The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity

Preface

◆ vii ◆ Preface This book depicts how emerging problems of human power challenge ethical inquiry and it tries to suggest the sort of moral creativity that opens possibilities of meaningful response to those challenges. It does not offer predictions or blueprints, despite what the title may suggest. It rather develops multidisciplinary inquiry into concrete problems that arise as human and ecological systems hybridize and change, searching for resources to cope with those changes and, to some extent, take responsibility for them. Initially I set out to write a different kind of book. After a first book on theology and environmental ethics, I thought I should try to apply the theory to practice. Students had pressed me to say what difference ecotheologies make for confronting particular problems, and colleagues in other disciplines wanted to know how I think theology matters to processes of cultural change. So I set out to describe how grammars of belief could generate satisfactory responses to representative problems of human power like: climate change, human poverty, biodiversity loss, and chemical exposures . My idea was to show how ethics interprets the relevant disciplines (economics, social theory, environmental sciences) within a general theological account of sustainability. Two things happened to me. First, working on each concrete problem changed my understanding of its practical challenge and of the concepts I had to interpret it. Paying closer attention to the fields of knowledge interpreting each problem, and to innovative projects using theological and cultural inheritances to confront them, shifted how I think about doing religious ethics.The experience of working on those problems and with those projects nudged me away from a notion of social ethics as putting ideas into practice and toward a view in which ideas and practices form inherited patterns of life that agents can redeploy to confront new challenges. This book depicts the tasks of ethics when understood as a form of critical participation in how reform projects adapt their traditions to respond to overwhelming problems. Religious ethics, I argue, should focus less on constructing and applying religious worldviews and more on inviting, tutoring, and pressuring moral communities to make better use of their inheritances. The second thing that happened to me was that I became a parent. Simeon was born in the midst of writing this book, and the experience of pregnancy and parenthood drive its concerns.Writing a book on the ethics viii PREFACE of overwhelming problems matters differently when one is writing for the world of one’s own child.Not only did I pay more acute attention to research on how chemicals accumulate in uterine tissues and to the risks of atmospheric changes fifty years from now, I also searched for creative responses that seemed to bear potential for change. Confronting a series of problems so overwhelming that they foster a whole genre of collapse literature, I felt compelled to find and write alongside live pledges of practical hope. In the face of problems that would disinherit the future—diminishing migrations, embittered injustice, impoverishing markets, deluded moralities—I came to orient my task as teacher and parent on finding sustaining graces. That task would be impossible without Rebekah Menning, who parents gracefully and has been supportive of me in more ways than I can name. In researching this book I visited communities in South Africa and Ecuador , and tried to learn from several transnational projects, which was made possible by a Conant Grant from the Episcopal Church Center.The shifting ideas in this book were forged through presentations given at Boston College, Centro des Estudios Teologicos, the College of William & Mary, Harvard Divinity School, Michigan State University, Oregon State University , Pacific Lutheran University, the Society of Christian Ethics, the Spring Institute on LivedTheology, the University of Montana, and the University ofVirginia. I am especially indebted to Jim Childress and Chuck Mathewes for believing in this project and organizing occasions to discuss it. Mary EvelynTucker and John Grim have been extraordinary and patient tutors. My colleagues in ethics atYale—Jennifer Herdt, Gene Outka, Fred Simmons, and Emilie Townes—encouraged and criticized in just the right measures. Coteaching with Os Schmitz instructed me in what ethics must do in order to make a difference for the everyday work of ecological scientists. Many other friends and colleagues offered crucial gifts of reading, including : Sarah Azaransky, David Barr, Sofia Betancourt, Stephen Blackmer, Jonathan Cannon, Elizabeth Gerle, Sarah Fredericks, Laura Hartman,Tim Hartman, Christina McRorie, Stephen Macekura, Christopher Morck, Kathleen Deane Moore, Kevin O’Brien, Peter Paris,Travis Pickell, Kathryn...