ethics

It seems that putting up a provocative Hauerwas quote without explanation is a bad idea. Which is fair because he usually requires some explanation and context. So, in lieu of a reply to a comment, here is simply "Take 2" on Hauerwas.

I must admit that until this week, I knew nothing of the beginning's of Mother's Day. Like Valentine's day, I wrongly assumed that it was yet another Hallmark Holiday, full of sentimentality and the idealization of motherhood, which is a noble but hardly sentimental or idealized profession (it is a profession, whether paid or unpaid!). How wrong I was! For the first time today, read in church, I heard the words of Julia Ward Howe, who apparently wrote something other than the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Over the last week I have been thinking about uncertainty and language (Gregory of Nazianzus), suffering and responsibility (where does this NOT come up?) and Human Rights (a panel proposal for SCE). In a presentation on icon, ethics and priesthood at this last AAR, I commented John Zizioulas’ and ethics, which he rejects as inherently reductionistic, based on an inevitable “polarity of good and evil.”

In his sermon, Fr. Paul emphasized the Canaanite woman's hope in asking Jesus, a member of an oppressive people, for mercy. Requesting mercy from the member of a group which historically excludes her and her people opens her to the risk of yet another rejection.... So, when do we risk asking for mercy, and when do we not? As a woman in a church whose praxis excludes women, sending them away from the altar much like the disciples ask Jesus to send the woman away at the beginning of the story, what does it mean to ask for mercy?

“In the process of healing the abused victim is also moving toward personhood as a gifted event. In the same way that depersonalization, “nonpersonhood”, happens in and through a set of relations, albeit violent, destructive and oppressive, personalization, the coming to personhood, being a person happens in relations of love and freedom. It is only in such relations, which presuppose the kenotic, and hence, ekstatic movement toward the other, that the abused victim is rendered a unique, free and unrepeatable being, a person."

In 1991, Zizioulas introduces the phrase, “ethical apophaticism… with which to indicate that, exactly as the Greek fathers spoke of the divine persons, we cannot give a positive qualitative content to a hypostasis or persons, for this would result in the loss of his or her absolute uniqueness and turn a person into a classifiable entity.”

Last month when I was at New Skete, Sr. Rebecca and I got into an interesting conversation about the emphasis on sin in the lenten season. Last night, I led an informal discussion about our experience of sin and the liturgy with the monks and nuns. At one point, Br. Christopher asked if there might be something to a 'liturgical ethic'. I jokingly responded that I certainly hope so, as my dissertation depends on the possibility. I also said that I think we tend to have a great vision for what is happening in the 'eschatological' space of the liturgy, but that as long as one among us is hungry, alone, sick, neglected, then I am not sure that our reality corresponds to our vision.