Claims of allegiance

Over the past few years I've come to formulate a central problem in modern life like this: how does one adjudicate between competing claims of allegiance? PETA, the Pope, and Polo Ralph Lauren all want a piece of me; they all want me to buy into their vision of what life is all about. The number and force of these so-called claims of allegiance constitute a huge source of tension in modern life.

I don't know whence Alasdair MacIntyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality? entered my field of vision, but I finally picked it up from the library today (having finished The Varieties last week). And what do I find articulated on page 2 as the central question of the book?

How ought we to decide among the claims of rival and incompatible accounts of justice competing for our moral, social, and political allegiance?

Folks, I am totally floored. Words! The same words, even! And he is about to give me 401 pages in answer to this very question! I am excited. Actually, after reading chapter one it looks like he is also going to "reunit[e] conviction [...] and rational enquiry" (7). In other words, he has Christianity's transition to Pluralism well under way. Yay!

Now, my hunch is that scale, abstraction, and boundaries can help account for the diversity and conflict amongst traditions that MacIntyre identifies: the human person simply operates at a scale from which no final view can be gained of such societal-scale objects as justice and rationality. We shall see. Maybe after this I'll go to Theology of the Body for the personalist angle.

The juicier question is how to apply this stuff in the parish. We had a great conversation tonight at church about how allegiance to local communities is where the answer to the identity crisis (namely, MacIntyre's crisis of allegiance and conviction) lies. A viable account of salvation today must answer this crisis. Gathering at all was itself an act of allegiance, so we are on the right track. Feed back to Chad Whitacre.