Revisiting My Grandmother’s Garden: Christian Moral Imagination of Cohabitation

In the interface of Christian ethics, autoethnography and Indigenous knowledge, I propose a Christian moral imagination of cohabitation based on interdependence and enablement. I use non-archival community knowledge and oral memory to excavate moral wisdom from my grandmother’s garden. I argue that to be interdependent is to be human, and the creation of a “social condition of livable lives” is a necessary requirement of cohabitation. Methodologically, this paper builds on liberative ethics and its emphasis on moral oughts as “derivatives of survivals”. I conclude that the deep-seated intentionality to live well and be fully human is the soul of Christian ethics. Though the story centers on my grandmother and her kitchen garden, the paper is transnational and contributes to the global discussion on what it means to live well. It adds moral knowledge centered on Indigenous people’s world-making paradigm. This paper is not an Indigenous perspective of Christian ethics. Rather, it is a paradigmatic paper built on the way that Indigenous people engage with the world (relationality) and with each other.