A Thinking Reed

VI Bookshelf – Updated

Written by

Lee M.

in

As happens all too often, I’ve been sidetracked from my reading schedule (loosey-goosey as it is) by a trip to the Philly public library. (The beautiful weather we’ve been having has made the walk from the office to the library enjoyable as well as edifying!)

Two acquisitions of note on the latest trip:

  • Justification: An Ecumenical Study by George Tavard. Tavard is a Roman Catholic theologian making the case, more or less, that Luther got it right. I’m about 2/3rds of the way through this. Some interesting bits about the Council of Orange and how it seems to have been unknown for much of the Middle Ages.
  • Chrisitan Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World by Robert P. Kraynak. This looks really interesting. Seems that Kraynak is going to argue against the common assumption that Christianity necessarily entails support for liberal democracy. Instead, he’s going to emphasize the Augustinian “Two Cities” notion as setting certain limits to how full-throated an endorsement Christians can give to any political system.

Comments

4 responses to “VI Bookshelf – Updated”

  1. Eric Lee

    “Seems that Kraynak is going to argue against the common assumption that Christianity necessarily entails support for liberal democracy.”

    Have you ever read any Alasdair MacIntyre? His After Virtue series is supposedly all about this.

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  2. Lee

    Yeah, though After Virtue is really more about meta-ethics and how the Enlightenment has supposedly made a coherent moral discourse impossible. He makes some cryptic remarks toward the end about a new “Dark Ages” and the need to build communities where true virtue rooted in a real tradition can be cultivated. He kind of follows up on this idea in Dependent Rational Animals, which tries to give more content to his neo-Aristotelian ethics.

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  3. Eric Lee

    He also has Which Rationality, Whose Justice? … I think that’s the name of it. I would have read it a little while ago, but the copy I was borrowing had to be taken back by the owner.

    Reply
  4. Lee

    Right – Mac’s thesis, best as I understand it, is that terms like “good,” “bad,” “right,” “wrong,” etc. only make sense in the context of a tradition animated by a certain notion of what the purpose of human life is. For instance, the virtues (prudence, honesty, justice, etc.) are good insofar as they enable us to fulfill our telos – our purpose as human beings. Even rationality itself is tradition-dependent, which is what he argues for in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (which I haven’t read)

    Once you lose that sense of a human telos (as Mac claims we have in our post-Enlightenment culture) then our moral language no longer makes any sense and emotivism (i.e. the view that our morality is sheer subjective preference) becomes inevitable.

    Personally I think Mac is a bit too pessimistic about the possibility of a common morality among people of different traditions.

    Here are a couple of good essays:

    http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9608/articles/oakes.html

    http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9910/articles/meilaender.html

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