a theological realism, exemplified by Brunner and Bonhoeffer, which streses the possibilities for Christian cooperation in making and sustaining the social order. A final chaper traces the (...) continuing influence of these approaches in Christian ethics today." -- Book cover. (shrink)

Christian realism has provided a theological understanding of politics that identifies the limits within which all political choices are made. Those limits are set by a theological understanding of judgment, which reserves the ultimate meaning of history to divine judgment, and by a theological understanding of responsibility, which gives proximate meaning to the choices between greater and lesser goods that are available to human politics. The assessments of global politics offered by Reinhold Niebuhr and other Christian realists during the Second (...) World War and the Cold War which followed owe their influence partly to an astute and historically informed reading of events, but primarily, their influence is due to this basic theological understanding of politics. While the world has changed in ways that clearly reveal limitations in the original formulations of Christian realism, the theological principles of judgment and responsibility continue to provide an understanding of global politics adequate to the new realities of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

In her critique of ethical naturalism and ethical formalism as starting points for methods in comparative religious ethics, Francisca Cho correctly identifies formalism and naturalism as modern Western versions of moral rationality, and she shows us important commonalities that the debate between formalism and naturalism may obscure. Her proposal to treat the other as a "philosophical subject" does not, however, escape the limitations of naturalism and formalism. The antifoundationalist rejection of theory and generalization in favor of the particulars of moral (...) experience is yet another version of modern Western moral rationality, and it, too, is one of the models of moral rationality with which we begin our comparative work. (shrink)

In recent years, public reason in the United States has narrowed to a focus on national security and economic stability. This marks the loss of an aspirational element that has been historically important in American public life, and it tends toward the privatization of all moral arguments, not just those that depend on theological claims. To maintain theological integrity, Christian public reasoning will have to become more distinctively Christian, simply because there will be less shared ground to occupy with others. (...) But the future of theological ethics also requires attention to the scope and quality of the public discussion itself. (shrink)

Recent critics have called attention to the alienation of contemporary academics from broad currents of intellectual activity in public culture. The general complaint is that intellectuals are finding a professional home in institutions of higher learning, insulated from the concerns and interests of a wider reading audience. The demands of professional expertise do not encourage academics to work as public intellectuals or to take up social, literary, or political matters in imaginative and perspicuous ways. More problematic is the relative absence (...) of religion in the writings of those who aspire to work as public intellectuals. This essay reviews recent attempts by William Dean, Cornel West, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Stephen Carter, and Robin Lovin to remedy the problem of academic alienation and to address the place of religion in American life. (shrink)

Boiger and Mesquita (2012) present a social constructionist perspective on emotion that argues for its multilevel contextualization through social interactions, relationships, and culture. The present comments offer a response to the authors’ call for input from other disciplines. We provide a sociological perspective on emotion construction at each of the contextual levels discussed by Boiger and Mesquita, and discuss a model that can address interdependencies between these levels. Our remarks are intended to identify additional literature that can be brought to (...) bear on multilevel emotion construction and to put forward some ideas for future research on the subject. (shrink)

Practical deliberation often involves conditional judgements about what will (likely) happen if certain alternatives are pursued. It is widely assumed that the conditionals useful in deliberation are counterfactual or subjunctive conditionals. Against this, I argue that the conditionals of deliberation are indicatives. Key to the argument is an account of the relation between 'straightforward' future-directed conditionals like ' If the house is not painted, it will soon look quite shabby' and * "w e r e ' ' e d F (...) D C s like ' If the house were not to be painted, it would soon look quite shabby': an account on which both of these types of FDCs are grouped with the indicatives for semantic treatment and on which, while conditionals of both types are properly used in means/ends deliberations, those of the ' were'ed-up variety are especially well suited for that purpose. (shrink)

'Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science is a survey that attempts to describe a hypothetic philosophy--the avant-garde pseudo-science imagined by Alfred Jarry. 'Pataphysics is a supplement to metaphysics, accenting it, then replacing it, in order to create a philosophic alternative, whose discipline can study cases, not of conception, but of exception: variance , alliance , and deviance . 'Pataphysics synthesizes the romantic schism between a literal, scientized discourse and a figural, poeticized discourse, and my thesis suggests that this revision (...) of the signifier "science" by 'pataphysics is symptomatic of a postmodern transition in science from a paradigm of absolutism to a paralogy of relativism. Structured as a descriptive explication, which emphasizes a theoretical perspective, this survey is divided into five chapters: the first chapter recounts the history of the conflict between science and poetry ; the second chapter examines the avant-garde pseudo-science of 'pataphysics itself ; and finally, the last three chapters discuss the influence of 'pataphysics upon the poetics of its subsequent successors . While my thesis focuses upon theories of textual poetics rather than poetry itself , my thesis does nevertheless strive to be as conceptually encyclopedic as 'pataphysics itself: instead of normalizing 'pataphysics within one theoretical perspective, this survey alludes intermittently to 'pataphysical enterprises that constitute exceptions to such a genealogy of Jarryites. What is at stake is the status of poetry in a world of science. How might poetry reclaim its own viable truth? How might science benefit from its own poetic irony? For the postmodern condition, such questions have already opened up a novel space for speculative imagination; hence, this survey presents itself as a kind of primer for a future of possible research. (shrink)

In this short but meaty book, Peter Unger questions the objective answers that have been given to central problems in philosophy. As Unger hypothesizes, many of these problems are unanswerable, including the problems of knowledge and scepticism, the problems of free will, and problems of causation and explanation. In each case, he argues, we arrive at one answer only relative to an assumption about the meaning of key terms, terms like "know" and like "cause," even while we arrive at an (...) opposite answer relative to quite different assumptions, but equally arbitrary assumptions, about what the key terms mean. (shrink)