RT Article
T1 H. Richard Niebuhr's Reading of George Herbert Mead: Correcting, Completing, and Looking Ahead
JF Journal of religious ethics
VO 44
IS 1
SP 92
OP 115
A1 Daniel, Joshua M.
LA English
PB Wiley-Blackwell
YR 2016
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/158020936X
AB In this essay, I reconstruct H. Richard Niebuhr's interpretation of George Herbert Mead's account of the social constitution of the self. Specifically, I correct Niebuhr's interpretation, because it mischaracterizes Mead's understanding of social constitution as more dialogical than ecological. I also argue that Niebuhr's interpretation needs completing because it fails to engage one of Mead's more significant notions, the I/me distinction within the self. By reconstructing Niebuhr's account of faith and responsibility as theologically self-constitutive through Mead's I/me distinction, I demonstrate Niebuhr's deep yet unacknowledged agreement with Mead: the self is constituted by its participation in multiple communities, but responds to them creatively by enduring the moral perplexity of competing communal claims. I conclude by initiating a constructive account of conscience that follows from this agreement. Conscience is more ecological than dialogical because it regards our creative participation in multiple ecologies of social roles oriented by patterns of responsive relations.
K1 George Herbert Mead
K1 H. Richard Niebuhr
K1 Conscience
K1 dialogical/ecological
K1 Self
K1 social constitution
DO 10.1111/jore.12133