Jeffrey Stout

How Charity Transcends the Culture Wars: Eugene Rogers and Others on Same‐Sex Marriage

In 1994 the “Ramsey Colloquium,” under the leadership of Richard John Neuhaus, posed a challenge to what it called the “homosexual movement” within the Christian Church. The challenge was to prove that it had reasons distinguishable from secular liberalism—reasons consistent with orthodox Christian theology—in favor of same-sex coupling. Eugene Rogerss book, Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God, can be read as a response to this challenge. The book is important not only for the content of its arguments, which are imaginative and theologically rigorous, but also for the exemplary way in which Rogers exhibits charity in his account of his conservative opponents. Rogerss recent anthology, Theology and Sexuality, provides additional evidence that a new, more promising debate is arising within the Church, a debate that has some hope of transcending the rhetoric of the culture wars.

What Is It That Absolute Knowing Knows

ions of formations of spirit. If, however, that is correct, the conditions for the possibility of any such formation are social-historical. They belong to an unfolding dialectical process that includes all prior formations of spirit. This process is the absolute standard—in short, the absolute. III. WHAT HEGEL’S EPISTEMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT IMPLIES It should now be clear that Hegel’s epistemological argument has ontological implications. Once we have entitled ourselves to his ontology of spirit, as part of the best explanation of the standard of knowledge, we are also entitled to see what other problems it permits us to resolve. This, I believe, is where the more difficult issues of Hegel interpretation arise. The minimalist readers of Hegel are right, in my view, to interpret the epistemological argument initiated in the Introduction of the Phenomenology as a radicalization of critical philosophy, rather than as a return to precritical metaphysics. I have been trying to summarize how that argument goes, while drawing attention especially to the significance of paragraph 440, where Hegel announces that all formations of consciousness are in fact abstractions of formations of spirit, and to the significance of the final paragraphs of chapter 6, where absolute spirit makes its first appearance in the form of mutual recognition. Hegel never reverts to what Kant calls transcendent metaphysics, because doing so would involve accepting subjective idealism’s conception of the absolute as supersensible. Hegel says nothing to that effect. Neither spirit, nor absolute spirit, nor the absolute ðin the sense of that which determines the trueÞ is supersensible by Hegel’s reckoning. They do, however, exist, and Hegel is committed to their existence. Has he arrived at this commitment dogmatically or critically? I am claiming: critically, which is to say, by taking Kant’s critical ðtranscendentalÞmethod as an appropriate starting point, criticizing it on its own terms, and adjusting it with the aimof retaining its strengths andeliminating its weaknesses.Hegel’s ontology of spirit is required, he argues, to explain that in which the standard of knowledge, rightly conceived, consists or abides. It emerges as an entailment of critical philosophy when it is critically amended. And it requires the critical philosopher to identify, qua epistemological inquirer, with the allencompassing, diachronically conceived process that determines what content his commitments have, what commitments he is entitled to accept, and which commitments are actually correct. Taking critical philosophy in this direction is a way of making it selfconsciously dialectical. That Kant’s philosophy is also implicitly dialectical is something we can see by examining how he goes about resolving the impasse between empiricism and pre-Kantian forms of rationalism. Kant implicitly presents his own idealism as a successful attempt to explain the strengths and weaknesses of the earlier positions. Hegel’s conception of

Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents by Jeffrey Stout. Boston, Beacon, 1988. 338 pp.

We recognize in the “confounding of language” and the “scattering abroad” of the people of the earth that take place in the story of Babel (Gen. 1l:l-9) conditions of chaos and confusion that pertain to our own situation, not only in language but also in the moral life. The story may make us nostalgic for a time when “the whole earth had one language and few words,” moral pluralism, too, frightens us. It’s not that we don’t appreciate variety in human life (though some of us seem able to tolerate it only in small doses). But coming into contact with significantly different moral beliefs, norms, and ways of interpreting, speaking, and acting-distinct “moral languages,” to use the shor thand4an make us worry whether any morality can be relied upon as true. Does the diversity of moral languages condemn us to a relativism that leads inexorably to nihilism? Is morality undermined by its own multiplici-

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Democratic citizenship is typically discussed on an excessively abstract plane. My book, Blessed Are the Organized, is an attempt to bring the topic down to earth by taking readers on a journey in search of decent, concerned, hopeful citizens who might have something to teach us about how to live more democratically. The journey begins in New Orleans and Houston in the months after Katrina, moves to the borderlands of Texas, where countless shantytowns have been transformed into habitable neighbourhoods, and continues in various locales—some desperately poor, some not—in Arizona and California. In each of these places, citizens have stories to tell about the successes, failures, obstacles and hopes of grassroots democracy. The citizens all belong to a single network or organizations known as the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), which was founded in 1940 by the legendary and notorious Saul Alinsky. Nearly all of the stories told are about how congregations revitalize themselves and their surroundings by engaging in what they call broad-based organizing. Along the way, there are myriad lessons to be learned about how to acquire and exercise power, about the ends and means of ethical and efffective citizenship, about the massive power imbalance that increasingly threatens to overtake democratic hopes, and about how to improve on Alinsky’s approach to organizing. Chapters 15–17 of the book focus more specifijically on the question of religion and politics, while chapter 16, ‘Pastors and Flocks’, pertains to the roles