The Bicameral Brain and Theological Ethics: An Initial Exploration

Abstract

Pope John Paul II called for an intense dialogue between science and theology, “a common interactive relationship,” in which each discipline is “open to the discoveries and insights of the other” while retaining its own integrity. This essay seeks to be responsive to that call and is an initial exploration of relationships between contemporary neuroscience and Catholic theological ethics. It examines neuroscientific data on the bicameral brain and theological ethical data on marital ethics, including divorce and remarriage, and asks what insight the former might provide into both the latter and the different ethical methods that respond to marital ethics. The analysis is undertaken in the hope of illuminating a pathway that opens the insights of one way of doing theological ethics to the insights of another way, thereby eliminating the unnecessary, unhelpful, and sometimes un‐Christian polarizations that presently separate them.

Religious Ethics and Empirical Ethics

“…Certain strands of virtue ethics and feminist ethics have also emphasized the social, emotional, and embodied elements of religion and ethics in varying ways and to different degrees from the early years of the journal. Encouragingly, from my point of view, more recent JRE articles by William D. Wood (2009), Arthur J. Dyck and Carlos Padilla (2009), Shannon Sullivan (2014), Christina McRorie (2016), Michael Lawler and Todd Salzman (2020), as well as the essays in a 2014 special issue on moral anthropology ( JRE 42.3)—just to name a few examples—have offered portraits of moral psychology and moral anthropology that one might classify as part of the minority type.…”

Reflecting and Advancing the Transformation: Catholic Theological Ethics and the Journal of Religious Ethics, 1973–2023

“…Looking at 2018 onwards, by contrast, the Board of Trustees includes M. Cathleen Kaveny, Lisa Sowle Cahill, and Aline Kalbian, and the Class of 2024 Editorial Board includes MT Dávila, Linda Hogan, Stephen Pope, and Cristina Traína. Authors working in and on the Catholic moral tradition published in volumes from 2018 onwards include Nichole Flores on human trafficking (2018a), Katie Grimes on race (2018), Gregory Reichberg on just war (2018), Jean Porter on eudaimonism (2019), Grimes on just war (2019), Kenneth Himes and Paul Weithman addressing the new inequality (2019), Michael Lawler and Todd Salzman on the ethical bicameral brain (2020), as well as Darlene Fozard Weaver, Tobias Winright, and Flores on mercy (2020). In 2018, there were also focus issues on Laudato si ’ featuring Alexandre Martins, Pablo Blanco, and Flores, on Catholic sexual ethics featuring Kalbian, Elizabeth Antus, Meghan McCabe, and Traína, as well as a Book Discussion showcasing Kaveny's 2016 ground‐breaking Prophecy Without Contempt Religious Discourse in the Public Square .…”