Leadership. Especially leadership in global context(s) is an undertaking fraught with complexity and it promises pitfalls to all who enter the process (great learning and joys too, but I\u2019ll leave that for the moment for another time).<\/p>\n
Yet, the setbacks need not happen as often as might have been and the dilemmas need not be as life and earth-shattering as they might have been each time they happen (though at times they still might well be fairly daunting) with recognition of some background schemas and understandings.<\/p>\n
Setting the stage with awareness for a variety of contexts is what Patrick Nullens and Ronald T. Michener are fully about discussing in their text, The Matrix of Christian Ethics: Integrating Philosophy and Moral Theology in a Postmodern Context<\/em>.<\/p>\n Nullens and Michener take readers through a broad (arguably, vast) overview of philosophical\/theological ethical inquiry spanning the ages. I happen to really like this kind of stuff, but for people who don\u2019t\u2026there\u2019s good news. First, they really deliver a ton of information reasonably succinctly in 244 pages. Considering the amount of concepts they cover, 244 pages is ironically, but truly, on the slim side. Second, they break conceptualizations down into really manageable categories; for example: premodern, modern, and postmodern. If you believe that you\u2019ll have trouble remembering some categories like the ones just listed above, now is a rational time to begin to exhibit some concern J (I\u2019m actually only half-kidding).<\/p>\n Being a person who values persons as a primary principle (note: this is not meant to suggest a complete and\/or wanton disregard of other ethical considerations) and one who seeks to follow Christ in our current era, I find myself highly resonating with the approach of the text. I understand the authors as having both maintained a \u201chigh regard for the Biblical text\u201d (of course this phrase needs to be clarified as many understand it differently \u2013 I\u2019m leaving you to read the text for a full sense of the authors perspective on this) and also recognized the inherent need for hermeneutic\/interpretive application.<\/p>\n I appreciate texts that both offer an overview, but also tip the authors\u2019 proverbial hat(s) as to their orientation. I find this honest and helpful. We all hail from various places and positions. Such hailing allows us to enter conversations from a nuanced vantage, add something particular in the midst of rescribing the general and, therefore, better contribute to conversation overall. In this case, as I read it, the authors of this text lean toward a postmodern (as they define it) appropriation of ethical inquiry and toward a Personalism\/Value Ethics orientation stemming from a Theocentric worldview.[1]<\/a> However, the previous noted, the authors expend significant effort to note that they recognize the overlapping and participatory aspects of all of the orientations about which they write. Essentially, they suggest that in all of the approaches offered there is a difference in emphasis rather than a dramatic difference in kind. For instance, while they might affirm the Value Ethics approach, they also recognize the \u2018progressional\u2019 (yep, I like the combination of progress, process, processional, progressive here) tendencies from values to character to duties to consequences \u2013 a sequence comprising four classic methodological approaches in ethics.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n Something I particularly appreciated encountering in this text and that has been a significant piece of my ethical\/theological formation over the past almost two decades is discussion of Jacques Derrida\u2019s work related to deconstruction and interaction with many of those who also engaged with Derrida\u00a0on this subject matter. Some of the related figures who either influenced Derrida, were influenced by him, or for whom the influence was reciprocal to certain extents that are mentioned in this text include: John Caputo, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Zygmunt Bauman, Immanuel Kant, Martin Heiddeger, Soren Kierkegaard, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, James K.A. Smith, Karl Marx, Franz Rosenzweig, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others.<\/p>\n Of course, it should be noted that listing all of these rather well-known figures in this way of starting out with the lens of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction situates them in a particular way within a particular discourse when of course they may well be taken many other ways as well. Really, in a nutshell, this is a significant overall point of\u00a0The Matrix of Christian Ethics<\/em> text we are considering. As we go about doing and thinking ethics we are situated beings and cannot rise outside of such situatedness \u2013 as Derrida renders such an understanding, Il n’y a pas de hors-texte<\/em>. We can move from one perspective of situatedness to another, but we can never remove ourselves from such constraints. The text suggests what it considers healthier and unhealthier ways in which to grapple with this situatedness and to live more ethically in the midst of the ambiguities of our non-foundational understanding, but our authors share the recognition of situated finitude.<\/p>\n For me, the discussion of ethics as relayed through the understanding of deconstruction \u2013 a process well aware of its situated finitude \u2013 allows for a justly engaged ethics. It is a humble ethics that recognizes the plurality of interpretive possibilities and yet, in its listening for multiple possibilities actually takes the person who is sharing into consideration to far greater extent than an ethics smug in its own knowledge which listens with only half an ear; just enough to figure out into which known legal principle or cultural norm it can pigeon-hole the conversation.<\/p>\n However, Derrida\u2019s work is not about relativism at its core (as some maintain), but instead about freeing people from the tyranny, the oppression of non-personalized, rigid, structural objectification. As the authors share about Derrida and deconstruction,<\/p>\n Interpretation is an inevitable part of being human. Everything we encounter inescapably demands interpretation. In saying this, however, he [Derrida] was not denying truth, reality, or the possibility of good or bad interpretations. Derrida\u2019s deconstruction was not about free-for-all-relativism for interpretations and denial of reality. Instead, it was affirming the ubiquity of interpretation. All human understanding is filtered through interpretive schemes, biases, cultures and backgrounds. Deconstruction seeks to bring these issues to light, to help recognize the latent prejudices causing the suppression of ideas and, often, the oppression of people and the prevention of justice.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n So, ethics. Should we have and practice them? Yes. Is it an area that is contestable, will be and should be contested? Yes. Is that healthy? Yes. Are there better and worse processes\/ways to go about all of this? Yes. What are some of these processes\/ways? Read the book.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Patrick Nullens and Ronald T. Michener, The Matrix of Christian Ethics: Integrating Philosophy and Moral Theology in a Postmodern Context<\/em> (Colorado Springs, CO: Paternoster Publishing, 2010), 37-45, 55-56, 61-64.<\/p>\n