Katie Cannon’s 1984 address to the Society of Christian Ethics indicted dominant modes of ethical inquiry for centering white, male experience and deeming black ethics immoral/amoral. Over 40 years later, questions of the importance of identity in ethics as opposed to other framings, such as tradition, still bring division in the field. While acknowledging the important contributions of womanism, this essay critically engages notions of identity, representation, and gender in womanist thought. In raising problems around these concepts, the authors present new trajectories for articulating the concerns of black social and aesthetic thought.
Thomas Piketty argues that the decline of the clerical class in early modern Europe led to a “void” in societal consciousness. Moderns subsequently filled this void by the sacralization of private property, precipitating the current popular acceptance of chasmic wealth disparities. This essay adapts and revises Piketty’s thesis by framing it within the Lockean natural rights tradition and Catholic social teaching (CST). For both Locke and CST, private property has never been a “secular” phenomenon, but always a product of ritualized labor. Locke, Leo XIII, and John Paul II understand property as the result of a clerical process through which humans act on God’s behalf in utilizing God’s creation, mixing transcendence with immanence through work. This theological postulate is crucial for challenging current regimes of inequality, because it presents wealth inequality as a sacrilegious liturgy in which the wealthy are de facto renegade priests.
Disability theologians Shane Clifton and Hans Reinders describe Christian virtue ethics as largely antagonistic toward disability. This is a product of Aristotle’s taxonomy of human capacities, wherein autonomy, individual agency, and independence form the ontological requirements of being human. Such requirements place persons experiencing extended states of dependency outside expectations of human flourishment, constructing eudaimonia in such a way that excludes complex bodies. Responding to Clifton and Reinders, this essay argues for pluralizing the perception of Christian virtue ethics to include Eastern constructions of agency. By incorporating Eastern Christian figures into virtue discourse, I argue that Maximus the Confessor provides an alternative Aristotelianism, which reformulates human function around two forms of value, direct and mediated. I argue that mediated agency forms a latent social model of disability that reorients the classical construction of moral agency around social and material facilitation, allowing for greater disability-positive representation in Christian virtue ethics.
This essay is a Black womanist response to the landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) ruling. It decidedly confronts Dobbs as a moral failure for Black women. In the US, forced pregnancy and involuntary childbirth is a timeworn tradition with death-dealing implications for Black women. First, the essay surveys the legacies of antebellim anti-Blacl reproductive violence. It then examines Black women’s bodily resistance to the violent (necro)politics of Black birthing—that perpetuate the physical and social death of Black women and their children. The essay concludes with preliminary consideration of a womanist ethic of abortion that emphasizes the sacrality of life, choice, and endings.
Christian theology feeds the dominant cultural logic when it is used to support the notion of justice as a social order established by White supremacist, sexist, and ableist hierarchies. In recent years, my work in ethics has taken a turn to explore and reflect upon the chaos created by our society’s social process of disablement in the lives of individuals and families affected by serious mental illness. The experiences and theological insights of people labeled disabled and their unpaid caregivers offer a powerful moral, ethical, and political imagination that challenges the mistake of connecting God’s creative activity to the sense of order imposed by the dominant culture and reflects on the way God enters into chaos to provide for life. My essay will explore the liberative power of the chaos narrative as a strategy for justice-seeking.
