Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology, and the Imagination of the Human

by Michael Banner

Overview

Why do we have children and what do we raise them for? Does the proliferation of depictions of suffering in the media enhance, or endanger, compassion? How do we live and die well in the extended periods of debility which old age now threatens? Why and how should we grieve for the dead? And how should we properly remember other grief and grievances?

In addressing such questions, the Christian imagination of human life has been powerfully shaped by the imagination of Christ's life. Christ's conception, birth, suffering, death, and burial have been subjects of profound attention in Christian thought, just as they are moments of special interest and concern in each and every human life. However, they are also sites of contention and controversy, where what it is to be human is discovered, constructed, and contested. Conception, birth, suffering, burial, and death are occasions, in other words, for profound and continuing questioning regarding the meaning of human life, as controversies to do with IVF, abortion, euthanasia, and the use of bodies and body parts post mortem, indicate.

In The Ethics of Everyday Life, Michael Banner argues that moral theology must reconceive its nature and tasks if it is not only to articulate its own account of human being, but also to enter into constructive contention with other accounts—in particular, it must be willing to learn from and engage with social anthropology if it is to offer powerful and plausible portrayals of the moral life and answers to the questions which trouble modernity. Drawing in wide-ranging fashion from social anthropology and from Christian thought and practice from many periods, and influenced especially by his engagement in public policy matters including as a member of the UK's Human Tissue Authority, Banner develops the outlines of an everyday ethics, stretching from before the cradle to after the grave.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198722069
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/30/2014
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Michael Banner is Dean and Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. His publications include Christian Ethics: A Brief History (Wiley Blackwell, 2009) and Ethics and the Doctrine of God, edited with A.T. Torrance (T & T Clark, 2004).

Table of Contents

Preface and acknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Moral Theology, Moral Philosophy, Social Anthropology, and the State We Are In: On (the Lack of) Everyday Ethics2. Conceiving Conception: On IVF, Virgin Births, and the Troubling of Kinship3. Being Born and Being Born Again: On Having or Not Having a Child of One's Own4. Regarding Suffering: On the Discovery of the Pain of Christ, the Politics of Compassion, and the Contemporary Mediation of the Woes of the World5. Dying and 'Death before Death': On Hospices, Euthanasia, Alzheimer's, and on (not) Knowing How to Dwindle6. Contesting Burial and Mourning: On Relics, Alder Hey, and Keeping the Dead Close7. Remembering Christ and Making Time Count: On the Practice and Politics of Memory8. In Conclusion: Some Final (but not Last) WordBibliographyIndex

Editorial Reviews

"The complex interactions between ancient and medieval theology and practice, contemporary bioethics and biotechnology, and social anthropology in The Ethics of Everyday Life are simply remarkable...His bibliography alone, not to mention his theological and moral imagination, are a gift to Christian ethicists seeking to befriend social anthropology and think more deeply about the ethics of the everyday. If the possibilities are as salient as Banner s work in bioethics, then may such friendships increase."—Reading Religion

"Michael Banner's work long been known for its theological depth and analytic acuity. Here we have a comprehensive Christian ethics of the "everyday,' inspired by his profound engagement with recent developments in anthropology, enriched by that discipline's empirical attentiveness and sharpened by its rigorous, but (for theologians) under-appreciated, theoretical self-awareness. There is no other account of Christian ethics as freshly illuminating, as intelligently displayed, or as systematically powerful as Banner's. I recommend this book to anyone wishing a more intelligent and perspicacious Christian ethics; they will not be disappointed." —Charles Mathewes, Carolyn M. Barbour Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia

"When moral topics are discussed, we spend too much time fiercely debating controversial questions and too little time reflecting on the meanings of the relations, feelings, institutions and practices which the questions presuppose. That is one of the valuable thoughts pursued in this book. And whether you come to it as a moral philosopher, a moral theologian or a social anthropologist there is much to be learned from Michael Banner's challenging and moving reflections." —Jane Heal, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge.

"This book is an interdisciplinary tour de force. Michael Banner is a first-rate moral philosopher and theologian who has learned to think about the intricacies of social life like a first-rate anthropologist. He has written that rare kind of work that not only can teach you new things about topics you thought you knew well, but can transform the very way you think about them. Anyone interested in socially grounded moral philosophy or in the anthropology of morality or of Christianity should read it as soon as they can." —Joel Robbins, Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

"We have lots of talk about the morality of particular acts, but little understanding of why we, Christian or not, are drawn to certain patterns of behavior, certain forms of life. Michael Banner's new book, The Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology, and the Imagination of the Human, is a welcome corrective." —Comment

From the Publisher