de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 0:00 This is Episode 12 of Ethics and Culture Cast from the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. Welcome to Episode 12 of Ethics and Culture Cast from the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. I'm Ken Hallenius, the communications specialist at the Center. In this episode, we sit down with Gilbert Meilaender, the Paul Ramsey Fellow at the CEC and author of "Not by Nature But By Grace: Forming Families Through Adoption", which kicked off the Center's book series with the University of Notre Dame Press entitled Catholic Ideas for a Secular World. We discuss his intellectual journey, the meaning of adoption for families and for Christians, and how he wants to be a burden to his children. Let's head into the Marion Short Ethics Library for this week's conversation. I'm sitting here today with Gilbert Meilaender. He is the Paul Ramsey Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Culture. Prior to joining the faculty of Valparaiso University in 1996, he taught at the University of Virginia and at Oberlin College. At Valparaiso, He held the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics until 2014. He served as an associate editor of the Journal of Religious Ethics, an associate editor for Religious Studies Review, and sat on the editorial board of First Things. Gill was a member of the President's Council on bioethics from 2002 to 2009, and is a fellow of the Hastings Center. He has written or edited several books including "Working: Its Meanings and Its Limits" in 2000, "Bioethics: A Primer for Christians" in 2004, "The Oxford Handbook of Theological Ethics" in 2005, and most recently 2016's, "Not by Nature, but by Grace: Forming Families Through Adoption" the inaugural volume in the Center for Ethics and Culture series, Catholic Ideas for a Secular World with the University of Notre Dame Press. Welcome to the podcast, Gil. Gilbert Meilaender 2:25 Thank you. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 2:26 So tell us a bit about yourself. about your background. Where did you grow up? Where did you do your studies? Gilbert Meilaender 2:32 Well, I'm Midwestern boy, I actually grew up, well I was born in Illinois, but I grew up in northwestern Indiana. Though then I did not live around here for, I don't know 30 years at least until I took the job at Valparaiso. But I did. I grew up in Indiana, went through a series of church schools. All called Concordia's. Not a very innovative system we have, actually the whole the whole church system has changed since the time I went through it. At that time, you went two years to a junior college and there were a variety of Concordia junior colleges at different places around the country. I went to one in Ann Arbor. And then students who, after their first two years still thought of themselves as pre seminary students. And since we started Greek vocational discernment, it took a turn. But those who still thought of themselves as pre seminary from all the different Concordia junior colleges around the country were funneled into what we ingeniously called Concordia Senior College, which was in Fort Wayne. That's, the whole system has changed. That school doesn't even exist any longer. But so my last two years of college were there, very kind of classical pre seminary education, language training, Greek and Hebrew and Latin. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 4:02 Why do you roll your eyes? Gilbert Meilaender 4:03 Well you couldn't prove it by the state of my Latin right now. But, and then I went to what we call Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, graduated from there in 72 and went to Princeton University, the religion department at the University for my PhD, which I finished in 1976. Went to teach at Virginia for a few years, then went to Oberlin where I was for 18 years before coming to Valparaiso, so that's the. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 4:35 Back to Indiana. Gilbert Meilaender 4:37 Yes. That's the short story. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 4:40 When you were at Princeton, did you study with Paul Ramsey? Gilbert Meilaender 4:42 Yes. Not only Paul Ramsey, but he was the main person obviously. And that was an experience, that was that was quite an experience to study with Ramsey. It was very good. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 4:53 Well, I mean, here at the Center, obviously, you're the Paul Ramsey fellow. Gilbert Meilaender 4:57 Oh that's right. Yes. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 4:58 So what does that who was Paul Ramsey for you? As you say it was an experience, but. Gilbert Meilaender 5:02 Well Paul Ramsey was, I did not name the the Ramsey Fellowship by the way. No, I guess Carter Snead came up with that. I'm not actually really certain. But Paul Ramsey was, who taught at Princeton for, has taught there for three decades, at least, I guess, was a really leading figure in the field of Christian ethics. At a time when there was still some coherence to the field. It wasn't as fragmented as it is now. He came right at the tail end really of the period in which Christian theologians and religious thinkers still actually had some public influence. You know, we think of Reinhold Niebuhr as kind of the epitome of that and Ramsey was sort of just after Reinhold Niebuhr and he was well known, especially for his work in just war theory which he spent about a decade of his life working on. And then he was one of the really early figures in this country when bioethics got started in the mid 1960s. I would say he was and and more theologians were involved in bioethics in those early years, then it's gradually sort of become more public policy oriented. But Ramsey was a very important figure in, in the early years of the bioethics movement in this country. And he was a, he was a dominant personality, we could have a long talk about I mean, you just. And a fellow graduate student of mine once called him an intellectual whip, and that's what he was, he would his mind would just sort of wrap itself around an idea and go to work on it. And I've thought about a lot of issues since he died. And very often when I work them through what I realize is that he was actually there first. He kind of got there before I did. He was just, if you spend your life in the academy around a lot of smart people. But once in a while you're around, especially smart people, and he was one of them. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 7:10 Well, now, how did you get involved with the Center for Ethics and Culture? I mean, what what's a nice Lutheran boy like you doing wrapped up with the University of Notre Dame? Gilbert Meilaender 7:19 Well, you know, I believe in inclusivity, and diversity, as everybody does these days. Well, it was years ago, and I don't really know how long ago but back when David Solomon was still directing the Center. I spent one year here as a fellow. But even before that, I believe I had come over as what David called a consultant for the annual medical ethics conference. I've done that for a number of years, given talks, added a couple times and served as a consultant for it. So I'd had sort of regular contact with the Center for quite a while. And then sometime after Carter became director of the Center, he talked to me about working out some kind of deal to be here on some sort of to be connected with the Center in some way or other. And this is what we worked out. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 8:17 And you would have known Carter through the President's Council? Gilbert Meilaender 8:20 Oh, yes. I knew, Carter was the legal counsel, I guess we called him for the President's Council on bioethics, at least for a few years, not not either right at the start of the council, but after that, and so that's where I knew Carter from originally, since we had an interesting few years on the council. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 8:39 Well, now, as I mentioned earlier, you've written or edited several books, and the topics are really wide ranging from bioethics to human dignity, the meaning of work, the effects of aging, to the last words of Christ on the cross, as we were talking about before we started recording, how would you characterize your own kind of academic and literary output really in a way? Gilbert Meilaender 8:59 I have never tried to think of my work as a, as my work, sort of the people will think of as the Meilaender Corpus, something like that. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 9:13 The grand project? Gilbert Meilaender 9:14 Yeah. I take up questions that seemed to me interesting and important and work on them. I do think there are certain themes. I mean, I think anybody who looked closely at what I've done, if anybody cared to sit down and work their way through it, I think there are certain themes that just, it's obvious, have been central. I'm interested in the question of limits in the moral life. Are there limits? Even limits on ways in which we should try to do good things? That's clearly a question that just recurs in various ways. It's clear that I'm interested in the, in what ethicists tend to call special moral relations. In other words, we may have obligations to everybody, we may be supposed to love every neighbor and even every neighbor who is an enemy, as Jesus says. But it's also it also, at least to most people, it seems clear that we have special obligations to certain people who stand in special relation to us. I mean, familial bonds are one obvious case, but not the only one. The second book that I ever wrote, was on friendship. As I always say it, nobody should think that it's a little Hallmark card book on how to be friends. The subtitle is "A Study in Theological Ethics" and it's really about if you have an ethical system that has some sort of principle of universal other regard to the way Christians think about neighbor love--that you should love everyone. What exactly is the justification for the love of friendship? In which we devote enormous amounts of our time and energy and resources to certain people. That sort of question has always been very interesting to me. So limits, special moral relations, and then probably the meaning of our embodiedness. What we see. I mean, that's important in bioethics in various ways. It's important in the adoption issue, actually, what its claims on us are and what the limits of those claims are. I think anybody who kind of, as I said, you know, cared to work their way through my stuff would say that those are the kinds of themes that have been of interest to me and that in whatever the issue I worked on, in one way or another, they tend to come out. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 11:44 And they seem to be clearly related to both ethical and theological issues. Gilbert Meilaender 11:49 Yes. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 11:49 Well, I mean, I hear incarnation, I hear proper relationship to created order. I hear things that that flow from our from our worship, and from our creed. Gilbert Meilaender 12:00 I think that's right. I while on the one hand I, I read fairly widely, and in fact, I did a lot of work in philosophy back back when I didn't mention it back when I was in seminary. I actually did a bunch of graduate work in philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, while I was there, I always used to say that after you had a couple of courses in practical theology, you developed a strong desire to read Kant. But so I've drawn on lots of things. And I don't think that we have to talk exclusively in theological or religious terms. But on the other hand, I don't think there's any reason for Christians to be hesitant to think in those terms, and I generally do. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 12:43 Well, let's talk a bit about your latest book, "Not by Nature, but by Grace: Forming Families Through Adoption." What is your personal interest in the topic? Gilbert Meilaender 12:52 Well, insofar as I have had long standing interest in special moral relations and the family bond is one of those, obviously this will relate to that in a kind of. So there's a kind of a theoretical hook, just in terms of the things I've been interested in. But I'm sort of more personally over time we, my wife and I did. My wife and I and our children actually did foster care for 10 years when I was teaching at Oberlin. We lived in Ohio, had several foster children. One of them ended up being adopted by us. He's you know, a 30 something year old son, I can never remember the ages of my children. But, so we did that for 10 years probably would have continued. We stopped it when we moved to Indiana. But, so that was true for us and a daughter of ours has a couple adopted boys. Couple of my sisters actually have adopted children. So in a variety of ways, just in terms of my extended family, we have quite a bit of contact with it. Actually one of my older sisters ran, who just retired, but was a director of a big adoption agency for quite a while. Gradually, I've, I've come to realize that we may think of adoption a little too much just as an alternative to abortion. I mean, it is that and it's an important alternative. But it's not just that, I mean, wholly apart from the issue of abortion, they're just a lot of children in the world who need families to belong to. And when we started doing the foster care, and my wife and I, it was just after our third child and whom we thought was our youngest and last child had begun school. And that's a moment when you sort of take stock, you know, and try and figure out, and my wife thought she might like to do this and so I just said, Okay. I mean, it wasn't there wasn't any deep thought involved in it. But it, I mean, it turned out to be a formative experience for all of us. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 15:04 At one point in your opening chapter you are summarizing an another author and you write, "Christians at any rate are called to recognize as kin as their own flesh and blood those with whom they do not share traceable genetic material. A history of relationship, commitment sustained over time, is what forms and sustains the bond a father and mother with their children." Is that, is that a good working definition? Or Gilbert Meilaender 15:31 It's, I think we need to supplement it in one way, but it is good. That's that's really a sort of my description of the views of a guy named Russell Moore, who's actually written a nice book on adoption. And is a well known Baptist theologian. I think we need to supplement in some sense. I mean that the family is a created structure as well. I mean, the biological family is, and if we didn't have biological families, we probably wouldn't have a paradigm to know what we meant when we talked about families. But that's not the only way to form a family. And being a parent, being a father, a mother is not primarily a matter of sort of transmitting traceable DNA to the next generation. That's that's not what it's about. It's about this long term covenant, as God covenants with us in adoption, so we do with our children. And so while I'd want to just sort of supplement what Russell Moore says, with the recognition that the created biological genetic bond is important and meaningful and, and sort of central to what we have understand a family to be, it's only a paradigm for what can be formed in other ways as well. And if we think that the primary thing of primary importance in forming family is to have connection of DNA, that that's why we have people running off to try to get what they call a child of their own through various forms of assisted reproduction, some of which end up giving them a child who is not even their own genetically because they've gotten donated gametes. So the whole notion of genetic connection, while very important, obviously and meaningful, just needs to be thought through more carefully and that's one of the things I was trying to think through as I worked on the adoption issue. Kind of thinking about this idea of Covenanting, and even sustaining commitments over time. I do have to ask about Carter Snead, one of his what he tells us is his favorite things he's ever read, and it was a 1991 essay of yours in First Things called "I Want to Burden My Loved Ones". You describe your own reflections on raising children beginning thusly, "I have sweated in the hot sun, teaching four children to catch and hit a ball, to swing a tennis racket and shoot a free throw. I have built blocks and played games I had to test with and for my children. I have watched countless basketball games made up of largely bad passes, traveling violations and shots that missed rim and backboard. Why should I not be a bit of burden to these children in my dying?" Well, is there a relationship between this essay and what you've written in "Not By Nature, But By Grace"? Oh, I think there is. That little passage that you read, by the way, actually got excerpt and reprinted in the Wall Street Journal. Yeah, it was, that was a fun piece for me to do. I'll just tell you a bit about how it came. Back at that time, sort of for my sins I was serving on the hospital ethics committee of a small little Hospital in Oberlin. If you teach the kind of things that I teach, you end up getting asked to serve on hospital ethics committees, and I don't actually believe that they function very well most of the time, but at the time, I was serving on it. They try to do various, sort of public educational things. And this was a Saturday or Sunday afternoon and the committee had this public panel discussion in the library in Oberlin. And actually it was a decent turnout from people. But as we're talking about this, when the subject matter was mainly about advanced directives, you know, authorizing other people to make healthcare decisions for you as you get older and perhaps can't make them yourself and so forth. And, and I actually am a person who believes that the living will is a very bad idea. And I was trying out my theories about this for the good folks. And, but, but also listening, and I realized as we're going along, sort of my mind started working on a couple different tracks, that people who were asking questions--or actually more often commenting, they weren't really asking questions, you know, as is often the case they were getting up and commenting--but they were all saying things like, it's sort of in opposition to my notion that a living will is a bad idea. That, oh, I wouldn't want to burden my children, I'd want them to know exactly, you know, what I wanted, and so forth. And I just started thinking about that, and ended up writing this little piece, which is, I mean, the serious point in it is about advanced directives, actually. But along the way I had a little fun with with that, and I think the connection to the kind of larger interest in familial bonds and the adoption book in general, is that, well, familial relations are satisfying and fulfilling and bring great happiness and life would be the poorer without them. They do also burden us and if you don't want those burdens, you can't be a member of a family. Because that's what a family is. You if you buy into it you're buying into burdens. And I just decided I, I'd say that fairly directly. And it was it was, as I say it was a fun piece to write, but it was a serious point about what it means to be a member of a family. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 21:13 Well, Gilbert Meilaender, thank you very much for the conversation. Your book, I must say as one who is also surrounded by many families here in in the Notre Dame community in South Bend. Many adoptive families and families that are formed through adoption and reading this really is kind of insightful in dealing with these questions. Like you say, we're talking about commitments that we form and then live those out. Gilbert Meilaender 21:38 Well, maybe you'll sell a few copies for me, Ken. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 21:42 Thank you very much for your time. Gilbert Meilaender 21:43 Sure. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 21:55 Thank you to Gilbert Meilaender, his book "Not By Nature But By Grace: Forming Families Through Adoption" is available now wherever the finest books are sold, and you can find a link in the show notes. Learn more about the Center for Ethics and Culture by visiting ethicscenter.nd.edu. 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