Preface

The 2012 Annual Meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics was held in Washington, DC, a city known for its monuments, the most recent of which is the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial (standing face-forward at the Tidal Basin and situated midpoint between the Thomas Jefferson Memorial and the Abraham Lincoln Memorial).¹ It is no accident, with the SCE presidency of Stanley Hauerwas, that this meeting would focus in part on King’s and many others’ thematic concerns regarding past and present wars. And it may not be an accident that the newest monument on the national mall celebrates King, a man who is arguably the most recognized critic of US war-making policy.² Unsurprisingly, with the attraction of the location and the ease of travel (by air, auto, and train), the meeting drew a great number of members of the SCE and of our sister societies, the Society of Jewish Ethics and the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics—656 in all. These numbers led to robust discussions throughout the meeting’s sessions, during breaks, and over dinner. And while past meetings have included preconvention tours organized by members local to the meeting venue, this year, with so many choices—from the Smithsonian museums, the Newseum, the national mall, the Capitol and offices of the US Senate and House of Representatives, the Library of Congress, Arlington National Cemetery, the National Cathedral, and so much more—no formal tours were arranged, although many a member and group took advantage of the offerings widely and liberally available in DC.

As many members will recognize, the annual “Call for Proposals” has included (since the 2007 call for proposals to the 2008 meeting in Atlanta, Georgia) themes developed by the president and affirmed by the board of directors to be used as suggestions for members to consider as they develop their proposals for the next year’s meeting. The themes are not intended to override members’ own research interests but to encourage a diverse approach to the suggestions, as represented by the interests and diversity of our members. The suggestions for this meeting included war and peace, theological ethics as a resource for both peacemaking and reasoning about war-making, US foreign policy and diplomacy, globalization and its impacts on violence, political theology, church and state relations, faith-based initiatives, health care access, immigration, and government research funding. Considerations of the many ethical implications and ramifications of war predominated the responses to the call for the 2012 meeting; this issue is dedicated to that theme.³

This issue opens with a challenging hermeneutic by Patrick McCormick. Previously McCormick explored the support of war through the medium of cinema and the film Saving Private Ryan.⁴ Here McCormick considers the Genesis account of Abraham’s obedience to a divine command to sacrifice Isaac; he reads between the lines of the text to uncover the seeds of an antiwar parable. As modern readers remain horrified at the thought of child sacrifice, McCormick wonders why so many are so eager to send children to the sacrifice that is the battlefield. Daniel Weiss also looks to ancient texts and their rabbinic commentators in his consideration of divine sanction, bloodletting, and the image of God. Weiss finds that the rabbinic literature places the prohibition of bloodshed in juxtaposition to the physical embodiment of the image of God. The implications of the juxtaposition are that it is never legitimate to cause the death of any person, even for a greater good. A curious connection is made between the interruption of Isaac’s sacrifice and the only legitimation of bloodshed: both require direct divine intervention.

Next we read about the concerns that veterans have regarding the influence soldiering has on soldiers. Dan Cantey asks if Christian life is compatible with a military ethic. Cantey finds support for his study in Pachomius of Tabenna, a fourth-century monk in Egypt and a veteran, and Philip Berrigan, the twentieth-century Catholic priest and war resister. Cantey’s analysis suggests that tensions between Christian discipleship and soldiering can be ameliorated by holding a stance before war as an abolitionist or by a stance that sees...