DESCRIPTION: This is a CATS doctoral seminar (for which students at the 800 level will register Fall and Winter, ET848A and ET848B), which is open in the Fall to a very limited number of master's students (ET548). We shall confront some constraints and constructive directions suggested by a postmodernist and communitarian criticism of Enlightenment influences on modern ethics. We shall analyze Michael Walzer's argument for how to make ethical arguments in the postmodern context, and use him as a comparison basis for analyzing other approaches. We shall seek to develop a constructive, historically situated understanding of love and justice that gives concrete guidance to community-formation and to the presently changing global economic environment and its impact on local communities.

RELEVANCE FOR MINISTRY: Church members and outsiders East and West are anxious about the impact of the global economy on their lives and on the future. Love, justice, and community are central to Biblical faith, and are pivotal to ministry to the lives of persons inside and outside the church. But in the modern cultural context, they have been either neglected, rendered vague and abstract, or set on a base that no longer holds.

COURSE FORMAT: Seminar discussions, in which we help each other understand, analyze, compare, and assess different understandings of love and justice in community. The seminar will meet weekly for three-hour sessions.

REQUIRED READING:

Bounds, Elizabeth. Coming Together/Coming Apart: Religion, Community, and Modernity. Routledge, 1997.

Rasmussen, Larry. Moral Fragments, Moral Community. Augsburg Fortress, 1990.

Stassen, Glen. "Michael Walzer's Situated Justice." Journal of Religious Ethics (Fall 1994).

_________. "Narrative Justice as Reiteration." In Ethics Without Foundations. Edited by Mark Nation, Nancey Murphy, and Stanley Hauerwas (Abingdon, 1995).

Walzer, Michael. Arguing About War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

_________. Interpretation and Social Criticism. Harvard University Press, 1987.

_________. Obligations. Harvard University Press, 1970. On reserve.

_________. Politics and Passion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004

_________. Revolution of the Saints. Harvard University Press, 1982. On reserve.

_________. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. Basic Books, 1983.

_________. Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad. Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1994.

Selected essays on Biblical understandings of justice, and selected essays by Walzer.

Bellah, Robert N., et al. Habits of the Heart. University of California, 1996.

Korten, David. When Corporations Rule the World. 2nd ed. Berrett-Koehler, 2001.

Okin, Susan Moller. Justice, Gender, and the Family. Basic Books, 1989.

Walzer, Michael. Exodus and Revolution. Basic Books, 1985; Just and Unjust Wars. Basic Books, 1977; On Toleration. Yale University Press, 1997; Radical Principles. Basic Books, 1980.

West, Cornel. Race Matters. Beacon, 2001; Democracy Matters. New York: Penguin, 2004.