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Gary Steiner on the moral status of animals and the “intellectualist” bias
Marilyn tipped me off to this very interesting-looking book by philosopher Gary Steiner: Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship. Looks like the book came out in 2008, but I wasn’t previously aware of it. Steiner provides a summary of the book’s argument here . Interestingly, Steiner takes a tack that…
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Edwards on animal redemption
If the entire creation–not just human beings–is to be taken up into the divine life (deified, to use the term Edwards prefers), then it makes sense to ask whether individual, sentient, non-human creatures (i.e., animals) will participate in the new creation. Edwards thinks that, based on the character of the God revealed in Jesus, we…
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Denis Edwards on new creation: radical transformation and real continuity
One problem for any Christian eschatology–an underappreciated one, it seems to me–is reconciling it with the rather bleak view of the universe’s future provided to us by modern science. We’re told that our universe will, after billions of years of expansion, either collapse back in on itself in a “big crunch” expand endlessly into an…
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Book notes
Currently reading: Denis Edwards, How God Acts. See my posts on this here, here, and here. The second half of the book, which I may or may not blog about in more detail, is less concerned directly with the question of divine action, but offers Edwards’ take on redemption, the atonement, and the salvation of…
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German frugality: threat or menace?
Is it possible that there’s something wrong with an economic system that requires us to scold people for being too frugal, not buying a bunch of useless crap they don’t want, etc.?
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Denis Edwards and Keith Ward on miracles
Miracles present what is probably the toughest challenge for Denis Edwards’ noninterventionist account of divine action. After all, isn’t a miracle by definition an act of God “intervening” in, or overriding, or bypassing the normal chain of events? Edwards considers one traditional view on what a miracle is, namely that of Thomas Aquinas. As we’ve…
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Quasi-mea culpa on Marcus Borg
A while back I lamented that moderate-to-progressive Christians were in danger of creating their own theological ghetto by creating an “approved” reading list of people like Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. I wrote that “Borg and Crossan, for example, though they both have some good insights, seem to want to replace 2,000 years of…
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Johnny Cash nixed “Imagine”?
From a review of the new Johnny Cash album American VI: Ain’t No Grave: The success in large part on this sixth collection, as with the entire series, comes down to song selection, which [producer Rick] Rubin has overseen with excellent taste. Talk about a dream job: Thinking up cool songs for Johnny Cash to…
A Thinking Reed 