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36 Wake Forest L. Rev. 557 (2001)
Ecclesial Profiling

handle is hein.journals/wflr36 and id is 569 raw text is: ECCLESIAL PROFILING Ashley Woodiwiss* Much of literature in religion and politics assumes that the two domains can be adjusted in such a way as to honor the chief ends of both. Specifically, the problem of religiously grounded moralities is typically considered solvable by the employment of any number of rational principles, discourse models, or theories. All these efforts depict the liberal public sphere as tolerant, inclusive and egalitarian. In this Article, I reject this liberal construal and claim that, from the standpoint of particularistic communities of faith, liberalism is and must always be committed to the project of ecclesial profiling, so that certain religiously grounded moralities are embraced and oth- ers are excluded. The decade of the 1990s witnessed the emergence of a move- ment among a small, but influential, group of Christian scholars that has been labeled radical orthodoxy.' I will not take the time here to set out this movement in its entirety. But one characteristic of it, what I have in another place called its ecclesiocentric perspec- tive,2 does require some elaboration for its relevance to my com- ments here. By ecclesiocentric, I mean the radical orthodox argu- ment that all authentic Christian thought begins from within the Church (her sacraments, practices, and being-in-the-world). That is, the Church occupies first-place in Christian thought and reflection; its narrative providing the interpretive read and critique of all other * For their critical comments upon an earlier draft of this Paper, I would like to thank my fellow participants in the conference, Bob Audi, John Coleman, Chris Eberle, Gene Garver, Kent Greenawalt, Cathy Kaveny, Steve Smith, Paul Weithman, and Nick Wolterstorf, Religiously Grounded Morality- Its Proper Role in American Law and Public Policy, held at the Wake Forest University School of Law (October 20-21, 2000). Special thanks go to our conference or- ganizer, host, and moderator, Michael Perry. 1. For two recent critical summaries of the movement, see R.R. Reno, The Radical Orthodoxy Project, FIRST THINGS, Feb. 2000, at 37-44; Jeff Sharlet, Theologians Seek to Reclaim the World With God and Postmodernism, CHRON. OF HIGHER EDUC., June 23, 2000, at 20-22. A collection of self-conscious essays by radical orthodox theologians can be found in RADIcAL ORTHODOXY: A NEW THEOLOGY (John Milbank et al. eds., 1999). 2. See Ashley Woodiwiss, What Is the Church Good For?, BOOKS & CULTURE, NoviDec. 1997, at 38-39.

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