As the Society of Christian Ethics gathers for its annual meeting January 5-8 in Phoenix, scholars associated with the 950-member organization say they are grappling with some of the thorniest issues in society today, from war and peace, torture and terrorism to decisions about the end of life and debates about religion, politics, and the policies of the Bush administration.
"What we're trying to do is sharpen the sense people have of various arguments and hopefully to help them find their way through the maze of argumentation on matters like the justification of war or bioethics," says John Kelsay, a religion professor at Florida State University known for his work on war and peace.
"A large part of our work is simply to provide language and entry-level question-framing," says Sondra Wheeler, professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. "Changes in politics and technology are outrunning our capacity for not only knowing what to do, but knowing how to talk about it."
A survey of scholars reveals some of the ways they are approaching current ethical debates. For Karen Lebacqz, bioethicist-in-residence and visiting professor of religious studies at Yale University, if society knows how to ask the right questions, "that's a good beginning" for confronting quandaries represented, for example, by the Terri Schiavo case. Too often, complex ethical dilemmas engender myopia, says Lebacqz, and the wrong questions prevail. "Instead of asking whether we should keep Terri alive, the question may be, 'Why is keeping her alive an option here when it is not an option in the rest of the world?' The underlying question may be more on the order of, 'What is the meaning of human life?' And that is a deeply religious question."
Father James Bretzke, who chairs the department of theology and religious studies at the University of San Francisco, focuses on misunderstandings of Catholic teaching on end-of-life issues. "There's a misperception out there connected with the Schiavo debate that the Vatican has mandated that a patient in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) must always be given artificial nutrition and hydration," he says. Many people, according to Bretzke, have taken one speech Pope John Paul II delivered in 2004 to mean that Terri Schiavo's feeding tube should not have been disconnected. But the pope's remarks were made in an occasional address rather than a more authoritative written document such as an encyclical, and subsequent speeches never reaffirmed his statements about PVS patients.
Bretzke has concluded that artificial nutrition is not, in fact, a moral imperative in all circumstances, and he warns against those who "try to hold onto absolute moral norms at all costs. There's an absolutization where people think, well, food and water are keeping her alive. [They think that] there's physical benefit with no burden or suffering. But we need to look more broadly at different burdens. The time, drugs, money, and research we spend for 'a' means we can't spend them for 'b'."
David Gushee, a professor of moral philosophy at Union University, a Southern Baptist school in Jackson, Tennessee, has studied evangelical voting patterns in the 2004 presidential election and says he hopes to further awareness of the growing number of evangelical centrists. "We've got work internally in the evangelical community to show that what it means to be an evangelical Christian goes beyond what the Christian Right or the weaker voice of the Christian Left has been saying," he says.
Gushee criticizes both conservative and liberal evangelicals for serving as "court prophets" to the Republican and Democratic parties. Instead, he urges evangelicals to shun partisan agendas in favor of a more holistic, theological approach to politics. Using the National Association of Evangelicals 2004 statement "For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility" as a template, Gushee suggests that the key fundamentals of political centrism include a belief in the sanctity of human life while shying away from single-minded focus on the issues of abortion and euthanasia; a commitment to religious liberty; a strong concern for the environment; a human rights-oriented internationalism; and the disavowal of uncritical patriotism and partisan identity.
