Preface

This issue of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics presents the remaining papers accepted for publication from the January 2011 Annual Meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics. As noted in the first issue from that meeting, neither the overall environmental nor the post-Katrina stories of New Orleans were lost on SCE members. In addition to the environmental justice tour highlighted in JSCE 31.2, fifteen SCE colleagues participated in the January 6 multisite field visit to places in New Orleans hardest hit by Katrina. Led by SCE member Alex Mikulich of the Jesuit Social Research Institute at Loyola University New Orleans, three areas were visited, each illuminating a different aspect of the impact of Katrina. SCE members visited the predominantly African American 9th Ward, which, at only 11 percent of its pre-Katrina population, indicated something of the asymmetric pattern of social support for rebuilding. Uptown New Orleans was already at 98 percent of its pre-Katrina population. The SCE tour also visited the Latino migration community immigrants who were attempting to gain work through rebuilding efforts from which labor justice issues have risen, including wage theft, human trafficking, and raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Finally, the group went to Mary Queen of Vietnam Parish in east New Orleans (a community of concern in the essay by Christine Pae and James McCarty included in this issue). Even with the many reminders of the slow response to the needs of the people and places in that fabled city, the Big Easy did not fail in its hospitality to friends and strangers alike.

As regular readers of the JSCE may recall, the annual publication of demographic distributions results are published in the second issue of a volume year; the essays in this issue are included in the data of JSCE 31, no. 2 (xv). From 124 proposals to papers presented, 55 papers were submitted for the second round of review for publication, and 20 were accepted.¹ Recall that proposals submitted in response to the “Call” undergo the first round of review; the presentation of papers involves the second round; and a third review is held postpresentation by the coeditors, anonymous referees, and the JSCE editorial board. These figures give the SCE and the JSCE editorial board a sense of how the JSCE is managing the review process and representing the demographic changes within the SCE and, in part, its sister societies, the Society of Jewish Ethics and Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics. In addition, this information provides data on the rate of acceptance and the provenance of our authors. Other journals in the humanities keep track of these data as well; see, for example, the first issue of each volume of Ethics (publishing this data since 1983) for similarly charted data. The total acceptance rate for publication in the JSCE reflects a competitive 16 percent.

This issue opens with a set of essays that reflect both excess and defect of pleasure. David Cloutier reminds readers of the moral category of luxury and the importance of retrieving the biblical and classical notions that set luxury in an economy of virtues and vices. In ways similar to the recognition that eating is a moral act, Cloutier raises the significance of spending one’s money as a moral act. Shannon Jung explores the ways in which desires may be redirected and reeducated from a focus on self-satisfaction to community concern. Jung suggests that unchecked consumerism betrays complicity and that contrition is a gift of grace in the face of that complicity. Not shying away from pleasures to be enjoyed, however, Jung treats readers to a visit to the New Orleans restaurant Arnaud’s. William McDonough argues that the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) understanding of sin and addiction is relevant far beyond the lives of alcoholics. McDonough’s essay offers a connection between Cloutier’s luxury and Jung’s desire with his understanding of AA to foster the rediscovery of the “soul” of the Christian tradition’s sin-talk, aiding the discernment of sin through Aquinas’s understanding of acedia and invidia as the two capital vices.

The next group of essays turns to...