John Howard Yoder's reclamation of Christ's law of love as normative for Christian ethics makes important contributions to the field, but this pacifist legacy is tainted by his sexual violence against women. Prominent "witness" and "feminist" ethicists either defend or condemn Yoder, reflecting retributive approaches to wrongdoing. Restorative justice models—with their emphasis on truth-telling, particularity, and communal responses to violence—illuminate common ground between these often antagonistic groups of ethicists, whose specific resources are needed to "do justice" to Yoder's legacy. Yoder (...) claimed that "Christian identity itself calls for feminist engagement," but he failed to fully develop this claim in his theology or embody it in his life. By collaborating in such a truly feminist pacifist politics, witness and feminist ethicists not only strengthen their own internal projects with respect to the church's mission and the promotion of women's flourishing but also more effectively address sexual violence. (shrink)

This essay reflects on the role academic journals like the JRE can play in facilitating and addressing tainted legacies. As an institution in religious ethics, the journal not only determines whose work is important, but it also replicates such judgments, passing certain sets of issues, concerns, and methods down from the past to the present, shaping future work. Journals highlight the systemic, structural elements of legacies that we often neglect in heated debate over how to respond to them. Consequently, they (...) illuminate the complexity of the problems tainted legacies present. I first discuss three ways a journal like the JRE facilitates the structural features of tainted legacies in religious ethics. I then suggest how the JRE might implement a position I call the “reformer” in response to such legacies. This position emphasizes practices of moral repair designed to challenge the systemic injustices that underlay tainted legacies. (shrink)

Scholars celebrate Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a "prophet of justice for the oppressed" who identified the need "to see the great events of world history from below." But few address the thorniest aspect of Bonhoeffer's ethics for the marginalized: the mandates or divine commissions in church, marriage, work, and government made concrete within certain orders of relationship and authority. Bonhoeffer's marriage mandate poses particular problems as it reinforces unjust social structures. Fortunately, striking similarities between Bonhoeffer's ethics and feminist thought—attention to concrete (...) contexts, the role of emotion in moral reasoning, opposition to harmful dualisms, and emphasis on relationality—suggest that feminists are well-placed to critique and reconstruct Bonhoeffer's account. Construing the mandates as contexts for "genuine communities of argument" repurposes them to combat rather than condone injustice. (shrink)

In contemporary reflection on Christianity and politics, the work of realist, witness, and feminist theologians has been done in isolation--that is, each school has largely pursued its projects without incorporating the insights of others. Christian Ethics at the Boundary offers the first approach to public and political theology developed at the boundaries that separate these approaches.

This essay assesses the oft‐made link between Walter Rauschenbusch and Martin Luther King Jr. Denying neither Rauschenbusch’s influence on King nor King’s social gospel status, it nevertheless questions the way historians locate Rauschenbusch’s legacy in King and the civil rights movement. This strategy, however unintentionally, reproduces the white social gospel’s “astigmatism” on race and undermines the contributions of black social gospel (and other neglected) leaders even as revised histories affirm them. After exploring King’s references to Rauschenbusch and Rauschenbusch’s reflections on (...) race, the paper compares their theologies. This comparison reveals key differences on race and economic justice that ramify across Rauschenbusch’s and King’s distinctive articulations of social gospel categories, further complicating historians’ claims on King. Oversimplifying the connection between these important figures in religious ethics distorts theological understanding of social gospel legacies and compromises their power for future generations. (shrink)

The prevalence of tainted legacies within Christian ethics, across the academy, and in contemporary public debate raises difficult questions about handling legacies implicated in traumatic pasts. This essay uses the concept of moral injury to illuminate the moral complexities of tainted religious legacies and employs feminist and womanist ethics to provide strategies for moral repair in the wake of these and other such legacies. It first argues that, despite significant limitations, moral injury provides purchase on the experience of encountering tainted (...) religious legacies by naming the type of agency involved, describing the moral harm tainted legacies cause, and highlighting the social and institutional context of that harm. It then argues that feminist and womanist responses to morally injurious forms of Christianity—particularly explorations of redemptive suffering—not only resonate with responses to Yoder’s case and other tainted legacies current in public debate but also provide criteria for assessing those responses. (shrink)

SCHOLARS OFTEN VIEW MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO political theology in the context of his philosophy of nonviolence. Drawing on feminist and womanist thought, I reconstruct King's theopolitical practice to construe nonviolence more broadly as including any "agapic activity" that forms and sustains community. In doing so, I uncover in King's thought a conception of agape that resonates with feminist emphasis on the relational and community-oriented nature of love, and I draw on womanist thought to highlight the role of (...) creativity, not solely love or justice, to King's ethical thinking. Both emphases suggest a vision of churches as communities of creativity with community-creating practices at the heart of their political roles. (shrink)

This paper explores the power of womanist ethics to illuminate the Confederate monuments debate. First, I draw on Emilie Townes’s analysis of the “cultural production of evil” to construe Confederate monuments as products of the “fantastic hegemonic imagination” that render visible for whites the invisibility of “whiteness.” Second, I argue that Angela Sims’s work on lynching provides a vivid example of how “countermemory” functions as an antidote to the fantastic hegemonic imagination. Finally, I argue that Delores Williams’s re-evaluation of the (...) cross as a sacred symbol enables a reading of Confederate monuments as realist symbols of violence that require displacement from the center to the periphery of national sacred space. I conclude that although the debate on Confederate monuments is important, womanist analysis warns against an overly-narrow focus on this issue, lest we neglect the already obscured gendered, classist, homophobic, and xenophobic dimensions of structural injustice that the monuments represent. (shrink)

What do we do when a beloved comedian known as "America's Dad" is convicted of sexual assault? Or when we discover that the man who wrote "all men are created equal" also enslaved hundreds of people? Or when priests are exposed as pedophiles? From the popular to the political to the profound, each day brings new revelations that respected people, traditions, and institutions are not what we thought they were. Despite the shock that these disclosures produce, this state of affairs (...) is anything but new. Facing the concrete task of living well when our best moral resources are not only contaminated but also potentially corrupting is an enduring feature of human experience. In this book, Karen V. Guth identifies "tainted legacies" as a pressing contemporary moral problem and ethical challenge. Constructing a typology of responses to compromised thinkers, traditions, and institutions, she demonstrates the relevance of age-old debates in Christian theology for those who confront legacies tarnished by the traumas of slavery, racism, and sexual violence. (shrink)