With Integrity to Risk

If you sometimes feel, as the Hebrew prophets Elijah and Jonah did, like going into a barren place, lying down under a tree, and saying, "I have had enough Lord....I want to die," Sharon Welch's A Feminist Ethic of Risk is for you. This insightful book calls middle-class Euro-American peoples who are engaged in the struggle for justice and peace to conversion from "cultured despair."

Welch--feminist liberation theologian and professor at Harvard Divinity School--diagnoses the roots of this problem in a broad-based political, philosophical, and theological "ethic of control." In counterpoint to such a deformative ethic, she proposes an alternative "ethic of risk," drawn from the example and stories of African-American women.

In the first of three sections of the book, Welch challenges the equating of good or responsible action with the ability to take decisive and effective measures to carry out one's intentions. It is no surprise that this win-lose mentality is foundational to American national security policy with its quest for absolute invulnerabilty through nuclear strategy. It also informs moral and political philosophy, evidenced by Reagan's unquestioning confidence in the moral superiority of the "American way" (and Bush's further championship of the "new world order").

However, Welch's greatest wisdom lies in her exposure of the way non-poor justice workers (e.g. members of the peace movement) are driven by this same will to control the endgame. When desired results aren't forthcoming, despair and cynicism creep in.

Welch issues a tough challenge to those of us in this group to recognize our despair as a luxury of class privilege: "It is easier to give up on long-term social change when one is comfortable in the present." Careful to distinguish between guilt and accountability, Welch calls us to repentance for and sustained resistance to the unjust structures that underpin our cultural privileges.

WELCH devotes three chapters of her book to engaging concrete parables of hope found in the novels of African-American women who teach us "the power and wisdom of struggle without guarantees of success." (You may find yourself, as I did, wanting to read every one of these books.) Protagonists in these stories show the way to an "ethic of risk" which does not involve "the certain achievement of desired ends, but the creation of a matrix in which further actions are possible, the creation of the conditions of possibility."

This alternative ethic is rooted in "beloved community" (a concept borrowed from Martin Luther King Jr.). Such a community is sustained by a doubly "dangerous memory": on the one hand, bearing witness to the life-denying and deceptive aspects of our "official" histories of imperialist conquest and "military victories without victims" and, on the other, affirming courageous stories of those who have struggled and survived.

Asserting that no person or group can be moral alone, Welch posits an ethic that is partial rather than absolute, always in process, open to self-critique and re-definition--a concrete result of specific communities sharing conversation and work for justice. This alternative ethic risks imprecise and often difficult negotiation and compromise in solidarity with those who are different or "other" from us.

The result is mutual accountability. We need others. We need to hear and be heard.

For all of its strengths, this book may prove uneven in its usefulness and readability for a broad-based audience. I found the organization somewhat confusing and haphazard. And while the range of sources and thinkers engaged is admirable, it is also a drawback, especially when Welch cites contemporary critical social theory. Terms like "deconstruction," "post-modern," and "jouissance" are used with little or no definition, and do not seem crucial to the overall argument. There is so much of value here that I suggest skipping those sections that seem confusingly complex and moving on to glean from the wisdoms.

When Welch turns from ethical theory to theology, readers who share my evangelical roots may also share my conceptual struggles. While I agree that a middle-class Western theology of liberation is crucial to our justice work, I was discomforted by Welch's abstraction of God to "the divine" and by the absence of reference to the prophetic tradition of the Bible which grounds the liberation theologies of our "Third World" sisters and brothers.

Affirmations of "creative power, the power of love, and the power of the web of life" do not finally, to my mind, provide "an imperative for ethical action" (italics added). The prophetic ministry of Christ does. However, Welch's call for non-poor North Americans to repent and take responsibility for our unjust history is prophetic and compelling in light of our "dangerous memory" of 500 years of First Nations' and enslaved peoples' resistance and survival.

Brenda Carr was a free-lance writer living in London, Ontario, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Western Ontario when this review appeared.

A Feminist Ethic of Risk. By Sharon Welch. Fortress Press, 1989. $10.95 (paper).