Russian Orthodoxy in American Culture Wars

I confess that the "culture wars" engrossing (truly the apt word in so many ways) so-called American Christianity, already so swollen on reactionary politics and its various authoritarian fetishes, are things for which I have no patience left. But reading good scholarly analysis of the same, and seeing the connections between reactionary politics in America and Russia will make for very fascinating reading indeed when, later this year, the following book is released: The Moralist International: Russia in the Global Culture Wars  by Kristina Stoeckland Dmitry Uzlaner (Fordham University Press, December 2022), 208pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this: 

The Moralist International analyzes the role of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state in the global culture wars over gender- and reproductive rights and religious freedom. It shows how the Russian Orthodox Church in the last thirty years first acquired knowledge about the dynamics, issues, and strategies of Western Christian Right groups; how the Moscow Patriarchate has shaped its traditionalist agenda accordingly; and how the close alliance between church and state has turned Russia into a norm entrepreneur for international moral conservativism. Including detailed case-studies of the World Congress of Families, anti-abortion activism and the global homeschooling movement, the book identifies the key factors, causes and actors of this process. Kristina Stoeckl and Dmitry Uzlaner then develop the concept of conservative aggiornamento to describe Russian traditionalism as the result of conservative religious modernization and the globalization of Christian social conservatism.

The Moralist International continues a line of research on the globalization of the culture wars that challenges the widespread perception that it is only progressive actors who use the international human rights regime to achieve their goals by demonstrating that conservative actors do the same. The book offers a new, original perspective that firmly embeds the conservative turn of post-Soviet Russia in the transnational dynamics of the global culture wars.

Job and Greg Debate Ethics

Eastern Christians of the Byzantine tradition, immersed in Great Lent, will often celebrate a pre-sanctified liturgy whose authorship, at least in part, is attributed to St Gregory the Great. This towering pope of Rome is thus still thought 'orthodox' by the Orthodox, still regarded by them and the Latins as a saint, since he lived prior to the unpleasantness of 1054 and all that. 

So attention can and should still be paid to him and his writings, including a new translation, for release next month: Moral Reflection on the Book of Job, vol. 6, trans. Brian Kerns (Liturgical Press, 2022), 584pp. About this book the publisher tells us this:

Gregory the Great was pope from 590 to 604, a time of great turmoil in Italy and in the western Roman Empire generally because of the barbarian invasions. Gregory’s experience as prefect of the city of Rome and as apocrisarius of Pope Pelagius fitted him admirably for the new challenges of the papacy. The Moral Reflections on the Book of Job were first given to the monks who accompanied Gregory to the embassy in Constantinople. This sixth volume, containing books 28 through 35, provides commentary on five chapters of Job, from 38:1 through 42:17. The present volume contains the Lord’s appearing to Job out of the whirlwind, the Lord’s two lengthy speeches to Job and Job’s responses, and, finally, the Lord’s rebuke to Job’s friends and restoration of Job’s fortunes. Finally, Gregory speaks of his intention in writing this long work and requests that his readers grant him their prayers and tears. Includes comprehensive indexes for volumes 1-6.

Handbook of Christian Ethics

Starting a good decade or more now all the major academic publishers--led by Oxford, but followed by Cambridge, Routledge, T&T Clark, and others--got into "handbooks of" and "companions to" in a huge way. I have myself contributed to a few of them from Oxford.

Another one was released this year: The T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Ethics, ed. Tobias Winright (2021), 512pp. 

All the chapters range widely and look fascinating to Christians of every tradition. There are also at least two explicitly Eastern Christian chapters featured. About this collection the publisher tells us this:

The T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Ethics provides an ecumenical introduction to Christian ethics, its sources, methods, and applications. With contributions by theological ethicists known for their excellence in scholarship and teaching, the essays in this volume offer fresh purchase on, and an agenda for, the discipline of Christian ethics in the 21st century.

The essays are organized in three sections, following an introduction that presents the four-font approach and elucidates why it is critically employed through these subsequent sections. The first section explores the sources of Christian ethics, including each of the four fonts: scripture, tradition, experience, and reason.

The second section examines fundamental or basic elements of Christian ethics and covers different methods, approaches, and voices in doing Christian ethics, such as natural law, virtue ethics, conscience, responsibility, narrative, worship, and engagement with other religions.

The third section addresses current moral issues in politics, medicine, economics, ecology, criminal justice and other related spheres from the perspective of Christian ethics, including war, genetics, neuroethics, end-of-life decisions, marriage, family, work, sexuality, nonhuman animals, migration, aging, policing, incarceration, capital punishment, and more.

Christos Yannaras: Philosophy, Theology, Culture

For more than a decade now, I have used Christos Yannaras's The Freedom of Morality in my moral theology courses to good effect. There are parts of the book--like every other of his books, at least among the ones I have read--that drive me to distraction by sometimes indolent polemicizing, but even that is redeemed somewhat in stirring up vigorous classroom discussion. (I rather suspect that may be part of his point, and that he would not be displeased to learn this.)

This summer a paperback edition of a book devoted to Yannaras, which first appeared in 2018, was published: Christos Yannaras: Philosophy, Theology, Culture by Andreas Andreopoulos, Demetrios Harper (Routledge, 2020), 218pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Christos Yannaras is one of the most significant Orthodox theologians of recent times. The work of Yannaras is virtually synonymous with a turn or renaissance of Orthodox philosophy and theology, initially within Greece, but as the present volume confirms, well beyond it. His work engages not only with issues of philosophy and theology, but also takes in wider questions of culture and politics.

With contributions from established and new scholars, the book is divided into three sections, which correspond to the main directions that Christos Yannaras has followed – philosophy, theology, and culture – and reflects on the ways in which Yannaras has engaged and influenced thought across these fields, in addition to themes including ecclesiology, tradition, identity, and ethics.

This volume facilitates the dialogue between the thought of Yannaras, which is expressed locally yet is relevant globally, and Western Christian thinkers. It will be of great interest to scholars of Orthodox and Eastern Christian theology and philosophy, as well as theology more widely.

Killing the Inconvenient and Inefficient

In the mid- and late-1990s, I was a volunteer in the pastoral care department of a large nursing home and was saddened by the neglect of many people there who were simply warehoused away pending their expiration date, which their families certainly found inconveniently far off into the future. And several of the residents themselves, bored, lonely, and often in declining health, felt the pressure to do the decent thing by hurrying along to their graves. The experience of visiting the residents, and sometimes bringing them the Eucharist, bestowed on my far more gifts than anything my poor efforts might have given them in return.

It was during this time that debates in Canada over euthanasia began to emerge, and it was smack in the middle of all that that Pope John Paul II rightly raised his finger in his powerful and still entirely relevant encyclical Evangelium Vitae. Some wrote that off as the "abortion letter" but its critique of the idol and ideology of "efficiency," developed at some length in several parts of the letter, admits of very wide application today, including how we handle the questions of human disease, decline, and death.

As I was reading the late pope's letter, I was also smack in the middle of my Hauerwas period, where I read every one of his books then extant, and even had whole sections memorized. He was hugely influential for my development, and became, unexpectedly, a friend when I wrote to him about my difficulties defending my MA thesis, which was heavily indebted to him and Alasdair MacIntyre. Hauerwas has written a powerful foreword to the new book Euthanasia and the Patristic Tradition by Ioannis Bekos (James Clarke & Co., 2019), 284pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Euthanasia and Patristic Tradition presents secular and Christian bioethics as opposing forces in dialogue, highlights the importance of the Christian Patristic tradition in revealing disguised characteristics of bioethics in our era, and challenges the idea of individualism in modern societies through the development of a Christian individualism. While the book is focused on euthanasia, it also offers important perspectives on other ethical dilemmas. Ioannis Bekos applies Panagiotis Kondyliss theory for the emergence of worldviews as a function of power where all ethical theories have been proved to be subjective. Bringing together bioethical theories and just war theory, he exposes the disguised power claims of modern bioethics over human existence. Then, through an account of the history of thought, society, and politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Bekos delivers a profound critique of the idea of common morality, popular theories such as principlism and contractualism, ethicists like Peter Singer, and philosophers like Habermas. Using the works of St John Damascene and St Symeon the New Theologian, Bekos shows the fundamental elements of a Christian anthropology regarding the constitution of man, the character of pain and death, and the importance of the free will in man, offering a critique of modern bioethics.

Sex on Earth as in Heaven?

Desire seems to have become a topic of increasing interest on the part of theologians recently. I have read several new books and interesting articles recently, and will say more about them later this month. But for now I wanted to draw your attention to a new book I just received: Patricia Beattie Jung, Sex on Earth as It Is in Heaven: A Christian Eschatology of Desire (SUNY Press, 2018), 298pp.

About this book, the publisher provides the following summary:

Offers a new theology of desire and delight based on the Christian hope for bodily resurrection.

This work is part of a growing chorus of theological voices raised in support of erotic desire. Although most theologians have concluded that there will be no experience of sexual desire and delight in the world to come, Patricia Beattie Jung critically examines the historical traditions and biblical rationales for this teaching. She defends an alternative claim that there will be a healed and glorified experience of sex in heaven based on a compelling account of the Christian hope for bodily resurrection. The first half of the work focuses on Christian foundations for the notion of sex in heaven, while the second goes on to discuss some of the implications of those convictions for sex on earth. Jung concludes with discussions of how best to nurture sexual delight on earth and how and why internet pornography fails in that regard.

Why We Secretly Hate Freedom and Health

In having to choose books for next year for a moral theology class, I've had occasion to go back to old works I've used in the past, beginning with the Orthodox thinker Christos Yannaras's The Freedom of Morality, which I have often used over the years, having first read it a dozen or more years ago now. Like many of his books, it contains occasionally wild claims and polemical allegations, and Freedom of Morality in particular is grossly swollen on its own verbosity and badly in need of severe editing. Nevertheless, the core arguments still remain important in refusing the temptation on the part of too many Christians--Catholics especially--to reduce "morality" to some kind of discrete system or, worse, an ideology.

Following Heraclitus' famous aphorism that you cannot step twice into the same river, so I find that picking up books one has read several times over the years necessarily entails reading them differently as the river of one's life continues to move. So this time, in coming back to Yannaras, I read him in light of more recent reading along similar themes, including the social critic and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom.

Fromm, in turn, let me to Nikolai Berdyaev's Slavery and Freedom. I don't know if anyone has ever read Fromm and Berdyaev together, let alone written and analyzed their similarities, but they are plainly there in both books for everyone to see. This is not entirely surprising as both men were near-contemporaries in living through both world wars. Both were also shaped by Marxism and existentialism in different ways.

All three--Yannaras, Fromm, and Berdyaev--have been on my mind lately because I have, since reading Adam Phillips, been especially taken with two of his insights: first, that most of us do not really want to be free because we find ourselves too much to bear. It is easier to restrict our freedom through submission to someone or something else--ideology, alcohol, authority figures--than it is to bear our freedom in all its uncontained unpredictability and ill-defined spontaneity.

I think our dis-ease with freedom is what led to D.W. Winnicott's powerful aphorism (quoted in Phillips' short biography of him, but originally found in his book on the child) that "health is much more difficult to deal with than disease." If we are suffering and diseased (spiritually, psychologically, physically) we are bound and unfree. Perhaps perversely, many of us seem to prefer it that way. That is both stranger and yet more widespread than many of us realize.

Jesuits and Casuists: A Note on Understanding Amoris Laetitia

I was on a panel last spring with Matthew Ashley of Notre Dame talking about Francis's methods as pope, and alluded in passing to a book that very much bears mentioning now in light of this endlessly jejune furor in the Catholic Church over Amoris Laetitia. It is a book I read twenty years ago now in a graduate class on the history of ethics, and has remained with me both as a wonderfully written and deeply fascinating work of history, but also as a clear reminder of the importance of treating cases on their own terms, something which the Catholic tradition used to pride itself on doing. I went back to it for my lecture last spring, and found that it described, in often uncanny ways, the approach of Pope Francis to moral questions in the aforementioned exhortation and elsewhere.

Published in 1990 by the University of California Press, this book remains very timely in the Catholic Church today. I submit you cannot understand how and why Pope Francis operates as he does until you read Stephen Toulmin and Albert Jonsen in The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning.

Equally I submit you cannot understand why his opponents (including authors of that "filial correction") are driven to apoplexy by the man until you realize, thanks again to Jonsen and Toulmin, that this pope is not content with abstract denunciations or universal declarations that fail to discern their particular applications in the context of individual lives. As the authors note of the early Jesuit leaders, "they prepared their charges to meet problems of conscience with 'discernment'--a favourite Jesuit word." Anyone who has read and listened to Pope Francis knows that 'discernment' remains if not his favourite word then certainly one of his most frequently uttered. He is a Jesuit casuist of the old school. Understand that and you understand something fundamental about the man.

Alasdair MacIntyre on Ethics Amidst the Conflicts of Modernity

One cannot do any sort of serious philosophy or theology today without attending to the context in which we live, a context that nobody has done more, in the realm of moral philosophy, to analyze than the greatest moral philosopher of our time, Alasdair MacIntyre. A new book by him--who is now well into his 80s--is therefore a signal event of capital importance. Just released at the end of the year is his Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 322pp.

MacIntyre has often been quoted, but too often those quoting him the most, or most often, have read him too little, as I have demonstrated and others too--most especially on the questions of conflict between monastic communities and Christian churches (variously understood) and the modern nation-state. MacIntyre is a careful thinker, and part of thinking with MacIntyre means taking the time to read him carefully, and to think about the implications of what he says. I wrote an MA thesis on him almost 20 years ago, and one of the many admirable things I found about him was how often he was willing to say "I know this requires more work" or "I thank my critics for pressing me to think more deeply about...." His genuine openness to recognizing what needs more work, or correction, or even outright retraction is refreshing to see today, and rarer than one might think among contemporary academics.

About this newest book of his the publisher tells us:

Alasdair MacIntyre explores some central philosophical, political and moral claims of modernity and argues that a proper understanding of human goods requires a rejection of these claims. In a wide-ranging discussion, he considers how normative and evaluative judgments are to be understood, how desire and practical reasoning are to be characterized, what it is to have adequate self-knowledge, and what part narrative plays in our understanding of human lives. He asks, further, what it would be to understand the modern condition from a neo-Aristotelian or Thomistic perspective, and argues that Thomistic Aristotelianism, informed by Marx's insights, provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enable and require us to act against modernity from within modernity. This rich and important book builds on and advances MacIntyre's thinking in ethics and moral philosophy, and will be of great interest to readers in both fields.

And we are given the table of contents:

Preface

1. Desires, goods, and 'good', the philosophical issues
2. Theory, practice, and their social contexts
3. Morality and modernity
4. Neo-Aristotelian ethics and politics developed in contemporary Thomistic terms: issues of relevance and rational justification
5. Four narratives
Index.

I wrote to Prof. MacIntyre to see if he would be willing for me to drive up to South Bend to interview him about this book, but he wrote a gracious and kind letter in response saying that some time ago he took the position to refuse all further interviews. There have, in fact, been at least three over the years I have read to great profit, but I had hoped to add to those interviews by talking about his forthcoming book.  Alas, it is not to be. (I do not for a moment begrudge MacIntyre, now well into his 80's, for husbanding his energies selectively, as I should also do at that stage--especially when confronted with letters from provincial academics one does not know!)

For those few who do not know his work, MacIntyre really burst onto the scene with his 1981 book After Virtue, updated in 1984 and released in a third edition in 2006. This is arguably his best known and most widely read book whose ringing peroration has inspired some people with a notion of a "Benedict option" for Christians of our time, though MacIntyre himself greatly regrets that line, and it has other problems I documented here. In addition, such "option" talk is not nearly as new as some seem to think. Jonathan Wilson, e.g., already wrote along these lines in his 1997 book Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World: Lessons for the Church from MacIntyre's After Virtue. 

Many Christians have found MacIntyre's work very useful in a variety of projects--e.g., ecclesiology, moral theology of course, and much else besides. His work has been ecumenically engaged by Christians of all traditions, though Eastern engagement, as with many things, has tended to lag behind Protestant and Catholic engagement for several reasons.

Perhaps none has engaged MacIntyre more, nor forced other Christians to do so theologically, than Stanley Hauerwas, beginning with his collection of 1981, Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy. Pick up almost any book by Hauerwas and you can expect to find him telling you how much he is indebted to MacIntyre.

The 1981 publication of After Virtue was MacIntyre's first full-length book in a long time. Part of its success, I maintain, lies in its style: it is an extended narrative of "how we got here." It is not the usual horrid, turgid, incomprehensible analytic philosophy one (despairingly) finds in parts of 20th century academic philosophy. Instead, it tells a story of how philosophical developments have led us to the emotivism of our time. Ranging widely from Aristotle to Aquinas, from Kant, Hume, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche to Gewirth, Anscombe, and Davidson, MacIntyre shows the dead-ends to which we have come in our moral, social, and political lives by being trapped by emotivism.

He posits two ways out of this: a Nietzschean way or an Aristotelian, here and elsewhere arguing for the superiority of the latter (while also "ransacking," as it were, Nietzsche and others, including Marx, for what may be useful). Anyone who foolishly imagines that a book of moral philosophy written more than a quarter-century ago now must be hopelessly out of date has not been attending to any political discussion in 2016, or for decades before that. It remains as vital and helpful in understanding our world as ever, and I regard the reading of After Virtue as obligatory for anyone today who claims to have a post-secondary education.

Much of his writing before After Virtue was piecemeal and later gathered into such collections as Against the Self-Images Of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy, first published in 1971. I read this book in the 1990s, when John Spong fancied himself an avant-garde figure but in reality offered tiresome clap-trap too bloated on its own eminence to rise to the level of intellectually serious heresy. Thus I realized that one could easily substitute a figure such as Spong (a real "Dr. Spacely-Trellis, the go-ahead Bishop of Bevindon” if ever there were one!) for those who come in for withering criticism in MacIntyre's book, which included wonderfully acerbic reviews of then-new publications by such Church of England heretics bishops as John Robinson (Honest to God)--to say nothing of others such as Bultman and Tillich, all of whom, MacIntyre suggests, seem engaged in some strange project of concocting a vaguely religious-sounding atheism to comfort bourgeois academics who would have us believe that "what Jesus really meant turns out to have been an anticipation of Martin Heidegger, and when the gospel is demythologized a theistic existentialism is what remains." In the end, such a project is summed up in one of MacIntyre's many memorable perorations: "the creed of the English is that there is no God and that it is wise to pray to him from time to time."

In the 60s and 70s, MacIntyre had published some longer monographs as well, though these are not as well known. Of that period I would argue that A Short History of Ethics remains important, not least in showing MacIntyre's historicizing project and his work very much as an historian of philosophy in particular (which would reach fullest flower in After Virtue), but an intellectual historian in general as well.

Perhaps, for Christians today, his most significant and lasting book from this period remains Secularization and Moral Change, about which I noted a few things here.

After writing After Virtue, MacIntyre recognized just how much further work was to be done in order to demonstrate, verify, and even amend many of his claims in that book. Thus After Virtue has been regarded as the first volume of a trilogy, followed in 1988 by Whose Justice? Which Rationality? This is a longer, denser work than AV, and concentrates in good measure on the so-called Enlightenment in its various forms as well as more recent modern philosophers.

The third volume of the trilogy began its life as the prestigious Gifford Lectures in Scotland, and was published afterwards, in 1990, as Three Rival Inquiries of Moral Inquiry. This, too, is another example of historical "display" by MacIntyre albeit in different form than the two earlier books. Perhaps the two most important chapters here are his justification of pedagogical authority via a reading of St. Augustine, and then his calling for the overhaul of the modern university as an institution, and the modern lecture within it. 


I wrote my MA thesis on MacIntyre in 1997, and so ended with his then-latest book, Three Rival Inquiries, wondering what books we might expect from him next. I had several ideas--as did many others--as to where we thought he needed to go next, but his two books around the turn of the century were, to me at least, considerable surprises. Thus in 1999 we had Dependent Rational Animals and then in 2006 we had Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913-1922.

I have written elsewhere several times about the latter book especially. As for the former, Artur Rosman's essay, here, accords well with my own views about this astonishing, under-appreciated book, which I have used in undergraduate ethics classes.

I attended the launch, in 2010 at Notre Dame, of God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition. This came in the aftermath of the Jenkins-Obama debacle at UND, and while he didn't get into the matter directly even when pressed by a questioner, it seemed very clear to me he thought Jenkins guilty of treachery towards the Church and any university that takes itself seriously as Catholic. It was also an occasion to hear from MacIntyre why it took him so long to write After Virtue--why, that is, there was such a long gap between his last book in the early 70s, and the appearance of AV in 1981--and he answered with a disarming shrug, "Because I didn't think I had much to say before then." Would that more academics felt such apophatic restraint as we continue to drown under too many publications!

Since the book launch was about a book devoted in part to the nature of higher, and specifically Catholic higher, education, one questioner asked for MacIntyre's views on whether his conception of the teacher-student relationship was undermined by having students write evaluations of professors each semester. I shall never forget MacIntyre's wildly applauded and bracing answer: "Student evaluations are of the devil. Next question?"

In addition to all the foregoing monographs and collections, some of MacIntyre's most important pieces are also to be found in articles. I still regularly refer people to his very useful essay on epistemological crises, which was reprinted in The Tasks of Philosophy: Volume 1: Selected Essays. In this collection also we have reprinted his essay on first principles, which was published in a very small book after having been given as the Aquinas lecture in 1990 at Marquette.

In addition, Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays Vol. 2 contains an essay I have very often referred to, an essay Eastern Christians in particular would do well to study: "Poetry as Political Philosophy," one of the earliest places where MacIntyre begins to describe and denounce the "dangerous and unmanageable institution" of the modern nation-state in all its pomps and works--which he memorably disdains as no more substantial than the accoutrements of the "telephone company."

Moreover, his "Toleration and the Goods of Conflict" remains an important cautionary warning for Christians seeking to build communities of any sort today.

In sum, picking up any book of MacIntyre's will give you a lifelong supply not just of "things to think about" but a whole new way of thinking about thinking, of imagining the world we live in today--a new epistemology inextricably tied up with a new politics containing a new moral philosophy. Thus there are, to use one of his better known phrases, goods internal to the practices of reading. Tolle, lege. 

Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity

When it first appeared in 2008, I read with great interest Susan Wessel's fascinating and important study, Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome. Among other things, it sheds important light on Leo's role in the Council of Chalcedon, including its famous controverted 28th canon about patriarchal jurisdictions and so-called Roman pre-eminence. Wessel's considerable achievement was to show that Leo--pace later Eastern fears--was not engaged in a campaign of self-aggrandizement at the expense of the East. In fact, both Rome and Constantinople misunderstood the motives and actions of each other when, in fact, it seems they were both concerned about maintaining ecclesial affairs in their own spheres "decently and in good order," without trying to one-up each other.

Now we have another book from Wessel, published just this summer: Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 290pp.

The publisher, who has made this book available both in print and in a Kindle format, tells us the following about the book:

This book examines how the early Christian elite articulated and cultivated the affective dimensions of compassion in a Roman world that promoted emotional tranquillity as the path to human flourishing. Drawing upon a wide range of early Christians from both east and west, Wessel situates each author in the broader cultural and intellectual context. The reader is introduced to the diverse conditions in which Christians felt and were urged to feel compassion in exemplary ways, and in which warnings were sounded against the possibilities for distortion and exploitation. Wessel argues that the early Christians developed literary methods and rhetorical techniques to bring about appropriate emotional responses to human suffering. Their success in this regard marks the beginning of affective compassion as a Christian virtue. Comparison with early modern and contemporary philosophers and ethicists further demonstrates the intrinsic worth of the early Christian understanding of compassion.

We are also given the table of contents here and an excerpt here.

Those Sexually Conflicted Romans

A visitor from another planet today would be forgiven for thinking that Catholic and Orthodox Christians (and others, too) must be monsters for their denial of the so-called right to so-called same-sex marriage. This absurd issue, which twenty years ago would scarcely have been entertained by anyone as a serious proposition, is today routinely used in the media as proof of the retrograde nature of Christian sexual ethics--all those poor gays and lesbians being picked on by the big bad old Church. What a tiresome lot of claptrap this all is. And how things have changed! As Kyle Harper's new book From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Harvard UP, 2013), 316pp. makes clear, there was a time when Christians were excoriated in the opposite direction--for being far too willing to grant dignity to people previously treated as sexual slaves.

About this book we are told:

When Rome was at its height, an emperor’s male beloved, victim of an untimely death, would be worshiped around the empire as a god. In this same society, the routine sexual exploitation of poor and enslaved women was abetted by public institutions. Four centuries later, a Roman emperor commanded the mutilation of men caught in same-sex affairs, even as he affirmed the moral dignity of women without any civic claim to honor. The gradual transformation of the Roman world from polytheistic to Christian marks one of the most sweeping ideological changes of premodern history. At the center of it all was sex. Exploring sources in literature, philosophy, and art, Kyle Harper examines the rise of Christianity as a turning point in the history of sexuality and helps us see how the roots of modern sexuality are grounded in an ancient religious revolution.

While Roman sexual culture was frankly and freely erotic, it was not completely unmoored from constraint. Offending against sexual morality was cause for shame, experienced through social condemnation. The rise of Christianity fundamentally changed the ethics of sexual behavior. In matters of morality, divine judgment transcended that of mere mortals, and shame—a social concept—gave way to the theological notion of sin. This transformed understanding led to Christianity’s explicit prohibitions of homosexuality, extramarital love, and prostitution. Most profound, however, was the emergence of the idea of free will in Christian dogma, which made all human action, including sexual behavior, accountable to the spiritual, not the physical, world.

Allah: A Christian Response

In my classes on Eastern Christianity and the Encounter with Islam, I am regularly asked how a Christian ought to view Allah. Is the God of the New Testament the same as the God of the Quran? Are they completely and irreconcilably different figures? Are there similarities between them? And is it more important to understand the similarities or emphasize the differences? Too much of the emphasis, for obvious political reasons, has been lately on emphasizing similarities, almost invariably at a cost of being completely truthful and faithful to both Christian and Islamic theological sources. Following Stephen Prothero, in his fascinating new book, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World I take a dim view of efforts to conjure connections or suggest similarities solely to make people feel good while holding hands and singing Kumbaya. Those who do that either do not know what they are talking about or are being deliberately obscurantist in their approach, or both. The responsible approach, it seems to me, is to allow both Christian and Islamic traditions to speak for themselves without forcing them together artificially--but equally without polemically blasting them apart into two solitudes. 

These are questions that animate a new book by Myroslav Volf, Allah: A Christian Response (HarperOne, 2011), 336pp.

About this book, the publisher says:

Three and a half billion people—the majority of the world’s population—profess Christianity or Islam. Renowned scholar Miroslav Volf’s controversial proposal is that Muslims and Christians do worship the same God—the only God. As Volf reveals, warriors in the “clash of civilizations” have used “religions”—each with its own god and worn as a badge of identity—to divide and oppose, failing to recognize the one God whom Muslims and Christians understand in partly different ways.

Writing from a Christian perspective, and in dialogue with leading Muslim scholars and leaders from around the world, Volf reveals surprising points of intersection and overlap between these two faith traditions:

• What the Qur’an denies about God as the Holy Trinity has been denied by every great teacher of the church in the past and ought to be denied by Christians today.

• A person can be both a practicing Muslim and 100 percent Christian without denying core convictions of belief and practice.

• How two faiths, worshiping the same God, can work toward the common good under a single government.

Volf explains the hidden agendas behind today’s news stories as he thoughtfully considers the words of religious leaders and parses the crucial passages from the Bible and the Qur’an that continue to ignite passion. Allah offers a constructive way forward by reversing the “our God vs. their God” premise that destroys bridges between neighbors and nations, magnifies fears, and creates strife.

I've already started reading it, and will have more to say about it on here later.

Christian Bioethics

Earlier I briefly mentioned the recent publication of a collection of articles treating the thought of the Orthodox bioethicist H. Tristram Engelhardt: Ana Smith Iltis and Mark Cherry, eds., At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. (Scrivener, 2009), 336pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

At the Roots of Christian Bioethics explores Professor H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.'s pursuit for the decisive ground of the meaning of human existence and knowledge of appropriate moral choice. Engelhardt has been the most influential, cogent, but critical voice within bioethics of the past several decades. The essays in this volume compass epistemological, methodological and topical contributions to bioethics, political theory, and Christian theology. Each explores Engelhardt's diagnosis of the contemporary social and cultural crisis, seeking to make sense of the decidedly post-Christian and often openly anti-Christian ethics that dominates public morality and politic policy. Each author investigates Engelhardt's personal and tireless enquiry to secure ultimate moral foundations as well as to recognize the full implications of the results of his investigations: that Christian bioethics does not originate in human reason but in the command of God. The book should be read by bioethicists, philosophers, religious scholars, public policy experts, and the Orthodox faithful.

Engelhardt is a fascinating figure, with degrees in both medicine and philosophy. He became Orthodox later in life, after publishing landmark works like The Foundations of Bioethics and then realizing his arguments would not hold up without a coherent theological metaphysic behind them. That led to the publishing, four years later, of The Foundations of Christian Bioethics.

I asked the Greek Orthodox theologian and ethicist Stanley Harakas to review At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr for Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, and we will be running his review in the fall.

Harakas is a prolific fellow, having written an introductory text to Orthodoxy (Orthodox Church: 455 Questions and Answers), a work on liturgical participation (Living the Liturgy: A Practical Guide for Participating in the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church), a book on Orthodox social teaching (Let Mercy Abound: Social Concern in the Greek Orthodox Church), two on marriage (Intermarriage: Orthodox Perspectives; Guidelines for Marriage in the Orthodox Church), and numerous other works besides. But he is best known for his work on Orthodox moral theology, beginning with his Toward Transfigured Life: The Theoria of Eastern Orthodox Ethics and continuing on in other works, especially his Wholeness of Faith and Life: Orthodox Christian Ethics: Church Life Ethics. He has also addressed moral theology in several other shorter works, including  Contemporary Moral Issues Facing the Orthodox Christian, Living the Faith: The Praxis of Eastern Orthodox Ethics, and  Health and Medicine in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition.

Harakas discusses At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr in compelling detail, noting, inter alia, that "any reader will be challenged and forced into reflection with the reading of these essays." The book, he says, "offers hope and lines of potential communication in coming to a more complete and satisfying understanding of the challenge of a twenty-first-century discipline of bioethics in general and Christian bioethics in particular."

To enjoy the rest of his review, which will be featured in the fall issue of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, subscribe here.