The death of an alleged heretic,Richard Hunne (d.1514), explained

Abstract

On 4 December 1514, a suspect heretic named Richard Hunne died while being held in Lollards Tower, the bishop of London’s prison in Old St Paul’s. The discovery of Hunne’s body, hanged, provoked sharp dissension between Church and State while also triggering an anticlerical backlash among London’s citizenry in the years preceding the Reformation. This study will consider if Hunne’s death was murder, as John Foxe, the martyrologist, subsequently insisted, or suicide, as claimed by the church authorities and by Thomas More in his later published treatment of the affair. A definitive answer to this question has eluded historians for 500 years, but here a new explanation, judicial but bungled torture, is suggested as the key to this death in custody.     

Thomas J. Sweeney: A Visionary Leader and Advocate for the Counseling Profession

The contributions of Thomas J. Sweeney to the counseling profession through professional leadership and advocacy, scholarship, teaching, and the development of Chi Sigma Iota are chronicled through a personal interview and comments from professional colleagues. Readers are provided with a sense of the depth and breadth of his more than 50 years of dedicated service.     

IMAGO DEI AND HUMAN RATIONALITY

There is a pervasive trend in Western theology to identify imago Dei with human intellectual and cognitive capacities. However, several contemporary theologians have criticized this view because, according to the critics, it leads to a truncated view of humanity. In this article, I shall concentrate on the question of rationality, first, through theologies of Thomas Aquinas and contemporary Lutheran Robert Jenson, and second, in some branches of recent cognitive psychology. I will argue that there is a significant overlap between contemporary scientific interpretations of rationality and both a traditional Thomistic view and a contemporary ecumenical interpretation of imago Dei. Consequently, it is possible to give an account of imago Dei which takes structural features as central and which is in accord with contemporary science, without falling prey to the dangers that the critics of structuralism point out.     

Heterodox Economics,Social Ethics,and Inequalities

Research in the cognitive sciences indicates that metaphors significantly shape perceptions and approaches to problem solving. With this in mind, this essay argues that it is problematic for ethicists that mainstream economics and other social scientific literature relies on naturalistic metaphors to describe markets. These imply an inaccurate picture of economic phenomena and rhetorically frame many solutions to problems such as inequality as interventionist. This essay proposes that religious ethicists may find resources for avoiding this conceptual hazard in emerging fields of heterodox economics that are attentive to the role of culture and human agency in shaping markets. It introduces feminist, behavioral, institutional, and Austrian economics in particular and highlights some of the specific approaches to inequality adopted in these fields. It then suggests that engaging heterodox perspectives more generally may help ethicists keep in view the full complexity and social nature of the economic problems they analyze.     

A test of the X-linked genetic hypothesis for sex differences on Piaget's water-level task

Data from seven studies involving 849 high school and college students were used to test the recessive X-linked genetic model prediction that the square of the proportion of men who perform accurately on the water-level task is equal to the proportion of women who perform accurately. Goodness-of-fit tests showed that this prediction was confirmed for each sample. A model with a single estimate of gene frequency accounted for all the data when a classification error parameter was incorporated into the X-linked model. In both models the gene frequency parameter was about $\text{2}\text{3}$.     

Rethinking Economic Inequality

Secular discourse about problem of economic inequality rests on two foundational premises that are problematic from a theological point of view. First, individuals enter into society with the aim of bettering their own condition. Second, bettering one's own condition entails accruing more wealth and power so that one can fulfill more of one's desires. In this paper I argue that insofar as these premises shape market behavior, they actively promote excessive economic inequality. Ethical responses to the problem of economic inequality that do not challenge these assumptions are unlikely to effectively promote justice. A theological response to the problem of economic inequality should work to promote cultural change by reminding us that genuine human flourishing depends on communal ties and the higher human goods that material wealth is properly meant to support.     

How Shall We Read the History of Ethics?

This response suggests that in writing the history of ethics, it is important to take seriously what the principals wrote and believed, distinguishing it carefully from our own responses to their writings, or from subsequent uses to which their writings may have been put. For example, when reading Thomas Aquinas and Francisco de Vitoria on just war against non‐Christian peoples, forcible conversion and conquest are clearly condemned. Whatever the attitudes of their contemporaries, not to mention later thinkers up to the present, there is no foundation in Aquinas and Vitoria for holy war or “exceptionalism,” American or otherwise.     

Solidarity and the New Inequality

Economists now have the data to generate a high‐resolution picture of the economic inequalities within the very top fractions of income and wealth and between the top‐most fractions and others that have emerged since the early 1980s. I shall refer to these inequalities collectively as “the new inequality.” I argue that the moral value of solidarity can be used to raise pointed moral questions about the new inequality. In most cases, however, I shall raise such questions without answering them. For I contend that solidarity functions more usefully as part of an articulate hermeneutic of suspicion—that is, as a central element in skepticism about economic inequalities and their justifications. Seeing that it functions in this way, we can see one contribution religious ethics makes to an inquiry into the new inequality.     

Aquinas's Opposition to Killing the Innocent and its Distinctiveness within the Christian just War Tradition

This essay argues that Aquinas's position regarding the killing of innocent people differs significantly from other representatives of the Christian just war tradition. While his predecessors, notably Augustine, as well as his successors, from Cajetan and Vitoria onward, affirm the legitimacy of causing the death of innocents in a just war in cases of necessity, Aquinas holds that causing the death of innocents in a foreseeable manner, whether intentionally or indirectly, is never justified. Even an otherwise legitimate act of just war cannot legitimate causing the death of innocent people, as this can never advance the common good. This stance also contrasts sharply with much modern and contemporary double effect theorizing in relation to jus in bello. In this regard, Aquinas's position, shaped decisively by his biblical and theological commitments, may point the way towards an ethical orientation beyond the typical divisions of “pacifism” and “just war.”