Today's ramblings are... well... just that... You could guess that the third photograph isn't mine.  My Australian friends Bob and Christine Rodland sent it to me today... It fits my writing, so I couldn't resist including it here. I hope I shouldn't need to say I'm including it because I think it's funny, and I guess in a perverse way it fits what is meant to be serious writing better than the other two.

TODAY IS SUNDAY… and I’ve been thinking.

Many years ago I had the good fortune to develop a close friendship with Joseph Fletcher, the American professor and theologian who is credited with founding the theory of situational ethics.  Joe, who died in 1991 at the age of 86, had been ordained as an Episcopal priest; and although he had taught Christian Ethics at Both Episcopal Divinity School and Harvard Divinity School from 1944 to 1970 and was the University of Virginia’s first professor of medical ethics , he confided in me a few years before his death that he had begun to self-identify as atheist. 

Long before we met and became friends I had read his book Situation Ethics… “The New Morality” (1966) . The book had changed the direction of my life, but that’s not the point of this BLOG writing.  I’m paraphrasing here, but my friend Joe said the point is that the laws and rules and principles and ideals and norms are all contingent, only valid if they happen to serve love, agape, in any situation.  The difference between ethics and doctrinal rules, or for that matter, any rule, is that ethics is not a system, but an effort to relate love to a world of relativities through a casuistry relative to love. Ethics is more of a strategy than a system of rules.  It is the strategy of love instead of a system of love. 

Joe said, “It is necessary to insist that situation ethics is willing to make full and respectful use of principles, to be treated as maxims but not as laws or precepts —- Situation ethics… calls upon us to keep law in a subservient place, so that only love and reason really count when the chips are down!

In the “Foreword” to his book Joe told a story: “Let an anecdote set the tone.  A friend of mine arrived in St. Louis just as a presidential campaign was ending, and the cab driver, not being above the battle, volunteered his testimony, ‘I and my father and grandfather before me, and their fathers, have always been straight-ticket Republicans.’  “Ah,” said my friend, who is himself a Republican, “I take it that means you will vote for Senator So-and-so.”  ‘No,’ said the driver, ‘there are times when a man has to push his principles aside and do the right thing.’”