A CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY OF EVOLUTION AND PARTICIPATION

Recent controversies surrounding the discernment of design in the natural world are an indication of a pervasive disquiet among believers. Can God as creator/sustainer of creation be reconcilable with the belief that God's work is indiscernible behind secondary evolutionary causes? Christian piety requires that the order experienced in the natural world be evidence of God's love and existence. Theistic evolutionary models rarely examine this matter, assuming that God is indiscernible in the processes and order of the world because only secondary causes can be examined. This leaves antievolutionary perspectives to interpret and address the problem of seeing God in the world. I examine these issues in order to gain more credibility for the religious longing to discern God in nature while at the same time affirming the indubitable truth of an evolutionary history. I argue that God's trinitarian nature, hiddenness, and incarnation give us reason to believe that God's presence in the natural world will be discernible, but only within the natural processes, and thereby only in an obscured fashion. I also argue that newer understandings of evolutionary mechanisms are more consistent with theological appropriation than are strictly Darwinian ones.     

Avoiding The Unavoidable? Judith Shklar’s Unwilling Search For An Overlapping Consensus

No less an authority than John Rawls identified Judith Shklar as a ‘political’ liberal. However, though their respective conceptions of political liberalism are similar in a number of important respects, Shklar emphasizes that her vision differs notably from that of Rawls. In particular, she explicitly eschews Rawls’s focus on establishing and sustaining an overlapping consensus, arguing that his belief in the possibility of securing such a consensus is naïve and, indeed, dangerous insofar as it embodies an obvious disregard for the painful lessons of history and thereby not only allows but invites the occurrence of new cruelties and horrors. Obviously, such an approach would seem to diverge dramatically from that promoted by Rawls and many other political liberals. The purpose of this essay is to analyze Shklar’s arguments and determine the validity of her claims regarding the differences between her conception and that of Rawls and, in so doing, assess the extent to which Shklar’s ‘liberalism of fear’ can be said to represent a meaningfully distinctive model of political liberalism.     

Rawls and Religious Community: Ethical Decision Making in the Public Square

While most people may initially agree that justice is fairness,as an evangelical Protestant I argue that, for many religiouscomprehensive doctrines, the Rawlsean model does not possessthe resources necessary to sustain tolerance in moral decisionmaking. The weakness of Rawls's model centers on the reasonablepriority of convictions that arise from private comprehensivedoctrines. To attain a free and pluralistic society, peopleneed resources sufficient to provide reasons to tolerate actionsthat are otherwise intolerable. In addition to arguing for thedeficiency of the Rawlsean political model, I sketch out a preliminarymodel of ambassadorship that offers religious communities, andin particular Protestant evangelicals, the necessary resourcesto engage the broader society tolerantly while maintaining theirreligious convictions. As a citizen of the church and a memberof another kingdom, Christians serve as ambassadors to thosewho are not of the heavenly kingdom. I take this model to bemore ambitious than that of a sojourner who lives in the landbut is isolated as much as possible from society, while moremodest than that of reconstructionists who seek to implementtheir own sacred law on all others.     

A Just Global Economy: In Defense of Rawls

In The Law of Peoples, John Rawls does not discuss justice and the global economy at great length or in great detail. What he does say has not been well-received. The prevailing view seems to be that what Rawls says in The Law of Peoples regarding global economic justice is both inconsistent with and a betrayal of his own liberal egalitarian commitments, an unexpected and unacceptable defense of the status quo. This view is, I think, mistaken. Rawls’s position on global or international economic justice is richer, more nuanced, and generally more compelling than his critics have been willing to acknowledge. My aim in this essay is to sympathetically set out, and then defend against two common families of objection to, Rawls’s position on global or international economic justice. Objections of the first sort reject Rawls’s position as inadequately attentive to the material and economic interests of individual persons worldwide. Objections of the second sort reject it as inadequately attentive to the material and economic interests of well-ordered peoples. Throughout the paper I develop several arguments implicit in The Law of Peoples but not well-developed there as well as offer some additional arguments of my own consistent with the spirit of The Law of Peoples and Rawls’s work more generally. I conclude with some brief remarks expressing two worries I have about Rawls’s position – one concerning global public goods, the other concerning the formation of a morally adequate and effective political will within the international context under contemporary conditions. I wish to thank Alyssa Bernstein, Allen Buchanan, Samuel Freeman, John Hardwig, John Mandle, Rex Martin, Jim Nickel, Walter Riker, Kok-Chor Tan, and Leif Wenar for helpful comments or instructive conversation regarding earlier drafts of this paper.     

Reasons-Responsive Compatibilism and the Consequences of Belief

John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza offer a theory of moral responsibility which makes responsibility dependent upon the way in which moral agents view themselves. According to the theory, agents are responsible for their actions only if they think of themselves as apt candidates for praise and blame; if they come to believe they are not apt candidates for praise and blame, they are ipso facto not morally responsible. In what follows, I show that Fischer and Ravizza’s account of responsibility for consequences is inconsistent with this subjective element of their theory, and that the subjective element may be retained only if they are willing to implausibly restrict their account of responsibility for consequences. I end by discussing the broad significance of the failure of the subjective element for their overall approach to moral responsibility.     

Shame,Stigma, and Disgust in the Decent Society

Would a just society or government absolutely refrain from shaming or humiliating any of its members? “No,” says this essay. It describes morally acceptable uses of shame, stigma and disgust as tools of social control in a decent (just) society. These uses involve criminal law, tort law, and informal social norms. The standard of moral acceptability proposed for determining the line is a version of perfectionistic prioritarian consequenstialism. From this standpoint, criticism is developed against Martha Nussbaum’s view that to respect the dignity of each person, society absolutely must refrain from certain ways of shaming and humiliating its members and rendering them objects of communal disgust.     

Militant atheism,pragmatism, and the God-shaped hole

This paper addresses recent examples of militant atheism. It considers the theistic reply that describes atheism as deriving from a “God-shaped hole” in the human soul. The paper will argue that American pragmatism offers a middle path that avoids militant atheism without suffering from this problem. The paper describes this middle path and considers the problem that is seen in Rorty’s recent work: how the pragmatist can remain critical of religious fundamentalism without succumbing to a militant version of atheism. The solution proposed is tolerant acceptance of religion along with melioristic criticism developed within shared norms of inquiry.     

Listening to God: Using Meta–Terminology to DescribeRevelation in a Comparative Theistic Context1

Abstract : Starting from the assertion that comparative theology is inherently dialogical in nature, this paper examines the use of non‐confessional meta‐terminology and its application in interfaith dialogue. In so doing, it examines potential meta‐terms for describing revelation as related in the Bhagavad‐Gita, the Qur’an, and the Gospel of John, and concludes that non‐confessional terms aid in the dismissal of normative viewpoints, leading to greater appreciation of commonality and meaning in the truth claims of other faiths and dialogue partners.     

Speaking to Pictures

A review of Peter Steele’s Plenty, a book in which each poem is faced by a colour plate of the painting or object which sparked it off. Hollander’s ecphrasis and Krieger’s ekphrasis are held in – possibly unresolvable – dialectic by Steele’s poems. The only resolution which one can find is one of wit rather than of philosophy.