'Judicious narratives', or ethnography as ecclesiology

Scottish Journal of Theology

Volumn 58, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 125-142

  Scharen, Christian Batalden ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61949114320     PISSN: 00369306     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0036930605000979     Document Type: Review

References (23)

1. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990);
2. by way of response, see the various review articles and Milbank's response in the special issue of New Blackfriars 73 (June 1992).
3. Fergus Kerr, 'Simplicity Itself: Milbank's Thesis', New Blackfriars 73 (June 1992), 306-10.
4. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 380.
5. Rowan Williams, 'Saving Time: Thoughts on Practice, Patience, and Vision', New Blackfriars 73 (June 1992), 319-26.
6. Williams, 'Saving Time', 321.
7. John Milbank, 'Enclaves, or Where Is the Church?', New Blackfriars 73 (June 1992), 341-52.
8. Milbank, 'Enclaves', 343.
9. Robin Gill, Churchgoing and Christian Ethics, New Studies in Christian Ethics 15 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 13-30.
10. And they have good Augustinian and Pauline reasons for doing so (to a point). But too strong a version of this division opens one to the charges Aidan Nichols puts to Milbank ('hermeticism') and James Gustafson puts to Hauerwas ('sectarian'). See Aidan Nichols, 'Non Tali Auxilio: John Milbank's Suasion to Orthodoxy', New Blackfriars 73 (June 1992), 326-32;
11. James Gustafson, 'The Sectarian Temptation: Reflections on Theology, the Church, and the University', Catholic Theological Society of Anerica Proceedings 40 (1985), 83-94.
12. Gill, Churchgoing and Christian Ethics, 43.
13. Steven Tipton, 'A Response: Moral Languages and the Good Society', Soundings 69 (1986), 165-80.
14. Stanley Hauerwas, Sanctify Them in Truth (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), 160.
15. Hauerwas, Sanctify Them in Truth, 160.
16. Nicholas Adams and Charles Elliott, 'Ethnography Is Dogmatics: Making Description Central to Systematic Theology', Scottish Journal of Theology 53 (Autumn 2000), 339-64.
17. Adams and Elliott, 'Ethnography is Dogmatics', 363.
18. This research also undergirds the author's book, Public Worship, Public Work: Liturgy and Ethics in Local Congregational Life (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 2004).
19. Penny Edgell Becker, Congregations in Conflict: Cultural Models of Local Religious Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
20. Michael J. Baxter, CSC, has convincingly defended Milbank as a true Augustinian rather than, as Hauerwas is, an Anabaptist. Thus this critique does not fall as hard on Milbank. See 'Whose Theology? Which Sociology? A Response to John Coleman', in Theology and the Social Sciences, ed. Michael Horace Barnes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000), 34-42.
21. One key text here is Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Stephen M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, revised 1994).
22. I am intrigued by the connection between Milbank's use of the term judicious and the strain of social science that thinks of itself as a practical science in the Aristotelian sense of that term. For more on social science as practical wisdom, see Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again, trans. Steven Sampson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
23. Robert N. Bellah, 'The Ethics Aims of Social Inquiry', in Social Science as Moral Inquiry, ed. Norma Haan, Robert N. Bellah, Paul Rabinow and William M Sullivan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 360-81.