Patricia B. Jung

2020 marks 100 years of women’s suffrage in the U.S. Considering this anniversary and the Christian presumption in favor of democracy, this essay invites readers to honor all those who worked for women’s suffrage in two specific ways. First, it invites them to tell the whole truth about the movement, both its many moments of grace and its moral failures. Second, it encourages readers to make the connection between this ambiguous legacy and ongoing forms of voter suppression in the U.S. and then to celebrate suffrage by finishing the fight for it.

In this essay I argue that childbearing and various kinds of organ donation are morally analogous activities. I argue, further, that the ethos of giftgiving ought to inform our analyses of both of these forms of bodily life support. This reframing of the abortion and organ donation debates yields new insights into two relatively neglected subtopics. First, though frequently asserted, few have demonstrated why bodily life support--especially in the form of childbearing--cannot be morally required. This comparison yields insights into the reasons for such an axiom. Second, while the giving of bodily life support is sometimes exhorted and almost always respected and admired, its intelligibility and political meaningfulness as a moral choice is rarely explored. This analogical wager reveals why one ought to give another bodily life support. In summary, the analogy yields insights crucial to the development of cogent arguments regarding both the grounds for and limits of the responsibility to give bodily life support. Further, the analogy displays the disparity between what has been demanded traditionally of those who are pregnant and of those men (and women) who by virtue of tissue or blood type can offer other forms of bodily life support. The analogy enables reflection on abortion (and organ donation) to develop in a context free of sexist biases. Finally, efforts are made to assess this giftgiving ethos in light of the feminist "hermeneutics of suspicion" regarding arguments which have and can sacralize victimization.

An account of character is developed on the basis of Ricoeur's philosophy of the will. Particular attention is paid to the role of the bodily involuntary in the process of character-formation. This augments the interpretation of the moral meaning of sanctification developed by Hauerwas. When interpreted in light of corporeality, sanctification entails not only a perceptual transformation but also an affective change in the agent's value orientation, the competent retraining of the agent's emotions, and the gracious triggering of an adoptive disposition toward the agent's incarnate situation. Finally, the rootedness of character in embodiment, with the attendant problem of automatism, indicates the limits of the usefulness of an "ethics of character" for moral theology.

It is my goal in this essay to articulate a nonsectarian conception of a distinctively Christian ethic which is congruent with the traditional theological nuances and anthropological assumptions of the Roman heritage. My argument hinges on three theses. First, theological convictions are not hypotheses which can be validated or falsified by reference to so-called "objective" fact. They are rather presumptions through which agents construe their world. Second, for an ethic to be distinctively Christian, its wisdom need not be absolutely unique to those who are explicitly Christian. Relative congruence between Christian and non-Christian sources of moral wisdom does not vitiate all that is distinctive about Christian ethics. Third, there are neglected resources within the Roman heritage which are supportive of a nonsectarian conception of a distinctively Christian ethic.