This is a guest post by Simeiqi He, co-editor of the latest book in the Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church book series. The edited collection, entitled Reproduction and the Common Good: Global Perspectives from the Catholic Tradition, is published in partnership between the Journal of Moral Theology, Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church, and Wipf & Stock. It is available in full via free download and will be available in hard copy in the coming weeks from Wipf & Stock. Catholic Moral Theology blog is hosting this series so that scholars can have a platform to engage, challenge, and amplify the voices of the book’s contributors. We are grateful to the editors of both Journal of Moral Theology and Catholic Moral Theology blog for fostering this partnership.
Almost two years ago in his audience with members of the International Theological Commission,[1] Pope Francis proposed three directions for theologians, including creative fidelity to tradition, a cross-disciplinary approach, and collegiality. He encouraged theologians to “go further, seeking to go beyond” in the spirit of “mutual listening, dialogue and community discernment, in openness to the voice of the Holy Spirit” and called for increasing the number of women theologians to deepen theology and make it more “flavorsome.”
Two and half years prior to Pope Francis’ proposal, a round table called “Reproductive Justice and the Common Good Virtual Table” was set in motion in July 2020 with the initial goal of bringing 10-15 scholars from around the world into dialogue for information sharing and solidarity. The current volume Reproduction and the Common Good: Global Perspectives from the Catholic Church is the fruit of this multi-year conversation, encounter, and collaboration. It is a living expression of Pope Francis’ vision for theological vocation and its fruitfulness.
The “virtual table” idea was first conceived in October 2019, when a group of scholars, including Emily, met in Munich, Germany to envision a way forward for the Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church network that would facilitate international collaborations without necessitating expensive in-person conferences. The “virtual table” vision was proposed to facilitate scholarly conversations across continents about the most pressing social issues facing the church and the world and to create spaces that is intentionally formative for younger scholars in the field.
The “Reproductive Justice and the Common Good Virtual Table,” among many other virtual tables, became a creative space that is both intimate and public. The late American cultural theorist Lauren Berlant has characterized the U.S. political public sphere as an “intimate public” sphere in her work The Queens of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, noting that “the intimate public sphere of the U.S. present tense renders citizenship as a condition of social membership produced by personal acts and values, especially acts originating in or directed toward the family sphere.”[2] The intimately felt impact of the Covid-19 global pandemic – which constituted the temporal context of the virtual table itself – and how it has shaped our discussions on a plethora of reproductive concerns, such as gender norms, child care, contraception, reproductive policies, ecofeminism, racism, clericalism, and seminary curricula, reminds us that the intimate public sphere is in fact a global atmosphere.
The current volume, which grew organically through multiple years of collaboration with scholars across geographical, ecclesial, and gendered boundaries, is a testament to such a global intimate public sphere, intensified by a shared theological vocation and commitment to the common good. While the virtual table facilitated the possibility of personal sharing, friendship building, mutual listening, solidarity, and shared activism among contributors, the volume extends a greater invitation to the Church and the global society by offering not only candid conversations, but profound reflections, sound analysis, and sage proposals. In her later works, Berlant noted that “an intimate public is an achievement,” where the first mass cultural intimate public in the United States is “women’s culture.”[3] Intimate publics are both “politically and institutionally mediated” and “emerging from shared spaces of the reproduction of life, thrive because of the extreme amount of contradiction they absorb about the range of possible, plausible responses to conditions of unfairness.”[4] They are “laboratories for imaging and cobbling together alternative construal about how life has appeared and how legitimately it could be better shaped not merely in small modifications of normativity.”[5] It is in this sense that the current volume is an achievement, for confronting the concern for reproductive health, the virtual table participants and volume contributors dared to go further in the face of paralyzing complexity, enduring insufferable impasse until the reproductivity of intellectual life bore fruit. To an extent, all the contributors were resounding Francis’ call before it was officially announced. Together, with all those who made its publication possible, the volume confirms both the creativity and fruitfulness of an expanding theological landscape inclusive of women, so theology is deepened, acquiring a new and richer “flavor.”
As the current volume is the fruit of doing “flavorsome” theology together, this introduction blog invites all to join the feast of joyful celebration, deep reflection, and further inquiry. It opens a blog series in which theologians from around the world are invited to taste and respond to each of the sixteen chapters of the book. Thus, the blog series continues the intensification of the global intimate public atmosphere, calling attention to the culture of life and its unceasing reproduction.
Simeiqi He, PhD, LMSW, is a Chinese Catholic theological ethicist and social worker. Currently, Simeiqi works as a Research Associate at the Yale Form on Religion and Ecology. She holds a PhD in Christian ethics from Drew University Theological School, a Master of Arts in Theology and Ministry from Brite Divinity School, a Master of Social Work and a graduate certificate in Women and Gender Studies from Texas Christian University, and a Bachelor of Science in Materials Physics from Sichuan University. Her writings have previously appeared in Journal of Moral Theology, Catholic Theological Review, Asian Horizons, and U.S. Catholic.
[1] Francis, Audience with Members of the International Theological Commission. November 24, 2022. https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2022/11/24/221124a.html. We translated to the US spelling for “flavoursome.”
[2] Lauren Berlant, The Queens of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 5.
[3] Lauren Berlant, Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), vii.
[4] Berlant, Female Complaint, xi.
[5] Lauren Berlant and Jay Prosser, “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant” in Biography 34, No.1 (Winter 2011),182.
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