Preface

This issue of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics includes the second set of papers delivered at the 2013 annual meeting in Chicago that were accepted for publication. There were 142 proposals submitted for the 2013 meeting (including the Pacific Section, the Society for Jewish Ethics, and the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics), from which 20 were accepted for publication (10 essays in vol. 33, no. 2, and the remaining 10 published in this volume). This yields a competitive 14 percent acceptance rate for the journal. The essays published in the previous volume focused on the conference theme “Doing Social Ethics from the Margins.” The essays published in this volume represent the diverse interests of the society’s membership.

The first two essays, from prominent scholars, address the theoretical foundations of Christian ethics. Jean Porter’s essay, “Divine Command, Natural Law, and the Authority of God,” navigates the space between two often competing schools of thought in Christian ethics: natural law, which emphasizes “the intrinsic goodness of the natural order, to the potential detriment of divine freedom,” and divine command theories, which “underscore God’s sovereign freedom, but at the risk of implying that the moral order is arbitrary and God’s will is, at best, opaque.” Robert Audi, in “Ethical Naturalism as a Challenge to Theological Ethics,” draws on his expertise in epistemology and ethics to address challenges posed to monotheistic ethics by naturalism, and charts a course that allows religious ethics to draw on elements of naturalism while still honoring theistic ethics’ commitments to experience, aesthetics, emotion, pluralism, and intercultural communication.

Ronald W. Duty’s essay, “Doing Christian Ethics on the Ground Polycentrically: Cross-Cultural Moral Deliberation on Ethical and Social Issues,” challenges academic ethicists to consider the resources and roles that congregations engage as moral agents discerning God’s will. In particular, he explores how people in congregations have permeable social and cultural identities that create polycentric (i.e., “without a dominant center”) ways of ethical reasoning. The following two essays build on this theme of moral agency and complement each other in two ways. Both address the ethical challenges of climate change and each proposes that mainstream ethicists working on climate change can be more effective by drawing on resources from marginalized groups. In “Atmospheric Powers, Global Injustice, and Moral Incompetence: Challenges to Doing Social Ethics from Below,” Willis Jenkins proposes climate change as an example of a problem that overwhelms moral agency. He argues that many Christian communities can alleviate their “moral incompetence” on this issue by learning from indigenous Christian communities “that deploy resources from multiple moral traditions in order to confront the threat to their ways of life posed by climate change.” Julia Watts Belser, in “Privilege and Disaster: Toward a Jewish Feminist Ethics of Climate Silence and Environmental Unknowing,” also notes that there is a moral disconnect between how many Americans live and their sense of responsibility for climate change. Drawing on the compelling Babylonian Talmudic story of Marta, daughter of Boethus, Belser argues that “resistance storytelling” can serve “as a tool for calling attention to key problems of social power and privilege that shape climate injustice,” which in turn will bring to light “the role of cultivated ignorance in preserving the status quo.”

The next pair of essays find common ground between competing approaches to issues in applied ethics. In their essay “Prophets Meet Profits: What Christian Ecological Ethics Can Learn from Free Market Environmentalism,” Kathryn D. Blanchard and Kevin J. O’Brien examine the anthropological tenets of “free market environmentalism” as resources for a Christian environmental ethic. While most environmentalists are suspicious of capitalism, free market environmentalists see private ownership, individual choice, and open markets as effective means for addressing ecological crises. Without endorsing free market environmentalism, Blanchard and O’Brien advocate for a pragmatic approach that strikes a balance between individual freedom and communal interests in order to address environmental degradation. Gerald W. Schlabach also seeks to build bridges between often divided groups. In “‘Confessional’ Non-violence and the Unity of the Church: Can Christians Square the Circle?,” Schlabach draws on Glen Stassen’s exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount...