Life at the end of the twentieth century presents us with a disturbing reality. Otherness, the simple fact of being different in some way, has come to be defined as in and of itself evil. Miroslav Volf contends that if the healing word of the gospel is to be heard today, Christian theology must find ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other. Reaching back to the New Testament metaphor of salvation as reconciliation, Volf proposes the idea of embrace as a theological response to the problem of exclusion. Increasingly we see that exclusion has become the primary sin, skewing our perceptions of reality and causing us to react out of fear and anger to all those who are not within our (ever-narrowing) circle. In light of this, Christians must learn that salvation comes, not only as we are reconciled to God, and not only as we “learn to live with one another,” but as we take the dangerous and costly step of opening ourselves to the other, of enfolding him or her in the same embrace with which we have been enfolded by God.
Naturalism" seems to me in this and other respects rather like "World Peace." Almost everyone swears allegiance to it, and is willing to march under its banner. But disputes can still break out about what it is appropriate or acceptable to do in the name of that slogan. And like world peace, once you start specifying concretely exactly what it involves and how to achieve it, it becomes increasingly difficult to reach and to sustain a consistent and exclusive "naturalism." There is pressure on the one hand to include more and more within your conception of "nature," so it loses its definiteness and restrictiveness. Or, if the conception is kept fixed and restrictive, there is pressure on the other hand to distort or even deny the very phenomena that a naturalistic study — and especially a naturalistic study of human beings — is supposed to explain.
But there is barely beginning to emerge a new generation of creationists with legitimate and relevant credentials who are undertaking to actually do some of the painstaking, detailed drudgery that underlies any genuinely live scientific program. This emergence has begun to produce a separation in the creationist movement — an upper and lower tier, so to speak. I think that what ultimately separates the two tiers is different levels of respect for accuracy and completeness of detail, and different levels of awareness that a theory’s looking good in vague and general form is an enormously unreliable predictor of whether in the long run the theory will be disemboweled by recalcitrant technical details. That appreciation is something that typically comes only with a legitimate scientific education, which some of the creationist popularizers and many in their audiences lack…The newly emerging upper tier of the creationist movement, however, seems to have little patience with the vague popularized treatments and is, again, undertaking to do the meticulous detail work that a genuinely scientific creationism requires. As yet, this upper tier is not associated with any particular organization.
J.P. Moreland, in Evangelical Apologetics (out of print), eds. Michael Bauman, David W. Hall, and Robert C. Newman. (Christian Publications Inc., 1996).
Moreland defines what he calls philosophical apologetics as "a philosophical activity which has as its goal (or perhaps as its result) the increasing or maintaining of the epistemic justification of a Christian world view in whole or in part." Moreland surveys several varieties of philosophical apologetics and makes the case for philosophy as an essential and specially placed discipline for the effective integration of theology with other sources of knowledge claims. Finally, Moreland suggests several practical ways in which Christians can interact persuasively with the world of ideas that undercut the plausibility and relevance of Christian ideas in contemporary culture. ~ Afterall
In an era where the defence of human rights is prominent, a fundamental question is who counts as a human person and, more specifically, when does human personhood begin and end? The answer to the question at both ends of the spectrum requires metaphysical reflection in three areas: 1. What is a substance and what is a property-thing?; 2. What does it mean to be a human being?; and 3. What does it mean to be a human person? In this paper, we will address these questions in order to lay a metaphysical foundation for ethical decision-making concerning human rights at the edges of life. While the implications of this analysis extend to a variety of ethical issues, we will limit our application to the ontological status of the unborn, and argue that zygotes, embryos and fetuses (hereafter referred to synonymously) are fully and equally human beings, and consequently, human persons. We shall not address the abortion question directly, though we trust the implications of the arguments presented will become obvious.
We cannot foreclose on the question of God’s willingness to disclose himself and his purposes in some concrete, particularized way without first looking into the evidence for the authenticity of an alleged revelation from him; even if a quest for some particular truth of the matter is scandalous by today’s ephemeral standards, It will hardly do to accuse God of hiding from us if we have not sincerely sought him in appropriate ways, or if we have insisted on prescribing for God the conditions under which we would approve a revelation of himself.
[Speaking rhetorically] The mere suggestion that Jesus might be the only way to achieve authentic religious fulfillment smacks of bigoted narrowness and rigid exclusiveness. While these are qualities that we have come to expect from obtuse religious zealots, they surely are unworthy of the general run of humanity, if not of God himself — if he should happen to exist. And the idea that humans can acquire specific religious knowledge that holds the key to the entire human condition is, well, pretentious at the least. The attitude is simply incompatible with enlightened awareness of our cognitive limitations.
During the last decade or so, there has been a growing body of literature about various topics in end-of-life ethics. And while there is no clear agreement about a number of issues in this literature, nevertheless, there is something of a consensus that has emerged, perhaps unconsciously and implicitly at times, regarding how to view a cluster of crucial metaphysical themes relevant to the ethical issues just mentioned — the nature of personhood, humanness, and personal identity. In our view, this consensus approach to these three themes is Cartesian and Lockean in spirit. Often conspicuous by its absence, especially outside Catholic circles, is any discussion of Thomistic insights into these metaphysical desiderata, much less an acceptance of them. This tendency is egregious and contributes to a way of framing certain ethical issues that determines their resolution from the beginning.
Queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, “queer” does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. “Queer,” then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative — a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practices. It could include some married couples without children, for example, or even (who knows?) some married couples with children — with, perhaps, very naughty children. “Queer,” in any case, does not designate a class of already objectified pathologies or perversions; rather, it describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance. It is from the eccentric positionality occupied by the queer subject that it may become possible to envision a variety of possibilities for reordering the relations among sexual behaviors, erotic identities, constructions of gender, forms of knowledge, regimes of enunciation, logics of representation, modes of self-constitution, and practices of community — for restructuring, that is, the relations among power, truth, and desire.
Many have thought that the reality of evil in the world makes the existence of God unlikely and religious belief irrational. The most influential contemporary solution to this problem has been offered by philosopher John Hick: God is responsible for evil, using it as a soul-builder to make human beings into morally perfect creatures. This book is an appraisal of Hick’s work on the specific topic of theodicy — his effort to cope philosophically with the problem of evil from within the Judeo-Christian tradition. R. Douglas Geivett seeks to show why any adequate response to the problem of evil must begin with the positive reasons one might have for believing in God. Geivett begins with a survey of three influential figures who grappled with this question: St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Gottfried Leibniz. Hick’s approach to the problem of evil is then contrasted with their views. The author makes a case for the possibility of natural theology and he defends the view that it is rational to believe in the existence of God, even given the reality of evil in the world. Geivett takes issue with Hick’s approach to the significance of evil, the nature of human freedom, and the character of the afterlife. He argues for a return to the Augustinian free-will tradition: that creatures with free wills are responsible for evil. This discussion of one of the most challenging questions in the philosophy of religion concludes with an afterword by John Hick in which he responds to the author’s thesis.