A Thinking Reed

  • Wikipedia rules

    I was looking for some information on Joseph Butler and had to laugh at this on the Wikipedia page for him: “You might also be looking for Joseph Campbell Butler, founding member of The Lovin’ Spoonful.”Indeed.

  • Left, right, whatever

    The summer issue of The American Conservative consists of a symposium on the meaning of “right” and “left” in our current context and what value, if any, these distinctions retain. You can now read the entire thing online. I venture to say that this may be the only time the writing of left-anarchist Kirkpatrick Sale…

  • Anscombe, Truman, and the bomb

    Brandon has a good discussion of the decision to use atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in light of G.E.M. Anscombe’s “Mr. Truman’s Degree” (which is, as far as I can tell, not available on the web). Brandon is right to distinguish Truman’s moral culpability from the question of the justness of the act itself.…

  • Glorious Assumption

    As we saw in the previous post, Macquarrie argues that the Immaculate Conception is both a preparation for and an implication of Christ’s redeeming work. This can be the case because the redemption wrought by Jesus isn’t confined to time and space and his “saving work reaches backward in time as well as forward.” In…

  • The Golden Rule approach to proportionality

    I complained a while ago about the imprecision, if not downright impossibility, in determining “proportionality” in cases where innocents are foreseeably, but not directly, killed in warfare. The usual way of formulating the proportionality criterion is to say something like the evil of any innocent deaths must be outweighed by the good accomplished by the…

  • Divine im/passibility

    As a follow up of sorts on this post, do check out these theses on divine suffering at Gaunilo’s Island. He’s an honest-to-goodness theologian-in-training and so actually knows what he’s talking about.

  • Without stain

    As we saw in the previous post, one thing MacQuarrie is concerned to do is to understand salvation in personal and relational terms rather than the impersonal categories of some traditional theology. We saw this at work in his argument against the strongly monergistic sola gratia position; since salvation entails the healing of a personal…

  • Mary and synergism

    Over the weekend I finished John MacQuarrie’s Mary for All Christians (excerpt here) and thought I’d jot down some thoughts on it. MacQuarrie, a Scottish Presbyterian turned Anglican is a noted theologian who has been involved in various ecumenical endeavors, particularly with Roman Catholics. One of the interesting contentions MacQuarrie makes is that the division…

  • Liberalism and theological disagreement

    Here’s a good article by Dr. Giles Fraser an Anglican rector and philosopher in defense of liberalism, rightly understood. Dr. Fraser contrasts the self-assertive hyper-individualistic version of liberalism which receives much well-deserved ire from theologians and social critics with a more temperate tradition of liberalism he traces back to Edmund Burke: Burke’s suspicious liberalism begins…

  • Worth a read: foreign affairs edition

    Political scientist Robert Pape, who’s written a book on the logic of suicide terrorism, has a piece in the NY Times on the nature of Hezbollah. At Slate Jacob Weisberg writes on the failure of economic sanctions as a method of undermining the rule of dictators. Charles Peña, whose new book on counterterrorism I just…