Responsibility without Choice: Harare's Baptist Christians and Normative Freedom Amidst Uncertainty
Baptists living in Zimbabwe's capital city, Harare, engage with a long-standing debate in Christian theology and beyond: that of the relation between moral responsibility and human freedom. The presumption has often been that to be held morally responsible, a person must be free to choose and t...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
2023
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| In: |
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Year: 2023, Volume: 91, Issue: 2, Pages: 326-345 |
| Online Access: |
Presumably Free Access Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Baptists living in Zimbabwe's capital city, Harare, engage with a long-standing debate in Christian theology and beyond: that of the relation between moral responsibility and human freedom. The presumption has often been that to be held morally responsible, a person must be free to choose and to act. The views of Harare's Baptists directly challenge this understanding, with important outcomes for their political lives. I show ethnographically how they do so through the urgency of their daily moral deliberations as religious practitioners. Influenced by Augustinian theology, they treat moral responsibility as a condition of existence, irrespective of choice. I argue that they adhere to a "normative freedom" as an alternative to classically liberal perspectives or to freedom as outlined recently in anthropological discussions of ethics. I propose that attending to moral responsibility provides a key avenue for further theorizing diverse conceptions of human freedoms and the attendant political consequences. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4585 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: American Academy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfad066 |