Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's World and Legacy

Abstract

These two camps include a wide variety of people: Christian and virtue ethicists, moral theologians and political theorists, and feminists. On the one hand, the defenders of virtue criticize the devastating effect of modernity on the life of communities and on the idea of the common good with the emergence of individual rights claims and relativism. On the other hand, the contemptuous of virtue see any shared notion of the good life as all-encompassing and dangerous to freedom. The author does not seek to criticize either side, but to promote Wollstonecraft’s thought as an alternative way of relating to virtue ethics today: a modern virtue that articulates concern for the common good and the legitimacy of rights (chapter 4&5). The great originality of the book is to dedicate Wollstonecraft’s contributions to current theoretical debates that cross Christian ethics and theology and political theory. For Wollstonecraft, theology and religion should be seen as garments of an inherited and everrevisable wardrobe of the moral imagination (p.317). If, as Wollstonecraft invites us to do, we see religion and virtue as revisable elements within our common moral imagination, then it is up to theologians to take responsibility for making these permanent adjustments and to conceive the public contribution of theology as a provisional ethics only.