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Responsibility without Choice: Harare’s Baptist Christians and Normative Freedom Amidst Uncertainty

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Repository DOI


Type

Article

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Authors

Williams Green, Leanne  ORCID logo  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4538-0492

Abstract

jats:titleAbstract</jats:title> jats:pBaptists 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.</jats:p>

Description

Keywords

5003 Philosophy, 5005 Theology, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 5001 Applied Ethics, Clinical Research, Generic health relevance, 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Journal Title

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0002-7189
1477-4585

Volume Title

Publisher

Oxford University Press (OUP)
Sponsorship
Wenner Gren Foundation

Version History

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2*
2024-07-03 10:31:36
Published version added
2023-11-01 00:30:48
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