Ethical reflection is often concerned with responsible action—identifying problems, imagining alternatives, and promoting steps to achieve a brighter future. But we are in a moment that is characterized by unpredictability, a bombardment of moral demands, and pervasive harms. Trauma and crisis fatigue make it difficult for many people to imagine anything beyond survival. These papers explore how the field of religious ethics helps us understand and respond to this felt lack of agency. Do the experiences of the traumatized, demoralized, and compassion-fatigued complicate existing moral paradigms? What does responsibility look like when one’s capacity to respond has been overwhelmed? Do we need to be able to envision a better world to withstand the crises around us?
This paper interrogates the moral meanings of enduring historical crises for agents caught in their wake. It begins with Christina Sharpe’s insight that the evil of chattel slavery adheres recalcitrantly to contemporary agents; it continues to affect us and risks depleting our moral capacities. I consider three alternative conceptions of this affective grip of purportedly irreparable evils (Bordieuan habitus, Deleuzian affect, and neo-phenomenological atmospheres) before outlining a constructive account of atmospheric adhesion. This reveals the paradoxical predicament of creatures seized by an infinite demand to repair evils that exceed our capacities to respond adequately. But it also indicates the more primordial, pathic dimension to agency that Bernhard Waldenfels’s “responsive ethics” attempts to articulate. I argue that recent theological formulations of this lived-bodily pathos present a picture of moral agency that remains intact with even a clear-eyed view of the gratuitous threats of agential depletion posed by irreparable evils.
This paper will explore the concept of “good boundaries,” particularly as they relate to ethical responses to the ongoing homelessness crisis in the United States. This paper will consider how blanket understandings of good boundaries as virtuous can shape interactions between housed and unhoused people in unhelpful ways that ignore the complexity of people’s circumstances and further perpetuate economic segregation. Drawing from sources in Christian ethics as well as ongoing ethnographic research in a Christian church that prioritizes fostering community inclusive of its unhoused neighbors, this paper will explore how relationships across class differences nurture our ability to imagine more mutually beneficial ways of living well together. This paper will consider the limits and possibilities in a particular community’s practices of relationally discerned and ever-evolving boundaries, offering insight with broader implications for how ethical discernment within communities can help us to envision our collective well-being in the face of crises.
This paper turns to Thomas Aquinas’s moral anthropology and theory of emotion to explore the felt lack of agency associated with feelings of despair. I argue that a distinction between a felt lack of moral agency and a diminished agency to put one’s moral values into action enables us to consider how quotidian activities, such as reading or watching news media, might cause two different yet related forms of moral injury. I begin by developing a working definition of moral injury with reference Joseph Wiinikka-Lyndon’s (2021) Murdochian account. I then use the ethical theory of Thomas Aquinas to offer a distinction between moral feeling and moral agency. I contend that this distinction aligns with forms of moral injury which I refer to as “moral injury-as-feeling” and “moral injury-as-diminished agency.” This distinction draws attention to the importance of daily practices to prevent feelings of despair from developing into habits of despair.
Ecological crises now displace growing numbers of individuals and communities. Many seek refuge in societies that greet them with ambivalence or hostility. Public discourse frequently minimizes their suffering. This paper examines how constant crisis overwhelms individual and institutional moral capacity, producing a widespread sense of diminished agency among both displaced populations and those who encounter them. Drawing on Mary Douglas’s concept of “matter out of place,” I show how dominant narratives render displaced suffering morally illegible, deepening the trauma of exclusion. I analyze mutual aid food-sharing initiatives as counter-rituals that respond to exhaustion by creating spaces for collective action. These gatherings reject bureaucratic state aid and cultivate a horizontal ethos of kinship. By transforming public spaces into temporary commons, shared meals restore the capacity to respond through tangible forms of solidarity in the present.