A Just and True Love: Feminism at the Frontiers of Theological Ethics: Essays in Honor of Margaret Farley

Introduction

1 Introduction Maura A. Ryan The presence of women theologians has not only changed the sociology of who is doing theology today, it has fundamentally changed the way of doing theology.1 Nowhere is Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s observation better illustrated than in the contributions of Margaret A. Farley to contemporary Christian ethics. A feminist pioneer, she has stretched the content of theological ethics, bringing to the center concerns often overlooked or trivialized: the role of equality and mutuality in a theology of sexuality and marriage; the ethical and theological dimensions of commitment; the adequacy of normative accounts of “nature” and “the natural”; domestic violence; the abuse of authority by religious leaders; and the disproportionate vulnerability of women globally to the threat of AIDS. More than thirty years a beloved teacher and mentor at Yale Divinity School, she has helped to change the face of the field through the many people—women and men—she has helped to form and develop as Christian ethicists. However, as the essays in this collection show, the influence of feminist theologians such as Margaret Farley extends not only to what questions are posed to Christian ethics today or who is part of discerning an adequate response, but to the very way Christian ethics is done. Inspired by Vatican II and challenged by the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, her generation of women brought to theology not only their distinctive voices and their particular concerns, but a self-conscious and self-critical attention to the relationship of sexuality, knowledge, and power. In other words, they engendered theology. THINKING WITH GENDER As Susan Parsons so aptly describes, gender is a “disruptive thread of argument—undermining certainties of truth, behaving badly, cutting across normal expectations, troubling what is natural, and turning over our thinking.”2 Gender is also a matter that today we cannot seem to avoid. It has pressed itself upon us as a primary category for understanding human experience and as such has become a foundational issue for Christian ethics. To engage seriously in the enterprise of ethics in this day and age is almost necessarily to “think with gender ,” to give an account of what it means to exist as men and women within a particular set of human relationships, to have a certain sort of body with its specific capabilities and vulnerabilities, and to act in light of a given description of the world and our place within it.3 At once revealing our self-understanding and calling it into question, gender implicates us immediately in the deepest concerns of both theology and ethics: “Gender is one of the ways in which we think differences, so that it stands as a marker of what is unique to woman and to man, and it allows us to wonder why and how it is that we are not alike. So, too, it is one of the ways in which we think our common humanity, about what it is that makes us beings who are able to live together, to love one another, and to form relationships.”4 Gender has been at the heart of what has been called today’s “postmodern moment” in ethics, first as feminists have taken up postmodernism ’s critical attention to language and power as well as its skepticism concerning the objectivity of reason, but also as the feminist critique of the established order has helped to undermine the previously “settled landscape of the moral life.”5 In its many varieties and through its various developments, feminism has contributed to the demise of the “Man of Reason,” calling into question inherited forms of universalism; changing the subject of ethics through its insistence 2 Maura A. Ryan on the significance of women’s experience as a source for interpreting moral value; “troubling what is natural” in its rejection of divinely sanctioned assumptions about the body and embodiment that shore up patriarchal social relations; and pressing for a description of human agency that accounts not only for the powers of freedom and will but also for the grace and the burden of our inescapable sociality.6 Farley has often reminded her readers that feminist theology was born out of women’s growing awareness of the disparity between what they had been taught about their identity and role within the human community,theculturallyandreligiouslyenshrinedimagesofwomanhood that they had received and in some part internalized, and their own experience of themselves and...