How do we know what nations intend when they wage war? Scholars of the just war tradition have tended to assume that belligerent nations intend whatever their heads of state say they intend. But this confuses descriptions of intentions—only some of them sincere—with intentions themselves. In truth, intentions are much more action‐oriented and embodied than scholars have so far realized. Nor have scholars of the just war tradition adequately reckoned with the corporate character of national intentions. In order to remedy (...) this, I draw upon the insights of both neuroscience and the scholarly subfield known as “cognitive sports psychology” in order to craft a robustly embodied and adequately corporate account of a nation’s wartime intentions. But we cannot simply plug this new understanding of intention into existing formulations of what qualifies as a just war. Assessments of national intentions will remain overly verbal and insufficiently corporate as long as scholars split war into the three phases of jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum. Because intention is action‐oriented, we cannot know what a nation intends until it has acted; intention unfolds across all phases of war and therefore cannot be fully known until a war is finished. (shrink)

This essay examines whether the Catholic magisterium's use of Aquinas to condemn homosexual acts is actually Thomistic. Rather than being aligned with the magisterium, Aquinas advances a moral epistemology better illuminated by the work of philosopher Judith Butler. Deploying Butler as a means of immanent critique, I show how magisterial attempts to argue against lesbian and gay sex fail on their own terms. Reading Aquinas alongside Butler shows us why we need not choose between fidelity to Thomistic natural law and (...) affirmation of lesbians and gays. (shrink)

This article introduces a new term, “anti‐blackness supremacy,” in order to supplement existing theological discourse about the ethical life of racism. To a much greater extent than the terms “racism, ” “white privilege” or even “white supremacy,” this term also better positions scholars to address what I identify as the two most pressing problems in anti‐racist discourse: first, the inability to diagnose the relation between classism and racism without reducing one into the other; and second, the tendency to treat racism (...) as a monolithic evil that falls upon all people of color equally and in the same way. The former error has distorted political discourse for decades; the latter misconception intensifies as the United States undergoes demographic shifts in the wake of immigration from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Both of these errors arise from a pervasive misunderstanding of the slave regime that has set our current racial system in motion. In truth, slavery primarily represents not a mechanism of profit extraction, but a relation of a unique type of power. The term “anti‐blackness supremacy,” I contend, corrects both of these misperceptions, affirming both the singularity of black oppression and its fundamental connection to enslaving power. In so doing, it enables ethicists to disarm an older racial foe while thwarting the ascension of a newer one. (shrink)

Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical Deus Caritas Est continues the magisterium's twentieth-century shift from an act-oriented, procreative approach to sexual ethics to what I will term a heterosexually personalistic one. Situating a heterosexual anthropology within a heterosexual cosmology, Benedict argues that just as God loves humanity with heterosexual eros, so must human beings love each other heterosexually. Although Benedict depends upon the explanatory power of heterosexuality, he perhaps unwittingly ends up depicting God's love not as iconically heterosexual, but as queer. In (...) casting God's love as queer, I do not, even analogously, impute to God a type of homosexuality as Benedict does a heterosexuality. Instead, by drawing attention to the discursive specificity and historical instability of both homosexuality and heterosexuality, I use “queer” to recognize God's love as beyond categorization and as strange; it cannot be corralled into or contained by the historically specific notions of heterosexual and homosexual. But this essay does not merely deconstruct Benedict's heterosexually personalistic cosmology. It uncovers in Benedict's Eucharistic transfiguration of marital love a new and promising way of situating discussions about the ethics of sex. (shrink)