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Modern Virtue is the first book length treatment of Mary Wollstonecraft's theology and religion, the first to show the centrality of each for her account of the vrtues and revolution, and the first by a scholar in these fields. While Wollstonecraft is canonical in many other fields, she is mostly unknown or ignored in virtue ethics, theology, and religion. This book remedies this omission and the prevalent narratives sustained by it in the latter as well as predominant views of her religion and virtue in the former.
List of contents
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Who's Wollstonecraft? Which Traditions?
- 1. Dissenting Devotional Taste: The Virtues of Madness
- 2. Staging a Tragicomic Revolution: The Virtues of Ethical Conflict
- 3. Imitating Christ: Virtues and Sexed Semblances
- 4. On Justice: Virtues and Rights
- 5. On Love: Virtues and Political Friendship
- Conclusion: What is Modern Virtue?
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Emily Dumler-Winckler is Assistant Professor of Constructive Theology and Christian Ethics at Saint Louis University where she serves on the advisory board for the Department of Women and Gender Studies. She received her PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary and held a postdoctoral research fellowship with the Center for Theology, Science, and Human Flourishing at the University of Notre Dame.
Summary
Modern societies are plagued with conflicts about basic beliefs, values, and ideals. What some call virtue, others count as vice. This book argues that the cultivation of the virtues as well as contestation about them are part and parcel of the goods that Christians and democratic societies share in common. Drawing on the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Dumler-Winckler aims to dissolve the anxieties of both defenders and despisers of virtue ethics and so form a rapprochement. Influenced by religious dissenters in eighteenth-century England, Wollstonecraft revolutionized ancient traditions of the virtues in modern ways for feminist and abolitionist aims. For this modern feminist, as for premodern Christians, moral formation requires putting exemplars to the test of critical examination-discarding some, adopting others, and emulating the virtues of each.
By elaborating the specifically theological aspects of Wollstonecraft's account, this book demonstrates the important role religious traditions have played in feminism and radical socio-political movements in the modern era. By treating the relation between modern rights and virtues such as justice and friendship, Dumler-Winckler illuminates their vital relation and roles in modern democratic societies. With good reason, both modernity and virtue have cultured despisers. Modern Virtue provides an account of the virtues in modernity and, even, the virtues of modernity.
Additional text
Emily Dumler - Winkler's account of Wollstonecraft's 'tradition of dissent' traverses the historical, the theological, and the ethical, offering a retrieval not just of Wollstonecraft's theological contribution, but also a feminist account of virtues which defies incorporation into the traditional binaries of defence or denial, religious or secular. This work offers a vital contribution not only to theological ethics, but for feminist studies, political theology, and beyond.
