[Discipleship as Political Responsibility, John Howard Yoder, Translated by Timothy J. Geddert, Forward by Stanley Hauerwas, Herald Press, 2003] In speaking of the temptations which the crowds presented to Christ, to make Him King after He multiplied the bread on the mountainside and again after His triumphal entrance into Jerusalem, Yoder says: [T]he political temptation [...]
The reader might wish to read my earlier posting, A Christian’s view of Einstein’s and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality, for some background on this general issue. I follow the philosopher Kurt Hubner (see his book Critique of Scientific Reason) in claiming that Einstein’s position was that things have relationships with other things [...]
In his first encyclical and in his book Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict has invited criticism of those parts of his thought which deal with speculative thoughts, including the nature of the human being. What is a speculative thought? Roughly speaking, it’s the result of an act of the imagination, a faculty stunted very badly [...]
I’ve spoken about the nature of evil as related to the individual creature in my previous two entries: Good and Evil: Simpler Than We Pretend and Good and Evil: The Instability of Evil. But evil takes shape on a large scale far too often, especially in this modern age of genocidal wars, this age where [...]
In my prior post, Good and Evil: Simpler Than We Pretend, I noted that St. Augustine of Hippo taught that evil is a privation in being rather than a positive substance. I also noted that a creature in this universe, this phase of God’s Creation, is not a firmly defined being of immutable substance but [...]