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As Christian ethics surveys the ongoing complexity in Gaza, much of the theological reflections come from Western Christian scholars, sometimes in dialogue with Islamic figures, but the Eastern Christian tradition is largely overlooked as an area of ethical discourse. This paper represents the important area of Levantine social ethics in diaspora, specifically the ways in which Arabic and Aramaic speaking communities have liturgized their experiences of genocide and displacement to offer descendant communities a unique social ethic that is non-Western and overtly decolonial. I examine how mass violence has impacted generational identity formation, informed by social science work on suicidality in multigenerational trauma, and then examine discourse on resilience from Eastern Orthodox communities abroad. I argue that the Eastern Orthodox moral tradition has formed language-protective traditions, ritual practices that commemorate experiences of displacement, and other cultural community protective factors which could provide an infrastructure for resiliency after trauma.
Moral traditions have consistently addressed the tragic fact of unjust suffering. The most prominent among the ethical responses are Stoic ones, which counsel apathia, ataraxia, and self-mastery as antidotes. These strategies can nurse complacency in the face of injustice, absorb individual suffering to some overall good, and turn one’s attention away from the historical plane. I propose an alternative by drawing from Mencius and Thomas Aquinas, who are often mistakenly assimilated to Stoicism. By attending to the centrality of lament and protest in them, I suggest a set of spiritual exercises different from Stoicism. I commend these exercises, not because they make catastrophe explicable or justifiable through theodicy, but because they render suffering culturally thinkable. Rather than demanding mental accommodation in the wake of injustice, moral tragedy is more properly seen as material for mutual recognition and a call for collective redress.
The tools of religious ethics are uniquely equipped to propose a vision of democracy as a theory of virtuous practice. Among the primary democratic virtues worthy of attention is hope - which I define as the just response to the tragedy-attuned. I contrast this vision with rival conceptions of hope, Augustinian and otherwise, where hope is understood as a merely internal disposition, where hope requires an object hoped in or hoped for, and where hope is understood to be solely future-oriented. I argue that hope instead is inextricable from the discursive practices endemic to its expression, and that the primary focal point of hope is one’s fellow tragedy-related-citizens for the sake of whom and with whom one is hoping. I conclude with meditations about the necessity of the recognition of tragedy for democratic practice.