God’s Faithfulness and Dementia: Christian Theology in Context

Christian theology concerns the practical, contextual realities of life in the church and the world. What does this mean for a person with dementia? While much dementia care focuses on deficits, this article promotes a different starting point: God’s faithfulness rather than our forgetfulness. Using case studies from residential aged care, opportunities for meaningful pastoral care are explored, inviting us to see in the person with dementia a deep connection with ourselves. Drawn from a theological understanding of God as three persons—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—“person-centered care” invites us into relationships of mutuality and reciprocity not dependent on words. Pastoral care of families is manifest through personal relationships where all aspects of dementia, including death and dying, can be discussed openly. Grounded in God’s faithfulness, the first and final word is love. Hope lies in the belief that we have already been found. We are blessed by the grace of God, called into community where the insightful and the forgetful flourish together.     

God’s Gender Confusion: Some Polymorphously Perverse Pastoral Theology

This brief paper introduces the special edition of Pastoral Psychology on the psychology of religion at Rice University.     

A Book Review of Richard Easterlin’s An Economist’s Lessons on Happiness

Journal of Happiness Studies -     

Leading God’s People: Perceptions of Influence Among African–American Pastors

Journal of Religion and Health - Religious leaders, particularly African–American pastors, are believed to play a key role in addressing health disparities. Despite the role...     

‘A Mark of Perfection:’ Receiving and Perfection in Aquinas’s Trinitarian Theology

In the last three decades, some Thomists have argued that receiving is a pure perfection, others that it is a transcendental, and others that it is neither. All agree, however, that Aquinas himself holds that it is neither a pure perfection nor a transcendental. I argue here that, while Aquinas does not number receiving among the pure perfections or the transcendentals, he comes closer to doing so than has been acknowledged, and – at least in one respect – he even associates reception more radically with perfection than do any of the more recent champions of receptivity.     

A Review of Sam Harris’s Free Will

The Psychological Record -     

Phenomenology and Theology: Situating Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion

This essay considers the philosophical and theological significance of the phenomenological analysis of Christian faith offered by the early Heidegger. It shows, first, that Heidegger poses a radical and controversial challenge to philosophers by calling them to do without God in an unfettered pursuit of the question of being (through his ‘destruction of onto-theology’); and, second, that this exclusion nonetheless leaves room for a form of philosophical reflection upon the nature of faith and discourse concerning God, namely for a philosophy of religion in a phenomenological mode (as exemplified most clearly in Heidegger’s 1920/21 lectures on the phenomenology of religious life). However, it is argued that the theological roots of Heidegger’s own phenomenological analyses subvert his frequently asserted claim concerning the incompatibility of Christian faith and philosophical inquiry.     

Told in Memory of God’s People: Beloved

The purpose of this article is to show how Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, can be used in pastoral care and counseling courses to encourage the development of empathy and to illustrate themes in the communal contextual and intercultural paradigms emerging in the field of pastoral theology.     

Review of Samuel D. Rocha’s the Syllabus as Curriculum: A Reconceptualist Approach

Studies in Philosophy and Education - The Syllabus as Curriculum: A Reconceptualist Approach by Samuel D. Rocha. The review examines the central tenets of Rocha’s book, namely that the...     

Review of G. Felicitas Munzel’s Kant’s Conception of Pedagogy: Toward Education for Freedom

Studies in Philosophy and Education -     

Whence the Happiness Revolution? A Book Review of Richard Easterlin’s An Economist’s Lessons on Happiness

Journal of Happiness Studies -     

A critique of Thad Metz’s African theory of moral status

Thad Metz defends what he considers to be a novel theory of moral status, i.e. an account about what beings are owed direct duties in virtue of their moral significance. Metz claims that his account is African, it is plausible and that it is worth taking seriously like other competing accounts in the Western philosophical tradition. In this article, I give four reasons why we should doubt, if not reject, these claims of plausibility. Firstly, I show how a theory that accounts for moral status by relying solely on some facet of human nature ultimately fails to grant intrinsic value to non-human components, and as such it will always prefer human interests over those of nonhuman components, and further it won’t have a moral-theoretical basis to assign intrinsic value to non-human components. Secondly, I hope to demonstrate that this theory will not be able to account for the moral status of Martians and in turn show that it does not secure the standing of animals from such beings. I also argue that his account does not give credible evidence for the intuition that severely injured human persons have greater moral status than animals with similar internal properties. Finally, I briefly indicate that this theory does not have the corpus to explain our duties to people who have died, or at least, their bodies.