Ethics in our time

One model of this approach is the United Methodist Church's program of creating Shalom Zones. The goal is for churches in a region to commit themselves to creating a zone of peace in the midst of communities disrupted by homelessness or addiction or poverty. The aim is precisely to operate at the local level, to work through existing church communities and with volunteers rather than through a social-service bureaucracy. The quality of these alliances varies, but there have been some remarkable successes in building networks.

HAUERWAS: Part of our problem is that we don't have many examples of what this grass-roots reflection and activity looks like. I'm impressed by the community-organizing work of the Industrial Areas Foundation. The IAF people are building community in a quite extraordinary way.

The other part of the problem is in the university, where so much of social ethics is located. It is not at all clear that the university knows what it's doing. Once the university decides, as it apparently has, that its primary function is not to provide the memory of a civilization but to produce new knowledge, then it's not obvious that the university is a very efficient institution for the job. IBM and Microsoft are obviously doing a better job of producing new knowledge. This development presents a major challenge to the enterprise called "Christian ethics."

Finally, I'd say we have to face up to the fact that we live in an imperial power. We live in Rome. Our main challenge as Christians is not to underwrite the presumptions of imperial power in the name of God.

HEIM: We may live in Rome rather than an incipiently "Christian America," but don't we still care about Rome's health care policy, or about Rome's welfare policy?

LOVIN: Churchpeople and people trained in social ethics need to participate in conversations about those issues. But if the question is how does the church make its witness, how does the church make a distinctive contribution, then I think it will be through activities that involve people at the grass roots and that involve paying attention to the people the rest of society has decided to ignore.

HAUERWAS: The problem with most policy-making is that it is determined by the economic model of rationality, which is more than happy to leave certain people out of the equation.

LOVIN: Society will soon wake up to the fact that we've been listening to public-policy ideas for 50 years and they haven't made a significant difference. That's why there is a move to other ways of addressing problems, a move to seeing what congregations are doing.

TOWNES: Yes, we live in a powerful nation. But it seems to me that the imperial power no longer rests with any government. What my colleague Larry Rasmussen calls "turbocapitalism" is the true imperial power. Governments are increasingly at the beck and call of transnational corporations. The "trans" is important, because it points to the fact that these corporations operate outside national boundaries and outside the cares and concerns of the people in those nations.