Charles T. Mathewes

Augustinian Anthropology: Interior intimo meo

Our appreciation and appropriation of Augustines thought is hindered by assumptions which serious engagement with his thought makes both visible and dubious. His account of the dynamics of human knowing seems, at first glance, a jumble of confusions, but, once better understood, it helps transform both the terms and the framework of our epistemology. His account of human agency seems similarly confused, but also works, once rightly understood, to transform our vision of what agency is. Furthermore, Augustines different anthropological and metaphysical assumptions provide not only a platform for criticizing what modernity takes for granted but also resources for reconstructing three important issues in Christian ethics. A proper appreciation of Augustinian anthropology offers benefits, then, beyond the merely exegetical.

Pluralism, Otherness, and the Augustinian Tradition

Recent work on religious pluralism profits from the systematic theological framework offered by the Augustinian tradition, which uses interrreligious dialogue in the service of its larger “conversionist” purposes. In so using dialogue, the tradition transforms our vision of the epistemic problem of pluralism into the theological problem of otherness; interreligious dialogue reflects the selfs inescapable dialogue with God, and reveals the self as constituted by such dialogue. Thus, those more mundane forms of dialogue, which engage the self in conversation with others, offer opportunities for the further manifestation of the Divine love and the fulfillment of the divine purpose.

An Augustinian Look at Empire

This paper uses an Augustinian construal of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity to analyze and assess the diversity of challenges facing faithful Christian witness, particularly in the United States, since 9/11. After describing the diverse challenges to proper inhabitation of these virtues and how attempts properly to inhabit them will inevitably put adherents in some tension with the culture as a whole, it ends with some general comments about what this teaches us not only regarding the condition of Christian faith in the contemporary world but also about how to apply Augustines thought today.

Reconsidering the Role of Mainline Churches in Public Life

Recent sociological research suggests that the typical narrative of the “collapse” of mainline Protestantisms influence in American public life is misleading; rather than disappearing from public life altogether, the mainline churches are “quietly influential,” serving more as stewards of civil society and sites of potential civic engagement. As social scientists have shown time and again, in serving this role the churches remain of foundational importance for American public life. However, the churches could do much better in their direct engagement of public concerns, particularly in the messages that they send concerning economic and family life and regarding issues of race. They would do better to bring into richer communion their “spiritual” and “material” messages, and to argue more convincingly that, in all aspects of our lives, we are responding to God. The mainline churches could do this if they were to build on the theological insights of H. Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr. The author doubts that such a ressourcement will be forthcoming, but he nonetheless argues that the mainline churches remain the most promising religious resource for American public life, and that they are well worth fighting for.

“Love in a Time of Capital”: A Response to the Papers

The essays gathered here display the vitality of humanities scholarship about what must be considered a basic question for today: what are the powers enabling, and challenges facing, human efforts at understanding, communion, and eros in the contemporary world? Where did these powers and challenges come from, and how do they function? And what, if anything, might be done to confront and resist their characteristic deforming pressures on the lives of every human alive today? I find much to admire and affirm, and some things also to resist, in each essay. I think their insights and their blind spots are both due not simply to what I take to be contingent features of these essays as performances— idiosyncratic individual excellences and errors of judgment — but also from the inescapably particular, and blessedly diverse, disciplinary and methodological assumptions and constraints they each, divergently but inevitably, accept. Part of my overall point in this response is that we must find ways to incorporate the insights they each identify, and avoid the limits they reveal, if we are to stand any chance of saying something genuinely useful to humans attempting to get on with existence today. The frankness of some of my critical comments below is caused by my sense that with these four pieces I am speaking to thinkers who do not need to waste time with niceties. Let me begin by saying something about the title of this collection of essays. To talk about Love is, I take it, to investigate a possible normative category we may wish to value. Here I think we are asking questions about “love” as one way to ask basic questions about the prospects for some sort of satisfactory human life in our world. Yet we can never use the term uncritically. In modernity “love” has been represented as a very quicksilver form of attachment, and very distinctively valenced and specified in different historical times and places. It comes with many different dimensions pressed into its strata; and as Lloyd’s piece makes clear, there is a definite theological and transcendent dimension to the category that still leaves a trace of excess and self-transcendence, even in the most secularized accounts today. To talk about love in the context of Time highlights a distinctive historical frame for these inquiries, yet a frame that is somewhat plastic. “Time” is a term that suggests a quite tentative character to its assertions; it is far less pompous and political theology, Vol. 17 No. 5, September 2016, 486–495

Justice in This World

There is a good case to be made that the American criminal justice system is itself criminal. Up until around 1980, all statistics we have suggest that the incarceration rate varied at around 100 inmates per 100 000 people. After about 1977, and especially after about 1982, the rate began to rise; in 2008 it was over 700 prisoners per 100 000, and while it seems to have begun a modest decline in the past few years, it remains over 700. In this context, “American exceptionalism” is not an overstatement; the United States is effectively the largest incarcerator in the world; the only states near us are Cuba and North Korea. Furthermore, this imprisonment system is hugely racially discriminate: an African-American boy born today in the US has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison. More African-American men were in prison or on parole in 2013 than were enslaved in 1850. Finally, the criminal justice system is fundamentally punitive, not at all reformative. We incarcerate, but we do not correct. US prisons are factories of criminality—the best predictor of whether a person will be arrested in the future is whether that person has been in prison before. An observer from another planet would be well within her rights to say that, while this system bears some relationship to criminality, it produces criminality at least as much as removes it. Considered in itself, the above is terrible enough. But the cruel irony is that this situation has arisen in the face of a huge decline in actual crime rates. From 1993 to 2012, the violent crime rate across the United States dropped by 48 per cent. (And not, by theway, because the criminals have all been lockedup—better policing and changes in demographics have contributed farmore substantively to this change.) The last time violent crimewas at the levels it is at todaywas1963. Still, poll after poll shows that the US population believes crime continues to rise; hardly anyone cares that the system itself is so massively horrific. This makes the moral outrage of American criminal justice also an acute political problem: for how didwe come to be somisled about our situation, and about what we are doing collectively in response to it? Answering this question is not easy. The causes of this condition are many. As the work of scholars such as Marie Gottschalk and Derek Jeffreys makes clear, the United States has long had a troubled history with criminal justice, but recent decades have concocted a new combination of superficial moralism and legalism

Response to the Work of Professor Steiker

This brief response to Carol Steiker’s essay asks questions about the kind of contribution Christian theologians and ethicists can make to large pluralistic debates about criminal justice, and highlights several insights that it discerns in Steiker’s argument—insights that, it argues, require a theological register and idiom to be identified, and articulated, in their proper fullness.

Original Sin and the Hermeneutics of Charity: A Response to Gilbert Meilaender

Looking for a way to read the classic texts of Christian antiquity without treating them either as if they were written yesterday or as if they were archeological artefacts, the author endorses Meilaenders endeavor to develop the insights of Augustine in the modern context. He nevertheless suggests that a different way of drawing the analogy between sex and eating would better capture Augustines distinctive way of joining theology and ethics and would enable a more vigorous defense of Augustine against modern critics of his treatment of sexuality.

Agency, Nature, Transcendence, and Moralism: A Review of Recent Work in Moral Psychology

Recent work in moral and philosophical psychology provides valuable resources for religious ethicists, and this review examines contributions by Julia Annas, Annette Baier, John Bowlin, John McDowell, and William Wainwright. This literature raises important questions about the character of human moral beingas naturalistic, about whether an explicitly supernatural morality can be other than inevitably “moralistic,” and about how that might be so. Nonetheless, religious ethicists should appropriate it only with care, particularly in its emphasis on naturalism, and the partiality of its appropriation of ancient thinkers.