Cavanaugh and Grimes on Structural Evils of Violence and Race: Overcoming Conflicts in Contemporary Social Ethics

Social theory can help Christian ethics respond to structural evil, both by accurately naming "what is there" and by precisely specifying "what to do." William Cavanaugh and Katie Grimes, representing distinct neo-Franciscan and Junian approaches, draw extensively on social theory to confront structural evils of nation-state violence and racism. Yet they fall short of an adequate account of how social structures and individual agency interact. Their works obscure the actual mechanisms of social change, call for overly heroic actions, and offer rival formulations of the church–world relationship. I use critical realist social theory to offer an alternative approach that better accounts for the interaction of structure and agency needed for effective Christian responses.