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Chimps, morals, and God
This Frans de Waal essay and the accompanying video discussion with Robert Wright, on the evolutionary roots of morality, are worth checking out. De Waal’s argument is that moral impulses exist in our non-human animal relatives–particularly our closest relatives, the primates–and that we can see morality emerging along a continuum as a completely “natural” phenomenon.…
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The thorn in the flesh and the “weakness gospel”
I’m reading Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s book The First Paul, and it’s really good so far. I may have more to blog about the overall themes later, but for now I just wanted to note one interesting tidbit. There has been a lot of speculation about the “thorn in the flesh” that Paul…
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Human “exceptionalism” as moral exclusion
In his review of Wesley Smith’s book that I linked to below, Angus Taylor puts his finger on exactly what has long bothered me about Smith’s rhetoric of “human exceptionalism”: Even if can be shown … that all human beings deserve an elevated moral status, it is not clear why this elevated status should entail…
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Spoiler alert!
This trailer for the 1956 John Huston/Gregory Peck film version of Moby-Dick gives an awful lot away. Maybe they were assuming most people had read the book? I haven’t seen it yet, but the New York Times liked it quite a bit.
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Friday links
– Chris Hayes: Postcard from Palestine – Endangered red wolves being hunted to extinction – Tea partiers fantasize about a “constitutionally pure” government – Jean Kazez on Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape – On not really believing in heaven – Corporations gain privacy rights as people lose them – Soldiers against torture – A…
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“The production and consumption of novelty”
Interesting TED talk by economist Tim Jackson on the limits to growth and alternative understandings of prosperity (via Nothing New Under the Sun). Jackson wrote a book called Prosperity without Growth, which you can read about here. And the “eco-friendly” search engine he mentions is Ecosia.
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John Birch redivivus
In the New Yorker, historian Sean Wilentz notes the parallels between the ideology and tactics of the Glenn Beck-inspired tea party movement and the Cold War-era John Birch Society. The similarities extend even to drawing on some of the same crackpot conspiracy-mongering “scholarship.” What I didn’t realize before reading this is that Woodrow Wilson has…
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The historical Jesus as a norm of Christology
Over the weekend I read A. Roy Eckardt’s Reclaiming the Jesus of History: Christology Today. The book is more interesting than the title suggests; Eckardt writes in conversation not only with “historical Jesus” studies, but also with feminist theology, theology of religions, liberation theology, and particularly “post-Shoah” theology. His stated goal is to develop a…
