Category: Uncategorized
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Imitating Christ in Magwi: An Anthropological Theology, by Todd D. Whitmore
Summary In his monograph, Whitmore takes his readers through a series of phases along his ethnographic journey: (1) attention (ch. 2-3), (2) discernment (ch. 4-6), (3) commitment (ch. 7), and (4) return (ch. 8). These phases organize the book and thus warrant basic definitions. Attention involves using sensory perception to notice “the way of being”…
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Saba Mahmood: The Politics of Piety
It is impossible to read Saba Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety in an American context without noting its publication year, 2005. While the book’s ethnographic research took place prior to 9/11, its theoretical contribution is inextricable from it. Specifically, Mahmood confronts the problem of feminist participation in the subsequent militant reaction to 9/11. She mounts…
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Cheryl Mattingly: Moral Laboratories
In Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life, Cheryl Mattingly employs years’ worth of ethnographic research with African American families facing illness and poverty to offer a moral anthropology that takes seriously the moral “experimentation” and even transformation that is a part of the everyday lives of the families she observed.…
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Jennifer Beste: College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics
In College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics, Jennifer Beste engages the experiences and perspectives of college students, in conversation with Christian ethicists and social science researchers, to reflect on the morality of contemporary sexual norms and behavior on campus. To do so, she enlists members of her classes as “student ethnographers”; much of the book…
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Michael Banner: The Ethics of Everyday Life – Moral Theology, Social Anthropology, and the Imagination of the Human
The Alder Hey Hospital case, where heart, fetuses, and thyme gland specimens were revealed to have been harvested and stored at the hospital without the knowledge of the parents of the deceased children, informed Banner’s research. The harvesting of the specimen was coupled with the bioethicists’ nonattendance to the parents’ needs and understanding of what…
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Welcome to Engaging Moral Lifeworlds!
You’ll post your contributions in a blog post like this one. Then, they’ll appear on the homepage for you and your classmates to see. To make a post, log in to ScholarBlogs and go to “Posts” in the left-hand menu. Then, click on Add Post and fill in your text! You can add images and…