As part of the Center’s third phase of research, titled “Between Relativism and Reproach: Exploring Value Judgments about Good Human Lives within Theologically Engaged Anthropology” and sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, we have organized a theoretical workshop in partnership with the Cambridge Anthropology-Theology Network taking place in June 2026. Scholars across career stages from the US, Canada, and Europe will meet to discuss how to craft an urgently needed collaborative approach that tackles the analytical challenges posed by relativism, which can devolve into amoral nihilism, and judgmentalism, which risks becoming moralistic reproach. As we approach this exciting event, Associate Director of CTEA, Dr. Hannah Grace Howard, is sitting down with each of the senior scholars involved to discuss their related research and hopes for the workshop. Below, a conversation with Dr. Derrick Lemons, Director of the CTEA and PI on the current project. HGH: Tell me and our readers about this current phase of the Center’s collaborative research. DL: I really feel like the center is coming into its own in this phase. We were initially built around this experimental question of whether theologians and anthropologists can work together to produce something interesting and productive to scholarly dialogue. In that initial discussion, which was over a decade ago now, we realized well yes, we can do that but then the question became what would that really look like and for what purpose would that dialogue exist. So the second phase of that was asking how we can collaborate to better understand actual contemporary religious phenomena, such as religious change, across religions. That was a useful question, you know, but I feel like this current phase is one in which we're asking kind of a bigger question. We as scholars need an additional framework to figure out how we can discern and judge and figure out these questions that face us when we run into cultures that maybe we agree with or disagree with. We have to ask on what basis are we making those judgments. I think ultimately we're getting to a point in this space where we’re thinking about how anthropologists can insert themselves appropriately into these questions of human flourishing and ethics and other things that theology has historically been more comfortable with addressing. HGH: That’s a great point about the evolution of this research. I do have two follow up questions from that. The first one is what do you think made this current phase talking about relativism and judgment and ethics the sort of natural next step after the first two phases you described? And then, the second question is why do you think it's important for anthropologists especially, but theologians as well, to do this work of critique and possible judgment as an expansion of our traditional relativistic framework? DL: Hmm, yeah good questions. I guess I would say first that there's been a lot written about ethics and the anthropology religion and so there's been a kind of ongoing dialogue and that’s where some of this naturally came from. But I think the conversation seemed maybe a little bit stuck. If we are going to critique that kind of classic relativistic impulse that has been the order and that people are starting to question, then what ways are we going to appropriately tweak it? As you know, the anthropology of ethics has some interesting answers to that, and in some ways that important conversation has happened alongside the theologically engaged anthropology discussion. But it just seemed like, you know, perhaps there were some tools within theologically engaged anthropology specifically that could expand the boundaries of the conversation, and we wanted to build on that. Over the first two phases, these collaborations with theologians, who do make judgments all the time, hinted that we could actually help anthropologists in this greater discussion of ethics and flourishing. That felt like an important direction to go in. We're still at the very beginning of this phase, and I know in my own thinking about it, I've come a long way already. You know, these oscillating ways exist to discern ethical action, and we can have relativism and judgment kind of together. So instead of seeing theology as the enemy of anthropology, it's a clear dialogue partner in these conversations if we have them in appropriate ways. HGH: You’re saying your own thinking on this has developed and shifted or maybe even pushed the needle. I’d love to hear more about that. We're headed towards this collaborative workshop, and we all are drafting submissions that attend to these questions. Can you tell us a little bit about your own submission and the thinking that is supporting your budding arguments? DL: This was a paper that I wrote with fear and trembling, because I really felt like when I finished with it that this is really something that could be important to this discussion… or you know, it could be really bad. So, I really appreciated you reading the first draft. What I've come to think about is a possible framework that I’m calling “comparative discernment” to help us as scholars of religion and ethics make useful judgments of practices. In comparative discernment, you've got these different analytical moves to make. One of the very first things that you need to do in order to discern or judge or make applied ethical decisions or comments is to engage in emic reconstruction. At a very basic level, what anthropology does well - or tries to do well - is really understand our interlocutors until we get to a space where we can adequately describe and explain people’s views. It's really hard to judge something that you don’t completely understand. The proposed second movement is that once you understand an object of study, you make some type of comparative inquiry. So you ask what are the internal goods within this society that have been reconstructed and how can we locate that within a broader field and maybe even compare them across time and space and cultures? In this comparison, do we see the ability to secure a good life? Then the third step is just to distinguish between the values people say they're pursuing and then the concrete ways that those values are actually coming into practice. When I'm interviewing people, especially with my research often working with religious officials and pastors and people who are “supposed” to have the right answer, I find that they'll often have an answer ready to go about their values, but then I have to ask them follow-up questions like: “tell me how that value is established,” “ what actions support that?” I think seeing the areas where this is aligning or misaligning is something that is important for us today. Once we understand those concrete ways of doing things, then we need to move on to specific tests based on what I see as five minimum thresholds. HGH: Okay I want to get into those thresholds, but first I want to circle back on the early part of your explanation. First of all, I really enjoyed reading that draft and I was glad to get to have early eyes on it. One of the things that stuck out to me was this notion in your attention to emic reconstruction of what you call “internal goods.” In the framework you've established, there seems to be a little bit of space to maintain that relativistic impulse from anthropology and incorporate critique into it. You've relativized the search for those internal goods, so the internal goods could be lots of different things, and then that space for critique and judgment sort of comes by meeting people on their own terms. I appreciated that from both an anthropological and theological standpoint. DL: Right, let me say something more about the relativistic impulse of anthropology that I think is really vital here. You know the old saying that anthropology makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. I think when you really understand someone you start to see that relativistic reality: if I believed everything that these people [our interlocutors] believed, if I ordered my life in the same ways, if I had the same experiences, the same pressures to remain in community, then I would be standing for the same things as them. That changes the analysis. If we find something repulsive, for example, that's really more of a judgment on our own stance than the stance of the other person. Like, let’s take the term “cult” - I'm not talking about cult in the anthropological sense of things, but rather the way the term cult is popularly used. It's always been an outsider label onto another group. People themselves don't say “yeah I'm in a cult;” instead others say “you are in a cult” and that labeling only happens when you don’t fully understand something. So I think it’s important to get to the place where we can say, “OK if I agreed with all of these things and saw the world through your lens, I would probably believe the same things.” And it’s really only from that place that you can then begin to step back a little bit and actually critically judge and discern. I think another piece in this is I need to also evaluate what I am bringing to the table. While I think that type of reflexivity is really hard and maybe we can question if we can ever quite get there, I think it is a worthy goal. HGH: I absolutely agree. So how does that stance affect your five thresholds? DL: Well, coming from that perspective, we get to these five thresholds of comparative discernment. And the point is that they can really serve as tests for these ethical systems of thought. The first is a threshold for vitality. You ask: is this a mode of life that does not systematically degrade the bodily material and civic conditions of people? Is this a way to share life where we can have bodily safety, subsistence, and the possibility of social reproduction? These are really just the minimum standards for the culture to persist. Vitality here is like evolution; often there's this confusion that happens over evolution and some people misunderstand it as things have evolved to their perfect state and it's really just about evolving to a good enough state to continue living. So does the way of life allow for that? The next threshold is relational integrity. Is this a formation that preserves the possibility of trust and care and neighbor recognition between people? Does it fight against the dehumanization of others? The third is epistemic accountability. What I mean by that is an awareness of knowledge and adaptability. So in this culture is there accountability for actual public truth claims? Are there ways to preserve opportunities for correction, testing, and scrutiny? The fourth threshold gets beyond the individual as a vessel for shared culture and asks for actual institutional accountability. How can people’s views account for history and systems? How can authority be answerable to processes of review and correction and responsibility? The fifth threshold is about repairability and coexistence that's allowed within a way of life. Can there be something like repentance or change or repair or peaceful disagreement? And again, how do we refuse contempt and the demonization of others? Ultimately, you know, I think these crucial thresholds are intentionally modest. Comparative discernment here tells us again that we're not trying to get to a “perfect culture.” That’s not really possible and there’s no universal idea of perfection, but maybe we can analyze cultures as “good enough” for people to experience human flourishing. HGH: That's great, thank you for sharing those. It’s a lot to think about. Last content question for you - in framing this conversation, we're talking a lot about human flourishing, so I'm going to ask everyone I speak to about their interpretation of this term. What's your three-sentence summary of that term? What model is kicking around in your brain? Because I think one of the critiques that has come out of the Robbins article that so much of this conversation stems from is that we're talking a lot about ways to fuse relativism and critique and we're talking a lot about ethical models and this notion of the good life and flourishing; but no one is really talking very clearly about what that is. So is the good life even possible and what do we mean when we say flourishing? DL: Yeah that’s good, that’s the question really, and I think this is really important. Wow, let me think a second about this. HGH: I’m asking selfishly because I want to make an argument about this in my paper and I’m still figuring out how. DL: I love this question. Can I give you a story first, and then I'll give more of an answer to your question? Like everyone, I have my own understandings of the way I think the world should go. In my first semester teaching here, I was giving a class on gender and religion. I'm very much in favor of women being empowered in religious roles and wanted to discuss that. I broke people up into groups and asked them to talk about if women should be allowed to be pastors or priests. I'm obviously very pro and, you know, there's a real theological answer for that position. But it became apparent from that discussion that there were divided minds among the students, more than I expected. Then it turned into a discussion more broadly about women and marriage, and what came out from this one particular group of women was that they were very much looking for a traditional marriage where they would be home with the kids and take care of the domestic duties and to them that was human flourishing. Although that is so far from what I would bring to the table - I mean that's not the house I grew up in, and I wouldn't have been interested in that kind of marriage - I always think back to that as a useful example. There are people who if they were to live in my world would think “wow this is not flourishing.” So to get back to your question: I think human flourishing is a way to live well by a chosen standard. As a person, it's more than just pleasure or success. It’s really a whole life where the person can thrive intellectually, morally, socially, emotionally, even spiritually, by participating in these communities where we're able to sustain dignity. I think we need to think about these things on the broadest levels, and I think that's the corrective to this impulse to go into what's being called “dark anthropology” right now. It’s easier to go to areas of suffering, and criticize and say, you know, “that’s so bad.” But now what we really need is to kind of get into a space of seeing all the different ways of life that allow for agency within loving relationships. You said three sentences, that was much longer. HGH: Yeah, but you said more that's useful and I didn't expect you to really keep to three sentences anyway. DL: I should ask you the same question. I think that's a really important question. HGH: Well, I'm still thinking through that question really and how I want to frame that as a key piece of some of the ideas that I'm thinking with for my own contribution. I'll have to tune back in with you on that one. Okay, last question which is just a fun one. We're getting all these people together for this theoretical workshop with both senior scholars and early career scholars. I think it's going to be really really fruitful, and I'm looking forward to it a lot, so I'm curious what you are most looking forward to with this event. DL: Oh wow, well I think in events like this, which are very curated and small-scale events, we're talking less than 20 people in a room together, the best part is spending so much time with each other and just the ability to build relationships with those folks. This work that we're proposing is hard work, and we need to be able to trust the people that we're working with, so I'm really looking forward to just getting to know people and growing in the way that I'm thinking about these things. HGH: Great, that's such a fitting answer also for the topic at hand. Thanks so much for your time!
