Category: Philosophy
Faithful Extension and the Question of Human Origins
William T. Cavanaugh and Jamie K. A. Smith, eds.: Evolution and the Fall, Eerdmans, 2017. The questions the church confronts most severely at present are questions of human nature, and what to call good and what to reject as broken...
Recovering Traditional Apologetics: A Review of Penner’s “The End of Apologetics”
I’m pleased to publish this guest review by Blake Adams.
Blame Jacques Derrida for Donald Trump.
I’m pleased to run this guest piece by S.D. Kelly, particularly given the direction the Trump campaign has gone in the past week. A dozen years after his death, the ideas promoted by the historian and philosopher Jacques Derrida still...
Playful, Passionate, Principled, but never Putrid Polemics (Or, Don’t Forget Jesus in an Argument)
If you’ve ever had an “intensely engaged” discussion with a friend in class, a Facebook thread, blog, or a Twitter-battle, you’ve engaged in polemics. Now, you needn’t worry that this is a particularly un-Christian activity. A friend of mine recently...
Because Telling Another Person They’re Just Wrong Usually Isn’t Helpful
From what I hear, there was a presidential election recently. I’ve also heard that it highlighted (again) some fundamental differences about moral issues that divide the citizenry. Just in case those things are true, and even if they’re not, I...
Essay Prizes, the Problem of Evil, and Philosophy of Religion: An Interview with Michael Rea
Notre Dame’s Center for the Philosophy of Religion has just announced a unique opportunity for an academic community: they are offering 10 $3000 prizes to people who publish essays in non-academic publications that expound upon the philosophical work that’s been...
Thomas Says: Scandal, It’s So Special
This is the third in my intermittent series on Aquinas on the topic of scandal, which is covered in question 43 of the second part of the second part of his Summa Theologiae. In the first two posts I covered...
Thomas Says: So Scandalous It’s a Sin
In the first post in this series on Aquinas’s account of scandal, we saw that Aquinas defines scandal as “something less rightly said or done that occasions spiritual downfall” and that he distinguishes between active and passive scandal. In this...
Thomas Says: So Scandalous!
Because you can never have too much Aquinas, I’ve decided to reboot my blogging here with another series on the thought of the Angelic Doctor. The first topic in the series was Thomas’s thoughts on killing. For no particular reason,...
Postmodernism Can’t Be.
Theologian John Caputo, quoted at my friend Christopher Benson’s blog, with a rather unsatisfying explanation of “postmodernism.” “Postmodernism thus is not relativism or scepticism, as its uncomprehending critics almost daily charge, but minutely close attention to detail, a sense for...