Michael Banner’s The Ethics of Everyday Life (the published version of his 2013 Bampton Lectures) is a stimulating contribution to contemporary Anglican moral theology. Banner asks: ‘how can the Christian imagination … be brought to bear on our conceivings, births, sufferings, deaths, and burials, for the sake of fashioning an everyday ethics which would support and sustain a Christian form of human being’ (p. 34)? To answer this question, he argues that moral theology must reject moral philosophy as a dialogue partner, and instead engage social anthropology and works of art as sources of insight into the human person. This is because the hard cases approach characteristic of utilitarian and Kantian philosophy cannot make meaningful sense of human desires and choices, and so does not adequately address everyday ethical concerns. What is needed instead is a descriptive account of the Christian moral imagination, understood as ‘the framework of perceptions, meanings, emotions, concepts, and attitudes’ (p. 28) that informs moral choices in everyday situations.
Banner advances this line of thought in eight chapters. Beginning with an assessment that contemporary moral theology lacks an everyday ethics because it is too focused on hard cases, he then discusses infertility and IVF, the value of children, the meaning of suffering, hospice care and euthanasia, burial and lament, and practices of remembering. By drawing from ethnographies and works of art that reframe these topics, Banner crafts a moral imagination that fosters ‘the practice and enactment of human being after the measure of Christ’s human being’ (p. 209).
In the course of making this argument, Banner evinces three classically Anglican tendencies. First, his account is based on Christology, antiquity, and empirical data gathered by human reason. The theological heart of the book is the Apostle’s Creed, and Banner develops this Christology using insights from Augustine’s treatises and sermons, and ethnographies of the past and present. Beginning with Christology secures the value of embodied human life, and the addition of Augustine and anthropology reveals that human cultures in different eras furnish options for reflection, formation, and action. This opens new avenues for an ethics of daily living, and it is especially valuable for expanding the moral imagination and correcting sociocultural biases.
Second, Banner displays the Anglican conviction that ethics is closely connected with worship and the arts. To this end, he shows how prayer and the sacraments of baptism and eucharist shape and sustain the Christian life. Prayerful meditation on the life of Jesus, for example, forms the moral imagination to consider our own conceptions, births, sufferings, deaths, burials, and practices of remembering. Furthermore, Banner examines several works of art that provide grist for the mill of an everyday ethics. The book includes six full-color images, such as The Annunciation Triptych of the Mérode Altarpiece, that are beautifully rendered in the text. The detailed accounts of spiritual practices and the arts are a particular strength of this book.
Third, although Banner does not use the traditional Anglican terminology of the created moral order, loyalty to custom, and reasoning with paradigms and exemplars, analogous concepts inform his position. Anglicans characteristically hold that the moral order established in creation makes it possible to dialogue with anyone, and even build some measure of consensus across differing perspectives. This makes Banner’s turn to anthropology and the arts prudent. Another Anglican hallmark is considering moral laws in light of the customs that shape particular social contexts. Along these lines, Banner contends that human nature is inherently social, so attention to custom and social practice is necessary to understand the moral life in its complexity. He supports this judgment by contrasting ethnographies of burial practices in the Greek islands with funeral rites in the United Kingdom (pp. 162-72). Finally, analogous to the Anglican tradition of inductive casuistry, Banner identifies paradigmatic actions and exemplars of right living. For example, he claims that Christian theologies of adoption challenge the cultural presumption in favor of IVF, and he defends this claim by appealing to adoption as a paradigm of Christian kinship, and to L’Arche as an exemplar of forming community without relying on ethnic and family ties (pp. 58-59). In these ways, Banner brings more clarity to the concepts of moral order, custom, paradigm, and exemplar than can be found in many Anglican moral theologies.
While Banner makes a convincing argument that moral theologians are tasked with narrating the Christian life in dialogue with anthropology and the arts, his account has three shortcomings. First, Banner does not discuss philosophical traditions that develop an everyday ethics, which weakens his claim that moral theology should leave moral philosophy behind. It is true that utilitarian and Kantian approaches do not yield the kind of ethics Banner seeks, but other philosophical traditions can. Virtue ethics – which is well represented in Anglican circles – attends to the moral imagination, social practices, paradigms and exemplars, and the cultural and personal habits that form a life worth living. Philosophers working in virtue also contribute practices to shape character and action at home, at work, at school, in public life, and so on. In these respects, virtue is a potential philosophical resource for Banner’s everyday ethics.
Next, Banner does not provide a methodological framework for integrating ethnographic findings into moral theology. He deftly avoids construing ethics and social anthropology as necessarily conflicting disciplines, and shows that theologians can constructively – and critically – engage ethnographies. But it is not clear from his discussion whether moral theologians should merely draw from anthropological texts, or work collaboratively with anthropologists, or even do our own ethnographic research. Attention to method would identify the essential features of an anthropologically informed moral theology, and distinguish best practices from inferior ones.
Finally, Banner does not explain in sufficient detail how his Christian moral imagination guides moral decision making in everyday situations. On this score, the Anglican tradition of inductive casuistry offers an important contrast. Casuists like Jeremy Taylor and Kenneth Kirk place moral reasoning in the context of the Christian narrative, with paradigms, exemplars, and principles like conscience and the virtues guiding the person who acts. Similarly, Banner forms the moral imagination by narrating paradigms and exemplars, but he does not establish normative principles that direct action in concrete cases. As a result, his Christian imagination helps to reconceptualize a moral issue, but does not provide the ethical concepts that support prudent reasoning in challenging moments. For example, by appealing to ‘rites of baptism (which displace kin by blood), and of the eucharist (which makes us kin to Christ, and thus to one another by sharing in his blood)’ (p. 59), Banner defends adoption rather than the culturally approved practice of IVF. But he neither discusses what to do if conscience rather than culture leads one to form a judgment in favor of IVF, nor does he identify particular virtues that create community with one’s adopted child. Because of this, Banner’s book is an excellent first step toward a moral theology that supports persons who imitate Christ in thought, word, and deed.
In summary, Banner’s ethics of everyday life offers a compelling narration of the Christian moral imagination. His astute discussions of anthropology and the arts make for a real advance in Anglican moral theology. This book is well suited for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in ethics and theological anthropology. It will also be of interest to clergy, chaplains, members of hospital ethics committees, and ethical advisors to public officials.
