Preface

The essays in this issue were presented at the Society of Christian Ethics annual meeting in Louisville, Kentucky in January 2019. While there was no theme for this meeting, a number of presentations, including the Presidential Address and the Keynote by David Bentley Hart, addressed issues at the intersection of aesthetics and Christian Ethics. In a broader sense, the question of judgement was at the heart of many of our presentations. Both issues in this volume of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics contain articles touching on these topics, as well as selections from the broad array of presentations made at the conference.

Diane Yeager’s Presidential Address, “A Quality of Wonder: Five Thoughts on a Poetics of the Will” brings to bear the question of aesthetics and ethics by asking what poetry can teach ethicists. Drawing from the work of W. H. Auden, Anthony Hecht, Galway Kinnell, and William Carlos Williams, among others, Yeager argues in favor of what she calls a “poetics of the will,” which requires affirmation and wonder, as well as a realization of the complexity of the human condition necessitated by our embodied reality. Such a poetics of the will provides resources of Christian ethics such as to enable it to resist the temptations of excessive self-righteousness on the one hand and despair on the other.

David Bentley Hart continues the exploration of aesthetic themes in his keynote address, “A Sense of Style: Beauty and the Christian Moral Life.” While acknowledging a degree of skepticism toward more formal and systematic approaches to thinking about ethics, he argues that the Christian moral life is better understood through an appeal to our aesthetic sense. Questions of morality are inseparable from questions of taste, in the sense that the good, the true, and the beautiful are dimensions of the same divine reality, and a genuine knowledge of the beautiful leads as well to a deeper conception of the nature of the good. Christian ethics leads us not only to look for beauty in the contemplation of eternal abstractions, but to find it in the concrete experience of the least of God’s children, which should lead us to seek to act in ways that are gracious and loving toward all whom we encounter.

As with poetry and literature, visual art can provide a conduit to the divine through which we can encounter God in the midst of the beautiful. In “The Prophetic Challenge of Disability Art,” Devan Stahl examines the way in which medical imagery can transformed into art and through which persons with disabilities can come to see themselves differently, and through which they can be seen differently by others. She offers an analysis of this trend of “disability art” through the lens of Christian ethics and her own personal experience of its power as a medium. Ultimately, she argues, it provides resources for a new ethic of communion that is capable of taking account of human beings in all of their vulnerability.

Delving into a different dimension of the question of judgement, David Cloutier’s essay, “Beyond Judgmentalism and Non-Judgmentalism: A Theological Approach to Public Discourse About Social Sin,” seeks to find a solution to what he describes as an oscillation between a refusal to judge others’ behavior on the one hand, and a strong sense of moral condemnation on the other. He argues that a theological conception of judgement that goes beyond the idea of judgement for particular sins is necessary in order to overcome this impasse in contemporary discourse. By placing God’s own judgment at the center of his account, he argues, drawing on the work of Oliver O’Donovan, Robert Jensen, and H. Richard Niebuhr among others, we can develop an understanding of Christian moral judgement that is grounded in God’s grace and a desire for the Kingdom of God. This understanding can guide our own sense of judgment in the midst of the chaos and ambiguity of contemporary society.

The next two essays in this issue deal in different ways with the question of how an ecclesiocentric ethic can provide resources for...