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CHAPTER TWO Religious Ethics and the Study of Emotion ✦ A religious-ethical approach to the study of emotion recognizes that there is a complex relationship between religion and emotion. In particular, there is a relationship between a person’s religious worldview—the way in which the world appears to have a mysterious kind of depth—and the way in which a person is moved, emotionally, by various objects in that world. One way to elucidate this relationship is to consider the connection between religious thought and imagination, on the one hand, and the cognitive dimension of emotion, on the other. Emotions clearly involve some form of cognition.Feeling an emotion involves having something in mind. An emotion is about something. It involves “seeing” an object, such as a thing, a person, a relationship, an event, or a situation , in a certain way as bearing on one’s happiness.1 Feeling the emotion of hope, for example, involves apprehending an object (a future possibility) and construing it as attractive, worth seeking, difficult to realize, but not beyond one’s reach.Feeling the emotion of daring involves apprehending an object (a threat to one’s own or another’s well-being) and construing it as hurtful, worth confronting and overcoming, difficult to overcome, but not beyond one’s capabilities. Just as an emotion has a cognitive dimension, so does religion. The practice of religion usually involves having an object in mind. It involves apprehending something that appears in many respects to be quite ordinary but appears in other respects to be laden with unusual meaning or revelatory of an underlying power or truth.2 Religion involves “seeing” certain things or situations as involving or possibly involving something more or other than meets the eye of the inattentive, unenlightened, or unimaginative observer. ◆ 40 ◆ Consider, for example, the way the biblical story of the Exodus (the liberation of the people of God from slavery in Egypt) informed the consciousness of many African American slaves. Many slaves who (over)heard Christian sermons on this story turned to each other and said, “We, too, are the people of God,and God will free us from our bondage!”Groups of slaves shared this story, linked it to stories about Jesus, who for them became a second Moses, expressed biblical themes in song, enacted the Exodus in dance, interpreted various events as signs of God’s liberating activity, and so on.3 Viewing the world through this interpretive lens changed the way the world appeared to them. The slaves imagined the future good of their liberation (this-worldly and/or other-worldly), and they construed this good as difficult but not impossible to attain—by the grace of God. They apprehended their enslavement,and they construed this evil as challenging,but not utterly beyond their power to confront and overcome in some way (in this life and/or in the transition to the life to come)—again, with the help of God. The emotions of hope and daring thus gained an edge over the emotions of despair and fear. Aquinas’s account of the emotions sheds light on the relationship between various forms of cognition, including acts of religious imagination, and people’s ways of being moved. Yet it is easy to misread him. It is easy to read that human emotions are motions of the sensory appetite that resemble the appetitive motions of other, nonhuman animals and at that point assume that Thomistic emotions can have little to do with the religious and moral lives of persons, other than to serve as distractions or causes of misdirection . In fact, Thomistic emotions can orient humans toward a wide range of objects, including objects that are of religious and moral significance . Emotions are interior motions that can reflect religious and moral concern, even as they reflect the fact that, as humans, we experience the world through the use of our sensory powers. Here I prepare the ground a bit for interpreting Aquinas by examining some recent discussions of religion , ethics,and emotion.These discussions can help us articulate important features that we would want to find in any account of emotion that is of use for religious ethics. We are most likely to find such features in Aquinas’s account (or make a place for them) if we are looking for them. RECENT DISCUSSIONS For the sake of brevity,I focus on two scholars.The first is James Gustafson.4 Gustafson is a Christian ethicist who has written extensively...

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