The Resurrection and Unborn Beings: The Seeds of a Materialist Emergence Proposal

This article looks at how two apparently unrelated issues—the afterlife and reproductive loss—turn out to be interrelated in complex theological and ethical ways. Eschatology is important to address, because how one thinks about resurrected bodies in the afterlife has implications for how one treats bodies that procreate in this life. Rethinking the notion of personhood lies at the heart of clarifying the nature of the resurrection. This article presents a theological anthropology that draws from the recent philosophical theory known as emergence. This theory allows us to conceptualize the resurrection of the “spiritual body” as a divinely initiated organic process that begins from a “bare seed” at death (1 Cor 15:44, 37). I hope to demonstrate that an emergence model of the resurrection both speaks to those grieving reproductive loss and also avoids eclipsing women’s exercise of moral discernment in reproductive matters.

Facilitating Dialogue to Build koinonia: A Study Document on Churches and Moral Discernment by the Faith and Order Commission

Current tensions within and between churches often result from disagreements over moral issues. The WCC Commission on Faith and Order took up the task to assist the churches in finding a way to deepen mutual understanding leading to dialogue. It published the 2021 study document Churches and Moral Discernment: Facilitating Dialogue to Build koinonia. In this contribution, the author provides insights into the background of and process leading to the study document and explains its content.

The Catholic Moral Tradition, Conscience, and the Practice of Medicine

One contested moral commitment shared by the American Medical Association (AMA) and American Nurses Association (ANA) has to do with the place of conscience in the practice of medicine. These organizations, each in their own way, urge their respective members to engage in careful moral discernment regarding their professional life, and they assert the existence of an obligation on the part of others to respect the conscientious objections of healthcare professionals and to accommodate objecting individuals. Yet despite the value that these organizations place on conscience and objector rights, these organizations do not offer elaborate philosophical defenses of their positions. This shortcoming is exposed by the light of contemporary philosophical challenges to conscience-friendly policies. What such challenges demand is a philosophical defense of these organizations’ moral commitments and corresponding policy recommendations. The point of this article is to indicate how the Catholic philosophical tradition’s account of the nature and importance of conscience can philosophically underwrite these organizations’ conscience-related principles and practices. It can be seen, then, that the Catholic tradition is far from inimical to the contemporary practice of medicine and that, on the contrary, this tradition offers philosophically serious grounds on which to rest (and from which to defend) some of the most morally significant values and guidelines endorsed by these contemporary health-professional organizations and their members.

‘Spoken from the Impulse of the Moment’: Epistolarity, Sensibility, and Breath in Frances Burney’s Evelina

Skinner explores the neglected role of breath in the mapping and understanding of eighteenth-century sensibility. Thematically rich in their associations with body and spirit, life and death, breath and breathlessness are also woven into the stylistic particularities of both sentimental and epistolary fiction. Examination of the epistolarity of Evelina, and the dramatic use of dialogue Burney became known for, reveals breathlessness as the signifier of intense and instinctive moral discernment of the kind described by eighteenth-century philosophers such as Frances Hutcheson, complicating the view that the heroine of epistolary fiction more generally, and Evelina in particular, is purely passive. Instead, she emerges as actively involved in numerous scenarios that at once challenge her capacity for moral conduct and allow her to demonstrate her power to act.

Reading Samaritanus bonus in Light of Magisterial Teaching and Recent Papal Writings

On July 14, 2020, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) issued Samaritanus bonus (The Good Samaritan), beckoning the human family to take the Good Samaritan as the ideal in the care of all persons in critical and terminal phases of their lives. The import of this letter is understood best as seen through three prisms: (1) Fratelli tutti, the encyclical of Pope Francis signed at Assisi on October 3, 2020; (2) the Declaration on Euthanasia issued by the CDF in 1980; and (3) “the remarkable progressive development of biomedical technologies [which] has exponentially enlarged the clinical proficiency of diagnostic medicine in patient care and treatment [which] call for growth in moral discernment to avoid an unbalanced and dehumanizing use of the technologies especially in the critical or terminal stages of human life” (CDF, Declaration on Euthanasia, intro)

Mental Illness and Moral Discernment: A Clinical Psychiatric Perspective

As a contribution to a wider discussion on moral discernment in theological anthropology, this paper seeks to answer the question “What is the impact of mental illness on an individual’s ability to make moral decisions?” Written from a clinical psychiatric perspective, it considers recent contributions from psychology, neuropsychology and imaging technology. It notes that the popular conception that mental illness necessarily robs an individual of moral responsibility is largely unfounded. Most people who suffer from mental health problems do not lose the capacity to make moral decisions, and mental illness on its own rarely explains anti-social or criminal behaviour. Moreover, the assumptions of some scientists, that recent developments in neuropsychology and brain imaging suggest biological determinism, must be treated with caution.

Moral Discernment and Doubt in the Human Journey

An ongoing challenge within all approaches to ethical decision making is reducing the degree of doubt about what action is right, good, or at least better in a given situation. The process of moral discernment within Christian thought is no exception; however, different Christian communities tend to understand moral doubt and moral certainty differently, to pursue different ways of allaying doubt, and to expect—and accept—different degrees of moral certainty. Drawing especially from Aristotelian virtue theory, selected teachings from the Eastern Orthodox tradition on humility, and recent discussions of the ‘grace of self-doubt,’ I sketch an account of virtuous moral doubt as a mean between the extremes of excessive and deficient moral doubt. My hope is doing so will help to make space and provide the framework for an ecumenical understanding of doubt’s proper role in moral discernment.

Why Trustworthy Stewardship Requires Justice

Doctors make daily decisions about allocating medical resources. Society trusts doctors to make those decisions justly, and physicians typically make trustworthy and just allocations. Justice requires not only equality in the treatment of equals, but also moral discernment to identify which factors are significant and how they should be compared. This chapter reviews prominent theories of justice in medicine and argues that each of them oversimplifies by reducing unavoidable complexity into a single and often-inappropriate principle. Instead, this chapter argues that justice should be understood as the conclusion from consideration of relevant factors in particular kinds of decisions. By discussing resource allocations in four domains (nonacute care, acute care, critically scarce resources, public health), the chapter explains which principles of justice should guide allocations in each domain. The chapter includes a summary table showing which principles of justice should be categorically rejected for guiding some allocations and which should be employed.

Some Common Pitfalls

Ethics can go wrong in a variety of ways, some of the experiences and the interpretive related to inept use of the skills described in chapters 2 and 3. Five errors are singled out for special consideration as commonplace in ethics. These are the trap of either/or thinking (a simplistic understanding of ethical choices), expecting too much from theory (overestimating the importance of theory and undervaluing the insights of practice), the desire for a unifying conception of ethics (the misguided search for foundations), restricting what experiences have moral weight (truncating the potential sources of moral discernment), and treating mysteries as moral problems (failing to acknowledge the limits of ethics).

In search of the grain

In this article I investigate the scientific grounds for reflecting on Palestine-Israel in light of other struggles, particularly those against Nazism and South African apartheid. Keeping in mind the distinction between simplistic comparisons and the use of analogies when events are not exact replications of one another, I evaluate John de Gruchy’s intersectional approach to Israel and the Palestinians. Likewise, I reflect on the cross-contextual reasons for Jewish Israeli and South African activists’ impression of the Palestinian struggle being part of a broad moral struggle against othering that transcends the boundaries of the geo-political context. The article concludes that critical scientific discussions and responsible moral discernment on Israel’s relation with the Palestinians cannot ignore the meta-narratives of systemic injustices such as state-sanctioned violence, apartheid, colonialism or ethnic cleansing that gave rise to resistance movements and prophetic theology in the contexts of Nazism and South African apartheid.