Everyday Ethics: Moral Theology and the Practices of Ordinary Life ed. by Michael Lamb and Brian A. Williams (review)

Everyday Ethics: Moral Theology and the Practices of Ordinary Life is a collection of essays in response to Michael Banner's The Ethics of Everyday Life (2014), in which Banner urges moral theologians to engage closely with social anthropology.

Everyday Ethics is organized in three sections: reflecting on Banner's method, considering additional aspects of everyday life, and anticipating the future of moral theology. The volume's authors are moral theologians, many—like Banner—developing threads of Anglican moral theology, and anthropologists from the United States and the United Kingdom. The volume belongs on syllabi that include Banner's book, for many chapters offer close readings that extend Banner's work. For instance, Brian Brock picks up revolutionary signals in Banner's method, and likens Banner's interest in the everyday with the "ethical and emancipatory message" of mid-century French Marxism (51). Meanwhile, Eric Gregory amplifies Banner's account of humanitarian relief. Drawing on ethnographies of aid work, Gregory complicates both the virtue of charity and the value of administrative efficiency.

Several essays push moral theologians to identify relations of power in everyday ethics. Molly Farneth contests Banner's appeal to "Christian imagination" as uncritically monolithic, which obscures how everyday Christian practices may be deeply threatening. The Stations of the Cross may indeed foster compassion for others' suffering, among Banner's claims, but it has also been a locus of Christian anti-Jewishness.

Like Farneth, Jennifer Herdt cautions against presuming Christianity provides a single social imaginary. Herdt considers the role of education in Christian formation as she compares the Highlander Folk school and Humboldtian research universities. From the perspective of an everyday Christian ethics, she explains, critical thinking and disciplinary specialization are not ends in themselves, rather they are "ways to participate…in greater love and service" (75).

Rachel Muers focuses on Christian food sharing to show "how the particular and contingent social body is formed in and through relation to others" (153). She appeals to Willie Jennings's concept of "joining," which posits how all bodies, despite existing in constructed racist and colonial hierarchies, are contingent and dependent. Muers disputes Banner's underlying assumption that ethicists merely need to stop focusing on hard cases. "What if," Muers wonders, "the 'hard cases' of ethics are a systematic way of not attending closely to the everyday struggle of 'hard lives'?" (161).

Stephanie Mota Thurston's chapter illuminates how Katie Cannon and Ada Maria Isasi-Díaz attended, well before Banner, to the moral complexity of the everyday. Thurston intimates that Banner, and others who have recently taken an "ethnographic turn," are behind the times: many have not engaged with the deep intellectual tradition in Christian ethics which has, for generations, "developed rich, localized depictions of the everyday by engaging with literary traditions and ethnography" (33).

In this way Patrick McKearney's bibliographic essay that outlines trends in scholarly discussions between anthropology and theology belies much of the volume. McKearney features a diversity of scholars, even as chapters' endnotes rarely contain citations to work by scholars of color (or by scholars from the global South). Rarer still are examples of white scholars, like Rachel Muers and Luke Bretherton, whose work is shaped by the intellectual contributions of scholars of color. These non-citations and non-engagements, if you will, are especially troubling for a volume that prioritizes, according to editors Michael Lamb and Brian Williams, "the ethics of ordinary practices and the ways that our communities and cultures shape (and are shaped by) our actions, character, and commitments" (1). Sometimes scholars make normative claims through what we do not do.

Even so, the volume rigorously analyzes Banner's significant contribution to moral theology and thus makes it a useful text for courses in Christian ethics that aim to engage constructively with the social sciences.