Some tag change suggestions

Question

1. gospels and gospel: these two tags get confused quite a lot. I think it would be a bit clearer if gospel was changed to the-gospel.

2. ethics and morality: should these tags be merged? There's a lot of overlap between them.

3. saint: this tag gets a lot of different things in it. What about if we split it up, into hagiography for questions about past saints, and sainthood for questions about what it means to be a saint according to various denominations?

4. sexuality: this tag really covers too many different things. I'd suggest splitting into sexual-orientation, sex-acts, gender. Anything else in there?

Answer 1

I recommend preserving both ethics and morality, since although in some popular usage the terms are interchangeable, in a site like C.SE it's important enough to distinguish so we can classify questions better. I edited the ethics so the difference is more obvious.

Reflecting academic literature in theology & philosophy, ethics is the creation of the standard while morality is the application of a particular situation to that standard. In Christianity the standard is called Moral Theology or Christian Ethics.

To apply the meaning to the questions:

• Questions which focus on application (where the standard is relatively clear, due to denominational scoping, for example) should be tagged morality. If the question involves conscience or the parameters of the moral act, it is an indication of application. Some recent ones are tagged appropriately already.
• Questions which focus on standard such as changes in history, ambiguous Bible interpretation which causes different rules, comparison among denominations, influence of philosophy to moral theology, relation to virtues, comparison among thinkers, etc. should be tagged ethics.
• What can be confusing is popular usage of right/wrong behavior in non-religious situations such as business ethics, medical ethics, etc. In Christian theology parlance, the application actually IS morality proper, while deriving secular laws out of Christian doctrines can be called ethics (as in university course names "Business Ethics" and "Medical Ethics").

See Britannica article for further discussion on popular usage.

Answer 2

I think questions like this:

Do Roman Catholics believe Saints are omnipresent?

asking about what saints do in heaven need the tag communion-of-saints

Answer 3

For gospel I think it would be a good idea to make the main tag good-news and have gospel, gospel-message as a synonym for it. This'd disambiguate gospel-music which is a bummer nobody asks about. I looked at the tags we use that start with "the-" and I think they're all likely to get replaced by tags that don't start with "the-" (i.e. the-glory-by, the-lord-of-the-rings, the-beloved-disciple). There are tags that probably should start with "the" like "pearl-of-great-price, but when used as a tag, probably ought to not have "the"

I would have thought someone would have addressed this by now; if tags should start with the word the, but I haven't found any advice on the metas. My assumption that this would be in the encyclopedia under "pearl-of-great-price, the". I don't think we're want to change papacy to "the Papacy" or "Virgin Mary" to "The Virgin Mary" or as she is in the Catholic Encyclopedia "Mary, Blessed Virgin, The"

I dunno, blame St. Isidore of Seville, or pray for his intercession.