Gnoseological concupiscence, intersectionality, and conversion of heart: insights into how and why moral theology develops

Abstract

Our human finitude and inability to grasp reality’s fullness means moral teaching has limitations, is incomplete, and sometimes wrong. As such, moral teaching should be an initial description of morality, subject to change and transformation, always open to more just conceptions of the moral life. In this essay I consider how and why Catholic moral theology changes. The essay begins by examining Karl Rahner’s understanding of gnoseological concupiscence as the basis for epistemological humility in the moral endeavor. The middle section turns to intersectionality, which as a discourse provides both explanatory and normative resources for moral theology around questions of power, oppression, and injustice. Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Susan M. Shaw’s work on intersectional theology demonstrates how intersectionality moves us beyond one-dimensional perspectives, enriching and expanding the human experience of each other and God. The essay concludes with moral theologian Klaus Demmer’s work looking at how norms change, the role of epikeia, along with guideposts for practical and intellectual discernment about what we think of, hold, and name as truth. For we ultimately arrive at moral understanding not through deductive reasoning, but through living, dialogue, encounter with difference, growing in virtue, engaging conflicts truthfully, and working for justice.