The papers in this panel highlight the constructive value of the social sciences to illuminate theological and moral analysis in and of contexts marked by violence and structural inequality. Authors explore a variety of social scientific theories and a diverse set of contexts. These include how religion’s imbrication with schema development can help explain the existence of radically conflicting visions for the common good; how psychological accounts of global and local traits can inform theological reflection on the relationship between implicit racial bias and virtue formation; and how sociological work on collective trauma can further our thinking on the role of theology and religious doctrine in traumatization.
Even as Americans’ racial attitudes grow increasingly egalitarian, racial injustices persist. One recent attempt to address this attitude-act gap has been to posit the existence of implicit racial bias (IRB), that is, an attitude that operates outside conscious attentional focus and disposes individuals toward discriminatory behavior. The Race Implicit Association Test (RIAT) is most often used to measure IRB. Yet studies of the RIAT reveal that it is too inconsistent, too susceptible to irrelevant factors to gauge IRB. Situations attempt to salvage the notion of IRB by alleging that it is a feature of situations rather than persons. But this is question-begging. This presentation aims to preserve the concept of IRB by positing IRB as a local trait—that is, as a trait that activates in very particular contexts. This in-between position preserves the importance of both structural analyses of social ills and theologies that emphasize individual moral formation.
This paper argues from research on cognitive social psychology and cognitive sociology that some of the difficulties of explicating and achieving the common good emerge from the relationship of individual people’s schemas to widely held positions of moral concern. Challenges to common understanding and enactment of the social good occur, in part, because individuals’ schemas, their mental constructs of perceptions and knowledge, develop through individualized yet partially shared experience of social norms and multi-dimensional experiences of feeling, perception, knowledge, and practice. Hence when we speak to one another about the common good, or make efforts to enact it, one person’s multi-dimensional schemas intersect with another’s similarly concatenated ideas. To highlight this, the paper highlights how schemas are not two-dimensional like the images that represent them in textbooks. The common good turns out to be less a tidy picture than a creative collision and ongoing mixing and shifting of schemas.
The enactment of violence on a collective scale requires that coercive power be structured in both referred and direct ways. While religiously hued authority is often implicated in mass violence, it is not always well-understood how theology itself—highly specific doctrinal reasoning particular to a given religious expression—can serve as a crucial structuring force in coercive violence. Taking the recently theorized notion of “theologized trauma” as a starting point, this study engages the medieval Christian inquisitions through the lens of christology. When inquisitors engaged in Christianized acts of torture, what was their operative view of Jesus Christ and his seemingly irenic message? In exploring this difficult question, fresh dimensions of theologized trauma and communal violence are unearthed. In dialogue with ongoing work on collective trauma and the social construction of meaning, a threefold relation between religious doctrine and structured violence is documented and defended.