I just got back from my first trip to the Society of Christian Ethics, and it was wonderful. Many of the sessions I went to were interesting, thought provoking, and/or challenging (with only one real dud). Even more, the conversations that emerged from the various sessions, which themselves provoked me to further thought and reflection, made the whole thing worthwhile. If you get a chance to go in the next few years, drop in! (You have to register, but I was never stopped or checked as I walked around in there with my “official” badge). It’s in Chicago next year, and Seattle the following year.
The sessions that really stuck out to me:
Aristotle Papanikolaou of Fordham University: “The Ascetics of War: The Undoing and Redoing of Virtue.” He talked about how the training for war (both before and during combat) very much forms us in a way that is the antithesis of our ultimate end, according to Orthodox theology, communion with the Divine. His tentative reflections on “redoing” virtue revolved around a particularly embodied conception of theosis, following Maximus the Confessor, that revolved around truth-telling. This interested me not only because it very much paralleled my most recent term paper (exploring a physicalist account of being formed into the imago Christi), but also because it provoked me to wonder if someone could conceive of a “just” war under this articulation (while Papanikolaou sought to bracket out this question, I couldn’t help but ask it in my head). More, his account of the impossibility of “forgetting” such trauma reminded me of Miroslav Volf’s work in The End of Memory – in particular, is Volf’s idea of an eschatological forgetting rendered incoherent by Papanikolaou’s work, which accounts for the profound and irrevocable effect such trauma has on and “in” our bodies?
Allen Verhey, Duke University and Christopher Vogt, St. John’s University, “The Christian Art of Dying Well.” A wonderful session that talked of the virtue necessary to die well, and how such virtue is not acquired on one’s death bed, but comes from a life lived well. Between viewing death as a friend to be welcomed to free us (a result of dualist thinking that Verhey termed “bullshit”) and viewing death as an enemy to be constantly staved off, controlled, and/or conquered via medicine and science (idolatry), the two argued for a view of death as enemy conquered already by the love of God in Jesus (echoing St. Paul). Death is not welcomed as friend, but accepted as a part of our finitude, an enemy that nevertheless does not get the final say in our existence. Verhey counseled Christians to look to Christ as an example at death, which I appreciated, and yet I wondered whether care must be taken in using such a metaphor: after all, Jesus died a particularly political death as a result of a particularly political life of discipleship, and I would not want that political dimension of his death to be abstracted or forgotten in the course of pastoral care. Just as I would resist saying to a heart-attack patient that they should “have their cross to bear” (for similar reasons), so I would be careful in using this language as well. But, Verhey assured that the chapter in his book dealing with Christ as example (which I plan to read immediately) is thoroughly nuanced in this regard. We shall see!
“Alasdair MacIntyre, 30 years after” was a panel discussion of the place MacIntyrean thought is and should head in the next 30 years. The consensus seemed to be that one must conceive of a robust natural law theory (in a sense very different from classic Reformed and Thomist conceptions), and also articulate how an agent occupies multiply overlapping traditions, as well as works with other traditions for a greater conception of the good. This session had Michael Baxter (Hauerwasian ethicist, Catholic worker, and provocateur) getting into a good-natured argument with Romanus Cessario OP. Fun stuff!
Stanley Hauerwas’ Presidential address (“Bearing Reality”) was phenomenal, really. I hope a transcript was made somewhere, by someone. Combining Stanley Cavell and John Howard Yoder makes for a very interesting talk indeed. “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” said T.S. Eliot. In the face of horrendous evils, silence overcomes us to a great extent, and much of our chatter is meant merely to distract us from the horrible nature of that which we do not wish to face, both in ourselves and in our world. We (Christians) confess that at the center of reality is a slaughtered animal, and so silence does not have the last word, even if that last word is not our own.
Overall: good conference, and now I’m ready to get back into the fray!