Month: September 2006

September 26, 2006

A Change of Climate at The Economist

At the request of Andy Crouch, who is among other things editorial director for The Christian Vision Project at Christianity Today, I have taken a look at the editorial from The Economist’s special issue from Sept. Continue Reading...
September 26, 2006

The Inevitable Loophole

On yet another day in a long season of bad news for Catholic schools in major urban areas, Chicago’s historic high school seminary is slated to close. Michael J. Petrilli addresses the broader context of the problem in this analysis on NRO. Continue Reading...
September 26, 2006

A Case against Chimeras: Part II

Part II of our week-long series on the ethics of chimeras begins with an examination of the creation account in the book of Genesis. Creation – Genesis 1:26–30 The creation account in Genesis provides us with essential insights into the nature of the created world, from rocks and trees to birds and bees. Continue Reading...
September 25, 2006

The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 1

This post will introduce what I intend to be an extended series concerned with recovering and reviving the catholicity of Protestant ethics. Protestant catholicity? Isn’t this an oxymoron? It may come as a surprise in light of a common stereotype of Protestant theology, but the older Protestant understanding of reason, the divine will, and natural law actually provided a bulwark against the notion of a capricious God, unbounded by truth and goodness, as Pope Benedict recently pointed out in relation to Islam’s understanding of God. Continue Reading...
September 25, 2006

Becker and Posner on DDT

This week, University of Chicago faculty members Richard A. Posner and Gary S. Becker discuss and debate the relationship between DDT and the fight against malaria on their blog. As a self-proclaimed “strong environmentalist” who supports “the ban on using DDT as a herbicide,” Posner writes first about the contemporary decline in genetic diversity due in large part to the rate of species extinction. Continue Reading...
September 25, 2006

A Case against Chimeras: Part I

This week will feature a five part series, with one installment per day, putting forth my presentation of a biblical-theological case against the creation of certain kinds of chimeras, or human-animal hybrids. Continue Reading...
September 22, 2006

The Green Old Party

A਋it of green conservative politics for your Friday – You’ll see why in a minute. First, read this blog post by the Sierra Club on Linc Chafee (Republican, RI), and then this: Meet Wayne Gilchrest, Republican member of the House of Representatives, First Congressional District of Maryland, former house painter, teacher, Vietnam veteran — and past, present and future canoeist who has yet to find himself up that well-known proverbial creek without a paddle, though he must think at times the current and wind is against his flimsy craft. Continue Reading...
September 22, 2006

Conference on Christianity and the Environment

Courtesy of today’s ZondervanTo The Point comes this announcement, replete with extensive related links: The MacLaurin Institute is sponsoring a conference at the University of Minnesota through tomorrow exploring what it means for people to demonstrate a Christian perspective as they live their lives at the interfaces of three “worlds” — natural, engineered, and human. Continue Reading...
September 22, 2006

Tithe and Tithe Again

In a way, the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford recognizes a fact that Ron Sider has written on and I have thought about for a long time. In “A New Take on Tithing,” Claude Rosenberg & Tim Stone write: Too often, individuals make decisions about how much money to donate to charitable causes on an ad hoc basis. Continue Reading...
September 21, 2006

Proportionalism Critique

The debate has not been confined to Catholic circles, but it has been concentrated there. Many (most?) American Catholic moral theologians of the post-Vatican II era have been enamored with one form or another of “proportionalism,” a theory of morality that eschews the traditional Catholic focus on the “intrinsic” goodness or badness of human acts. Continue Reading...