Between Inculturation and Natural Law: Comparative Method in Catholic Moral Theology (original) (raw)

2013, Journal of Moral Theology

HE HISTORY OF CATHOLIC MORAL THEOLOGY may be understood as a developing conversation between the church and wider society that can be read in one of two ways. On the one hand, we can emphasize the distinctiveness of the church, drawing forth the moral implications of the creed to highlight differences between "church" and "world." On the other hand, we can focus on the nature of life in the church community, which will not only bring us into contact with the turbulence of its history but also its noble and beautiful struggles for love and truth. Depending on which line of emphasis one selects, the terms "church" and "world" will mean something different as will the conversation between them. In the following paper, we focus on the latter way of reading this conversation, and in doing so, we attempt to bring Catholic moral theology into dialogue with the comparative study of religion. We are concerned primarily with how religion has been understood in the pastoral life of the church. 1 We focus in particular 1 As a community of study in the North American academy (which we assume to be the primary readership of this journal), Catholic moral theologians work in an ecumenical environment in conversation with others interested in Christian ethics and the wider field of religious ethics, which is itself affected by scholarship in the critical, comparative study of religion and the comparative philosophy of religions. These will not be our focus here, although we will have a few comments on possible intersections between Catholic moral theology and these fields at the conclusion of our essay. While each of the authors of this essay has written for the wider audience of religious ethics, both share the conviction that deep comparative thinking across religious and cultural traditions is both possible and necessary for contemporary Catholic moral theology. While David M. Lantigua emphasizes primarily the accessibility of contemporary narratives of cross-culturally recognized moral exemplars, in conversation with historical-contextual approaches to understanding the meaning of basic moral concepts, David A. Clairmont emphasizes the trans-temporal and cross-cultural appeal of moral and intellectual struggle within religious traditions, revealed in historical studies of the relationship between a community's moral concepts and moral practices.