Anti-Semitism is Alive in the U.S.

That I bother to state this may be an embarrassing confession of my own detachment from this particular evil, if not my ignorance of the fact.
I was struck by these statistics reported in ChristianityToday's January 2008 issue (their source was the FBI):

Number of Anti-Jewish hate crimes reported in the U.S. in 2006: 967
Number of Anti-Islamic hate crimes reported: 156
Combined number of Anti-Protestant (59) and Anti-Catholic (76) hate crimes:
135

Happy New Year.
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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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The need for a theology of Holy War for pacifists and just war theorists

I read through Joshua this week. I feel quite confirmed in my assertion that JWT does not allow us to morally approve of the Israelite conquest. No distinctions are made between combatant and non-combatant; the Israelites (apparently in obedience to YHWH), put to death "everyone that breathes", including women and children. So, whether pacifist or just-war theorist, a Christian must come up with a separate theology of Holy War to cover the history of Israel.
When doing OT theology, therefore, I wonder if one's ethic regarding war and the use of force really makes any difference. Here there can be much fruitful common ground between the two historic traditions of the Church for doing biblical theology. It is our New Testament ethics that are opposed.

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Local World Religions

I spent the first part of my afternoon doing some online research on nearby religious groups, especially in Eastern traditions (Hinduisum, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Daoism). I didn't really have much luck with Daoism, although I did find a local "Taoist Tai Chi" place--I'm not sure if it would count as a religious-studies oriented activity to visit there. I also found out some info on the local Chinese community, but as far as I could tell, this is to a large degree centered around a Chinese Missionary Alliance Church, so while their cultural activities would doubtless by enriching and educational, I'm not sure it would be that helpful for my purposes in finding places to require my World Religions students to visit in the Spring.

Hinduism was easy--I knew that there was a temple locally, and found its website with a good deal of information, including the name and e-mail address of the priest and the hours of operation. There is more than one Zen/other Buddhist meditation group in the area, as well. No Sikh groups in Toledo that I found, although I did find an address and phone number for a group of Jains.

A couple of interesting general resource sites: this is a directory of Buddhist groups in Ohio; and this is the site of Harvard's "The Pluralism Project", which allows me to search the state for various religious traditions (not Jews or Christians).

Elsewhere in the state, probably within driving distance, there are several different kinds of Buddhist that I found on that first site: Pure Land, Therevada, Tibetan. This is a really interesting part of the world to be studying World Religions in.

On the Western side, there are lots of kinds of Orthodox, Eastern Rite, and of course American Catholic and Protestant churches in Toledo. And we have three synagogues--an Orthodox, a Conservative, and a Reform congregation. There's a large Mosque here, too. To find Baha'i I would have to go farther, like to Dayton or Cincinnati. No luck with Zoroastrians.

I'm thinking I should plan to make some visits myself, before the semester begins, or at least some phone calls and e-mails to make contact with some of these communities in order to open the door a little before my students go.

Anyway, the opportunities are exciting.
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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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random amusement

Sarah got a recruitment flyer in the mail today from the U.S. Navy. It offered her x amount of dollars for school together with an opportunity to become a navy officer. I found this amusing on more than one level.
We decided that the U.S. Armed Services should be required to offer equal amounts of student financial support to C.O.'s who do C.O. service (or who sit in jail if the government would prefer us to do that). This would be a great way to work against the poverty draft.

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Celebrations!!!

I just talked to the dept. chair, and I learned that I will be teaching Intro to Philosophy and World Religions next semester!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The (slight) downside to this is that it means two new preps while I'm still scrambling to finish up my degree. I'm not sure whether prepping for these lecture courses or for Logic will be more time consuming.

Oh, and I get to choose my own textbooks! :) I'll probably need to do this over Thanksgiving break, as the bookstore will need to know what books to order.

I'll have a very busy Christmas break!!

Please pray for me as I work out how to manage my time between teaching and the thesis, both over break and during the next semester. I *really* want to finish this Spring (as opposed to summer term), which means I *really* want to meet certain (hefty) writing goals in the next week or three. And I'm really good at procrastinating...and at prioritizing teaching prep over research & writing.


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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Between Pacifism and Jihad, IVP 2005

And now for something completely different…
So I got Dr. Charles’ new book via OhioLink today…and my initial reaction to it, I am somewhat ashamed to say, is violent anger. J Disclaimer: there might be some ranting in the following! These are my thoughts/initial reactions as I just begin to read the book (I really haven’t got far yet. It may be illuminating to compare these thoughts to my reflections further along, when I can read more of his arguments. That’s really why I’m publishing these comments.)

Let it not be thought that only Christians who admit the use of violence are engaging in responsible moral and theological reflection or responsible conversation with secular policy-makers. I trust Dr. Charles does not really think this is the case, but one might be led to think otherwise by his consistent criticism of Christians who do not think through moral issues and who do not engage with current events relevant to public policy on a national or global scale, combined with his holding up of (nigh exclusively) JWT proponents such as himself, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Ramsey as models of Christians who are thinking and engaging the world responsibly, ethically, and Christianly.

At times his rhetoric seems emotionally colored and strongly biased against the perspective of Christian nonviolence. He considers the response of some Christians to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks of “Let us remember to forgive our enemies” to be a “theologically vacuous excess” that “will contribute little to civil society”. (11)
I hope that Dr. Charles will eventually engage with his opponents on the pacifist side with some exegetical depth (admittedly I am only in the first chapter). I want to know his reasons for rejecting the arguments of Yoder and Hauerwas and the like, and not just his reasons for embracing JWT.

I appreciate the fact that Dr. Charles grew up Mennonite, and that his father was a CO in World War II. It increases my level of respect for him that he is not just arguing for a view that he has always been comfortable with, and was raised into. But I worry a little–perhaps unfoundedly–that he tends to characterize the Anabaptist perspective too monolithically, as advocating withdrawal from society. Not all Anabaptists, and not all Christian pacifists would do so.

I have to admit that Dr. Charles’ political perspective is quite different from my own. He rejects what he calls “the self-righteous attitude of ‘America as empire’…attributing to our nation imperial or imperialistic designs that are reputedly causing the ills of the whole world.” (16). He is certainly right that self-righteousness should be no part of this attitude for Americans, but I really do perceive the US government’s policies over the last several decades to be imperialistic–even openly and unashamedly so at times.

Dr. Charles argues against those who claim that JWT and pacifism share a common presumption against violence. The presumption, he says, is against injustice. JWT recognizes that peace is not merely the absence of conflict, and that there is something wrong–to be corrected–when a society is not justly ordered. I think he is right that “absence of conflict” is not the highest good–but that does not mean that war is an effective or just method of bringing about a just ordering of a society. Not only does war often fail (as in the present case!) to bring about a just ordering of society effectively, but even if it were to achieve this ideal result, the means taken are most decidedly unjust. In my view, the consistent, respectable pacifist position calls for (and to some extent participates in) nonviolent responses to injustice, both domestically and internationally.

“When we speak of just war, we do not mean a war that, narrowly speaking, is just. Rather, we refer to warfare undertaken that is in conformity with the demands of charity, justice and human dignity, and that seeks to protect the innocent third party from gross injustice and social evil. These are the fundamental assumptions of just-war thinking.” (20). I applaud these words. I question the possibility of a war (especially a modern war conducted by the U.S. military!) which can meet these standards, not only as an ideal that forms a part of our leader’s political rhetoric, but as a lived reality, day to day, for the people on the front lines. Just how are you supposed to drop bombs in a way that is charitable, respectful of human dignity, and protects the innocent third party? This sounds to my ears like suggesting that we give someone a lethal injection while at the same time being motivated by an overriding concern for the condemned’s well-being!

Dr. Charles speaks dismissively of the attitude of churches in the Cold War years who argued that “War could not possibly be justified … regardless of the gulf between democratic self-government and totalitarianism. Both superpowers…are immoral in ‘threatening’ the world.” (18) He is not really making an argument here, and I don’t suppose he is trying to at this point in the book. But it should still be said that one’s ordering of domestic society being more just does not justify an unjust war against another society (or its oppressed civilians! MAD is all about threatening noncombatant life!!). This is like saying that because our religion is better than someone else’s that we have a right to invade their territory and forcibly convert them. (This is, in fact, in political terms, what the White House’s explicit policy seems to be!). This smacks of cultural imperialism, if not any other kind of imperialism.

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Politics of Jesus: Reflections I (of ?)

Reflections on
The Politics of Jesus
by John Howard Yoder

I

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1. Christocentric Ethics: The Normativity of Jesus in the Gospels
(from ch. 1, “The Possibility of a Messianic Ethic”)

At a popular level many Christians appeal to Jesus as a model for life and for right action. When I was a teenager (what seems like a very few short years ago), Christian teenagers were being taught (by the advertising media of the subculture, which of course infiltrated our church youth groups) to ask “What Would Jesus Do?”. (Incidentally, I have sometimes wondered: Would Jesus buy and wear WWJD bracelets and jewelry?) But how much direct help does scripture give us in answering that question? Does the New Testament present us with a substantive notion of what Jesus would do, based upon which we can do Christian normative ethics, or do Christian ethicists need to look elsewhere (i.e., in natural rather than special revelation) for our ethical foundations?

Yoder advances the hypothesis that the New Testament (read in the light of the Hebrew scriptural tradition that shaped its authors & audiences--Yoder is no proponent of the Marcionite heresy) does in fact give us a platform for social ethics. (The term “politics” in the title of the book is not meant to suggest that Jesus wants his disciples to take an active part in secular institutions of government; the term has a broader application to how his disciples are to live and act as members of society.) The project of The Politics of Jesus is to dig up confirming evidence for this hypothesis in the theology of the canonical New Testament writings. (Yoder does not consider himself qualified to attempt historical reconstructions of Jesus and his teachings that go behind the texts as we have them today; he comments more than once in a footnote, however, that the evidence in the canonical texts suggests that any such reconstruction would only strengthen the case for his hypothesis).

In his first chapter, Yoder surveys some arguments, common among Christian scholarship, for the thesis that Jesus and his teachings in the Gospels do not provide substantive normative answers for Christians’ questions in social ethics. Proponents of this thesis argue that Christians need to look elsewhere for answers to ethical questions; Yoder refers to these as “natural law” ethicists, broadly speaking. Here are some of the arguments of Yoder’s opponents: [note: my summary below does not exhaust Yoder’s presentation at this point of his argument]

1. Jesus gives only an interim ethic
Since Jesus expected the end of the present age to come soon, his ethical teachings became more and more irrelevant as the Church came to terms with the delay of the parousia. “Thus at any point where social ethics must deal with problems of duration, Jesus quite clearly can be of no help. If the impermanence of the social order is an axiom underlying the ethic of Jesus, then obviously the survival of this order for centuries ahs already invalidated the axiom.” (16)


2. Jesus gives only a personal (i.e., non-public) ethics
Jesus’ ethical teachings were intended to apply only to interpersonal relationships, not to social problems of a large scale. “His radical personalization of all ethical problems is only possible in a village sociology where knowing everyone and having time to treat everyone as a person is culturally an available possibility. … There is thus in the ethic of Jesus no intention to speak substantially to the problems of complex organization, of institutions and offices, cliques and power and crowds.” (16-17)


3. Jesus gives only an ethic for the powerless minority
Christians have ascended to positions of power in society (e.g., economic and political power). But “Jesus and his early followers lived in a world over which they had no control.” Christians in positions of power must look elsewhere for moral guidance in making the kinds of decisions they have the responsibility to make. “…the Christian is [today] obligated to answer questions which Jesus did not face. The individual Christian, or all Christians together, must accept responsibilities that were inconceivable in Jesus’ situation.” (17)


4. Jesus gives only spiritual (not social or ethical) teachings
Everything Jesus taught must be interpreted in light of the gospel of personal salvation. The point of his ethical teachings was not our obedience, but some spiritual aim, such as a recognition of our need for grace. The point of his life was not his ethical teachings, and we should not take his behavior with respect to social authorities as a model for our own, because Jesus’ life had the unique purpose of ending with a vicarious sacrificial atonement. The primary concern of the Christian life is not being ethical, but trusting in grace alone for our salvation. “For Roman Catholics this act of justification may be found to be in correlation with the sacraments, and for Protestants with one’s self-understanding, in response to the proclaimed Word; but never shall it be correlated with ethics.” (19)



Reflection #1
Response to (1):
(a) Perhaps to be faithful to the teachings of our Lord, we should continue to live as if the end of the present age is imminent. Perhaps we should not make our choices based on the assumption that the money we put in the stock market today will be there for our retirement in thirty or forty years. Perhaps we should give up all our allegiances to earthly institutions, knowing that they will not last.
(b) Perhaps the end of the age did come in Jesus’ lifetime, or immediately following his death & resurrection. Perhaps his ethics were not for the short span of his life only, but for the new age in which we presently live. Again, perhaps we should abandon all allegiances to the institutions of the old age.
(c) Remember that if there was a development in the theology of the early Church, during the writing of the New Testament books, toward accommodating the delay of the parousia, Jesus’ teachings as recorded in Matthew and the other Gospels were among the latest canonical works to be produced by the early Church. So these teachings should be intended by the scriptural authors as relevant for the long-term wait for Christ’s return at the end of the age.

Response to (2):
(a) Perhaps we should fight the cultural trend of depersonalization and establish communities of our own in which to live out these personal ethics. Perhaps we should not concern ourselves with larger social, global problems—or perhaps we should not approach such problems from a large perspective. Perhaps we should not let the ethics of complex organization override the ethics of interpersonal relationships.
(b) Jesus did confront some institutional figures in his lifetime: the Temple, the Sanhedrin, Herod, Pilate (and not just during Passion week!).

Responses to (3):
This is a tough one. Should we remain a powerless witnessing minority, and shun power when it is offered to us? Or should we be distinctively different when in power? If Jesus teaches us to love our enemies, what will this mean for a Christian who is elected as commander in chief of the United States armed forces?

Response to (4):
The gospel in both testaments clearly (as it seems to me) involves a call to those who have accepted grace to live out God’s law, and the commandments of Christ—a call that we are expected to fulfill, not to perpetually fall short of.
How to see Jesus’ journey toward the cross: as both political and spiritual, only spiritual, only political, or something that defies the distinction of political and spiritual?—this is a challenge for me.


Reflection #2
Consequences for our Christianity:
Either Jesus (and more broadly the New Testament revelation) introduces into our lives a distinctive ethic, or else it does not. Where does either option leave us, as Christians?

Suppose we are forced to look to natural revelation for our ethics.
“Is there such a thing as a Christian ethic at all? If there be no specifically Christian ethic but only natural human ethics as held to by Christians among others, does this thoroughgoing abandon of particular substance apply to ethical truth only? Why not to all other truth as well?
…what becomes of the meaning of incarnation if Jesus is not normative man? If he is a man but not normative, is this not the ancient ebionitic heresy? If he be somehow authoritative but not in his humanness, is this not a new gnosticism?”(22)


Suppose Jesus does call us to a distinctive set of ethical standards.
Must we all then turn our lives upside-down?

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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The Politics of Jesus and the disciple's cross

Now Reading:
The Politics of Jesus, by John Howard Yoder

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I have gotten about 40 to 50% of the way through the book by now. For those who don't know, John Howard Yoder was a Mennonite theologian who taught at Notre Dame and the Mennonite seminary in Elkhart and wrote many books during his academic career. One of his noted students is Stanley Hauweras. Yoder himself was a student of Karl Barth at the University of Basel.

The Politics of Jesus is perhaps Yoder's best known book; he published it in the early seventies.

I liked the first chapter very much, for a beginning. He is good at articulating the positions and arguments of others. In the first chapter of Politics of Jesus, Yoder lists off a number of different arguments mid and late twentieth-century Christians have given for why the life and teachings of Jesus are not of immediate practical, political relevance. Yoder also clearly distinguishes his own project from the then-popular notion of Jesus as a generic political revolutionary to whom one can appeal in support of whatever radical political views one wishes, and from a "WWJD" model of moral discipleship, which looks elsewhere (e.g., natural law) for one's ideas of what right conduct is, but uses Jesus as a motivator for doing the right thing no matter how unpopular or inconvenient it might be. Yoder is interested in drawing a concrete, socio-political Christian ethic out of the teachings of Jesus--and he argues for continuity of such an ethic across the teachings of the New Testament writings.

In the next couple of chapters he quickly outlines the message of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke in broad strokes, and connects it to the restoration of the Jubilee year in the Hebrew Law. (Every seventh year, Israelites were to (a) not farm their land and trust to God to provide for their needs by an abundant crop the sixth year, (b) release all indentured servants/Hebrew slaves, forgiving their debts, and (c) restore the former slaves to their ancestral land which they received under Joshua in the original conquest. Yoder argues that Jesus' gospel was in essence a declaration that God wanted His people to put the Jubilee year into practice as a community, with all of its economic implications, together with even more radical injunctions such as loving one's enemies. That the Jews were not in a position of political dominance in Judea and Galilee was irrelevant, as God's people are to trust Him to take care of military and political victories--not to fight for themselves as the militant Zealots wished to--and simply obey the word of the Lord.

Yoder goes on to characterize Jesus' life and message as essentially a rejection both of quietism or withdrawl from the political arena (Christianity a pure, apolitical religious movement) and the violent, military revolutionary methods of the Zealots. Jesus fearlessly preached a politically charged message, was recognized by both Jewish and Roman leaders as politically dangerous, while refusing to defend himself or take up a sword and fight. Jesus is repeatedly tempted to take the easier road to kingship by the use of the sword and repeatedly rejects it in favor of the inevitable suffering of the political execution that awaited him at the end of his ministry. He told his disciples likewise to reject lordship and to reject violence, and to "take up your cross and follow" him on the road of carrying this particular nonviolent political message and being executed for it by the armed political authorities.

Yoder's book is not focused on the atonement. He rejects an exclusively spiritual interpretation of Jesus' cross, or the cross of the disciple. But I don't think he would reject the evangelical notions of sin and atonement through the cross. But even if he does, I think his views deserve careful consideration, and could be made compatible with an evangelical view of the atonement.

Still reading and still processing...
I don't have the book with me at the moment; I might post in more detail later for anyone who might be interested.

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Minor (but repetitive!) citation issue

Does anyone know the answer to this question (and could you provide a reference to confirm it)?

When one is making a bibliographic entry for a book published by Oxford University Press / Clarendon Press, (1) when does it matter, if ever, that one specify "Clarendon Press" or "Oxford University Press", and (2) when, if ever, does one give "New York" or "New York and Oxford" or "Oxford and New York" as the location instead of "Oxford"? Is there any standard on this at all???
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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Minor comments on Evan Almighty...

Movie reviews aren't usually my blog post of choice. But last night we watched Evan Almighty for the first time. I thought it was overall rather stupid (but good enough to watch once). I thought that the extra features on the DVD about making the movie a "green" film were interesting (i.e., making the ark recyclable, and giving the used materials to Habitat for Humanity, and planting trees to try to decrease the overall carbon footprint of the production) ...but I really didn't think the movie itself was as much an environmental flick as the special features made it sound. (I watched those features first, before the movie, which I know is an odd thing to do.) I suppose it did provide an opportunity for some reflection on being foolish in the world's eyes in order to do what God is calling you to do / what you think is the right thing to do, morally. And it was worth a few laughs.

There was one thing (minor within the movie) that I found offensive. (Disclaimer: you might interpret this as a "liberal" comment on my part!). In once scene, God appears in the chamber where a congressional committee is convening, in the middle of their saying the pledge of allegiance (to the American flag), and he joins in. Now, to be fair, I'm sure the primary reason for doing this was just for frivolous amusement, and I suspect that any political/religious statement buried in this event is limited to a vague comment on the whole issue of the "under God" phrase being in the American pledge. (Again, I think it is most likely that they were having fun with it, and nothing more!)

But in a combined amused/irritated way, I strongly object to the portrayl of God saying the pledge of allegiance to the American flag! (OK...he didn't start talking until the "one nation under God" part, so maybe he wasn't really pledging allegiance to the American flag...). It seems so obvious (to me) that this turns any notion of dual-citizenship on its head. If Christians owe any allegiance to their nation, its flag, its ideals, its constitution, its laws, its authorities, whatever...this allegiance is unquestionably secondary to the allegiance we owe to God, Christ, and His Kingdom. God certainly does not owe any allegiance to the U.S. I *hope* that the filmmakers were not endorsing a "God is on America's side" viewpoint, but I seriously think that many nonAmericans could interpret it this way, and rightly take offense at such a viewpoint as arrogant nationalism mixed with dangerously bad theology.

I can tell that I'm ranting. So I'll stop.

:)

Oh, and happy All Saints Day, if anyone cares. If you're a saint, or knew some saints now dead, I guess it has relevance. I don't know that much about what All Saints Day is *supposed* to be about, but I personally think it makes more sense as a day for the memory of saints (any saints, in general) that have died than Memorial Day does. Not that I've been observing it as such.

Now I'm not ranting, I'm just rambling. Definitely stopping now.
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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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wasting time productively...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressivism

I made my first contribution to a wikipedia article today, and was invited to join the philosophy / ethics taskforce(s). This is probably not the best use of my time, though. Motivation has been lacking the last couple of days in general.
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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Islamic-Christian Ecumenism

http://gandalf83rss.blogspot.com/2007/10/common-word-between-islam-and.html
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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Metaethics and First-Order Ethics

Ponderance of the day:
What is the relationship between metaethics and normative ethics? What are our purposes in metaethical inquiry? I suspect they are at bottom practical purposes, the same practical purposes at the root of our first-order ethical inquiry. If one of the primary functions of a metaethical theory is the *justification* (not merely the description) of first-order ethical judgments and their truth-aptness, this would seem to argue against certain expressivists' claim that metaethical discourse is morally detached, descriptive discourse by contrast with first-order moral discourse which is morally engaged, evaluative discourse. Further, if one of the purposes of metaethics is to aid in selection between competing normative ethical theories, it would be strange if our conclusions in metaethics had no consequences (even indirectly) on our normative ethical commitments.

These are articles I came across but have not really looked at much this afternoon:

Google Search: revisionist metaethics
JSTOR Links: Paul W. Taylor, The Normative Function of Metaethics, The Philosophical Review, 1958; Alan Gewirth, Metaethics and Moral Neutrality, Ethics, 1968. Reference from Taylor: Frederick A. Olafson, Meta-Ethics and the Moral Life, The Philosophical Review, 1956.


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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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I sent my paper in on Monday after rewriting the ending a few times. However, I think it was not properly submitted, because I could not find the e-mail address (I was not at school where the flyer was). I sent the paper to the department e-mail address on the website of the hosting university, but this was not the correct address for paper submissions. Oh, well.

I am writing a paper this week (and probably next week too) on methodological considerations in metaethics. This will basically serve as an introductory chapter in which I set up to argue against metaethical theories that inadequately accomodate truth in moral discourse. I will argue that cognitivist expressivism is interesting because it agrees with me that a good theory will accomodate truth in moral discourse, and then proceed in the rest of the thesis to argue that cognitivist expressivism fails to make that acccomodation. If I have space and time enough, I will probably conclude the thesis by talking about a way or some ways to accomodate truth in moral discourse.

Here is a quote I found highly amusing in my reading today:

If meanings are given by objective truth conditions there is a question how we can know that the conditions are satisifed, for this would appear to require a confrontation between what we believe and reality; and the idea of such a confrontation is absurd (Davidson, "A Cohrence Theory of Truth and Knowledge").

I rather thought that notion of confronting reality (or purporting to) was analytically contained in the concept of belief.
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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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What I'm Up to This Week

Since last Monday I have been focusing my energy on teaching and on writing a paper on expressivism and relativism that I want to submit to a graduate student conference (the deadline is Monday the 15th).

My argument in the paper is this:

V. Why Expressivism Must Either Relativize or Deny Moral Truth

1. A nonrelativistic account of the truth and falsity of moral judgments must admit nonrelativistic standards of value. **
2. Expressivism does not admit normative facts in any 'robust' objective sense.
3. Any metaethical view that admits nonrelativistic standards of value must admit normative facts in a sense rejected by expressivism. **
4. Hence, expressivism does not admit nonrelativistic standards of value.
5. Hence, expressivism is not a nonrelativistic account of the truth and falisty of moral judgments.
6. Hence, expressivism is either a relativistic account of the truth and falisty of moral judgments, or else it is not an account of the truth and falsity of moral judgments at all.

** points of contention (where I have my work cut out for me)

Conclusion: To the extent that the expressivists' reasons for rejecting ethical relativism and any metaethical account that does not account for the truth and falsity of moral judgments are accepted, expressivism itself ought to be rejected.)


This is an exercise for me in writing for a deadline, and trying to stay focused on a narrow argument. I need to stay out of tangential issues and additional arguments that I am also developing for my thesis.
I have been worrying a little bit today about all of this. About finishing this paper by Monday, about having enough for my thesis to be done "on time" (my new deadline being the end of this school year), about employment for next semester, about my academic career...
I'm hungry right now and I need a break.

I have also been tutoring at TMC. I've spent the last three weeks reading with a fourth-grader. That's rather fun. He's an easy kid to work with.

Love & Peace!

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Thought of the Day: On Nativism

Jerry Fodor has argued that we never really learn new class-concepts; we only learn new vocabulary for class-concepts we already have. For example, if you show me ten things and identify some as "flarn" and the others as "non-flarn", I might learn that the class-concept "flarn" applies to everything that is a flat, green, rectangular or triangular shape. I already had the concept of FLAT+GREEN+(RECTANGULAR OR TRIANGULAR) in my inventory of concepts; I just learned your word for this concept. Fodor argues that all lexical concepts--all concepts that are normally denoted by a single word in English--are innate. On this view, even the concept CARBURETOR is an innate concept. (He further supports this view with arguments designed to show that giving definitions of such concepts--in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions--is not possible using other, simpler concepts.) Let's call this view "extreme nativism".

OK - That was background. Here's my thought (had while walking back from teaching Logic this morning):

The essential claim of extreme nativism is that our class-concepts (at least, the lexical ones) are not learned in a classical empiricist sense--that is, we don't acquire these concepts via experience. They have always been a part of our mental inventory. (Note: Nativists don't deny that experience plays a role in our 'learning' concepts--we may have a concept innately, but we don't 'learn' it, in a sense, until we meet something in our expereince to which we apply it).

Perhaps this claim could be modified or restated to make it seem more plausible. The categories into which we sort the objects of our experience are a subjective contribution that our minds make to our experience, not a contribution that the objective, given reality makes to our experience. (William James says something like this--we classify and categorize things according to 'essences' depending on how it suits our practical purposes at the time). So, categorization is native to our minds, not a part of the world. Perhaps we don't create the class-concepts until we need them; it is not like there is a fixed set of concepts (including CARBURETOR) that is a part of our natural endowment that come out to play when we first meet something the concept applies to. Rather, we have an innate capacity to creatively make up class concepts in accordance with our practical purposes.

In some ways the great mystery (to scientists & philosophers of science) is, where do our concepts come from? And also, where do our hypotheses come from? The scientific method explains how we test our hypotheses, but it does not explain how we come up with them. My suggestion is that the creation of explanatory hypotheses and the conception of class-concepts are essentially and non-reductively products of our innate mental structures and capacities. No input from the external world determines our concepts and hypotheses for us; it is a part of our internal processing mechanism.

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Looking Up

I caught a kind of second wind after posting yesterday evening. Writing and/or saying what I'm thinking can really be helpful when I feel upset or out of control, or like giving up.

I submitted two papers from the end of the Fall 2006 semester--one each to the two conferences whose deadlines were yesterday. So I feel like I didn't give up after all.

The James paper is behind me however the grade turns out. That's one more obstacle toward my graduation out of the way (at least, once I get a grade back!). I can now turn to other things.

There's one more fall grad conference (at Western Michigan) with a deadline in two weeks (the 15th). Maybe I can submit a thesis-related paper to that one. My thesis is my primary goal now. (Other than keeping up with Logic, and the rest of my life). I will need to focus my energies on a particular task, though--one chapter, one criticism, etc. It will come together. I will do this. I will finish.

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Vulnerability -- (Self Absorbed Blog Post Warning!)

This evening I handed in a paper that has been due since December 2005. I feel discontent. Perhaps this is a typical symptom of Type-A personalities who write philosophy papers, or who regard themselves professional students. In some ways I feel like my writing improved over the course of the last six or seven weeks. But I had much higher ambitions for this paper. It just would take too much work--too much time and energy that I do not have right now--to take it to level I imagined.

I am missing two conference deadlines as we speak. One is for grad students only--I'm not sure if I'm eligible for it anyway since I'm not enrolled in any credit hours this semester. The other is not for grad students only--which probably means that I would have even less chance of getting a paper accepted there. But the reason I am missing the deadlines is because I don't have anything ready. I had dreams of submitting the aforementioned paper I turned in this evening, but I think it is all I can bring myself to do to give it to the professor and ask for a grade. (I am so scared I will get a B or worse for the course!) There is at least one other paper I would like to submit, which I was encouraged by a professor to submit for publication about a year ago. It is not really ready for submission, though--one of the sources needs updating (I did not have access to the second edition of a book I was using), and I need to write some more (a transitional passage added here or there would be good). After turning in the other paper this evening I just didn't feel like I had the energy or drive to do any real work on this paper.

Ah, maybe I'll e-mail it in anyway in the next hour. I'll let you know.

Those of you that know me probably will not be suprised that this is the content of my thoughts...as I said, type-A personality. I can find so many ways to self-criticize right now...laziness, self-absorption...

I just want to go home and rest--to have no worries or responsibilities. I spend too much of my time longing for that state of being! I don't really want a life with no responsibility. I want to mean something to people.

I wish I could just teach for the rest of my life, without any other performance pressures. I am fairly consistently confident about my teaching abilities. At least I get to tutor tomorrow.

As I get ready to publish this post, I notice my automatic signature. Peace. That sounds nice.
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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Just an Idea on the Fact/Value divide

(P1) Judgments of value are non-(correspondence-)truth-apt because value-realism is false.
(P2) Judgments of fact are (correspondence-)truth-apt because (physical?-)realism is true.

Rebuttal to (P1) & (P2):
Our full cognitive-affective capacities are involved in every factual judgment we make about the way the world is. That is, evaluative and factual judgments are not separable in ordinary practice. Evaluative judgments are part and parcel of the way we conceptualize, categorize, organize the (physical, factual) world of our experience. (For example, we see the objects we see because they are important to us.) Either this means that judgments of fact are too non-objective to be correspondence-truth-apt (i.e., my claims involve the rejection of (physical?-)realism, or else this means that judgments of (moral) value are objective enough (in virtue of their intimate association with judgments of fact) to be correspondence-truth-apt (i.e., my claims involve the affirmation of value-realism).

Possible response to the above suggestion:
While a modest (physical?-)realism can accomodate our subjective contribution to experience, what makes it count as a realism is that there are objective, subject-independent thingummies which place limits on our cognitive behaviors with respect to conceptualizing the world of our experience (e.g., our defining discrete objects in our experience). We can still sensibly reject value-realism by denying that there are any such objective, subject-independent thingummies which place limits on our cognitive behaviors with respect to morally evaluating objects in the world of our experience.

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* (The OED entry for thingummy is better, but probably not something most can directly link to:

Also 8 thing-o-me, thing-o'-me, 9 thing-o-my, thingamy, -ammy, -ummie, -umy. [f. THINGUM + -Y (?dim.).]

Used (in undignified speech) to indicate vaguely a thing (or person) of which the speaker cannot at the moment recall the name, or which he is at a loss or does not care to specify precisely; a ‘what-you-may-call-it’. Also in extended form thingummytight (-tite, etc.).

1796 F. BURNEY Camilla III. 259 Poor miss thing-o'-me's hat is spoilt already. 1803 FESSENDEN Terr. Tractor. IV. (ed. 2) 174 note, The little whalebone thingamy which the Duke of Queensbury run at New Market. 1807 W. IRVING Salmag. (1824) 38, I mean only to tune up those little thing-o-mys, who represent nobody but themselves. 1819 ‘R. RABELAIS’ Abeillard & Heloisa 101 A passport to a brilliant court Where all great thingummies resort. 1862 THACKERAY Philip viii, What a bloated aristocrat Thingamy has become! 1904 Times 11 Jan. 12/2 Mr. So-and-so has..‘entrusted’ its little carcase to Mr. Thingummy, birdstuffer. 1937 G. FRANKAU More of Us xvii. 177 Quick. The small green phial. It's in my bathroom. In the thingummytightThe corner cupboard. 1939 J. CARY Mister Johnson 23 What's the trouble? Why, it's thingummytite, aren't you? 1977 D. CLARK Gimmel Flask viii. 147 We've got a thingumitite with us...a sort of visionary. Young cops with fantouche ideas! 1980 D. BOGARDE Gentle Occupation i. 21 Nothing in the taps of course because the terrorists had buggered up the hydroelectric thingummytites.

)

* I probably should use this specialized (specially used that is, when you want to be absolutely general) metaphysical term more often in my writing. I recall disagreeing with Dr. C over using "entity" or "subsistence" in my Senior paper on the Trinity. I rebelliously stuck with "entity" I think (to refer to a Person), because I thought using "subsistence" involved me in metaphysical claims I didn't intend to make (of course, that was why Dr. C was trying to get me not to use "entity"!). I really should have used "thingummy"--that captures precisely my intended meaning in that context.

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Madeleine L'Engle

The Christian author, Madeleine L'Engle, died on the 6th of this month, I just found out.

Here is a tribute to L'Engle by her friend and editor Luci Shaw (published on christianitytoday.com). There are links at the bottom of this page including past CT interviews with L'Engle, her personal website, and a news release regarding her death in the NY Times.

The most memorable & meaningful books of L'Engle's I have read are:

• A Wind in the Door

(this is the best one of the four I grew up on: the others are A Wrinkle in Time, Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters)

• A Live Coal in the Sea

There are also some good things in Walking on Water, but this book never made my list of favorites.

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Promised Update

OK, one week and several hours later, here's a brief update on last weekend and this week.

The NW Ohio Mennonite Men's Bike-Hike was fun. I biked a little over 30 miles, I believe, on Saturday--mostly on a flat bike & buggy trail. We were in Holmes County, where it seems everybody is some kind of Amish or Mennonite. Hearing a little bit about the different groups made me feel a renewed sadness about the divisions in the Church. As much as Anabaptists value community, they've/we've (I haven't solved that identity issue yet) been really good at *separating*.

We went to Behalt, a Mennonite-Amish heritage center with a big mural. It was kind of interesting. We were rushed, though.

Sunday it was too rainy to bike. Saturday it rained a lot, too, just never on us. The radar on guys' cell phones (!) showed that the storms stayed around us pretty much all day--but we never got any rain. Also, my bike held up well on Saturday although its tires were showing signs of considerable age. (When did I buy that? Was I in high school yet? Have I ever replaced its tires or inner tubes?) The inner tube blew overnite after the trip, so it was a good thing we weren't biking on Sunday. Now I have to replace it (which I should have done before the trip, really). I know that Dr. S would be comfortable crediting Providence with several of these things (I often fondly recall his passionately asserting in class once ... ah, never mind. He used rather strong language. Stripped of emotive content and rephrased, he said that everything was God's doing, so he didn't have a problem attributing....everything to God's doing). I have to satisfy myself with noncommital wonder at these things. Ah, the mysteries of Providence.

I have not been as disciplined with my time this week. I did better Wednesday and since. However, today was "undisciplined" in the sense that I once again spent *all* afternoon doing Logic stuff in the computer lab when I wanted to finish a paper.... Grr... My own fault.

Love & Peace to all.

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Weekend Retreat

After a couple of posts containing no original material (but, of course, the selection and re-presentation of these sense-impressions is an original act of consciousness on my part!), I figure that I ought to give a personal update, as well.

Today marks the end of the third week of classes here. I am *close* to finishing a paper that I wanted to complete by the end of this week, but I don't think it's going to happen because I'm leaving on a retreat this weekend with some guys from TMC.

I'm not entirely sure what the retreat will involve, except outdoor camping and biking. Unfortunately, it looks like rain....

I had a very nice time last night having coffee with a friend here in Toledo (other than my wife). We both remarked how nice it was to have an intentional relationship where we are now in our lives. I'm very happy about this.

I'll probably say something about my retreat experience on my next post.

Happy Friday!

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Sojourners' Surge for Peace

http://blog.beliefnet.com/godspolitics/2007/09/a-surge-of-prayers-by-jim-wall.html

Quote:

Next week, Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, will report to Congress on the progress of the troop "surge" and the war effort in general. That report promises to catalyze an intense national debate on the floor of the U.S Congress, in the media, and across the nation. Is it time to end the war? If so, how? Or should we persevere until we “win” the war? And what would that mean?
It will be a great debate on what is clearly a life-and-death issue for both Americans and Iraqis. It is a debate in which much is at stake. All next week, this blog will be focusing on Iraq and the future of this war, which has become such a disaster.

But as people of faith, we believe the place to start is prayer. Only prayer can soften hearts and open the way to peace and reconciliation. So, as General Petraeus testifies, we're planning to match his surge with one of our own – 20,000 prayers for Congress to bring an end to this war.
[...]

So we would like to begin this great debate with prayer. Prayers for peace and prayers for the wisdom and courage to end this war in the ways that are most protective of human life, especially of the innocent. Our nation's political leaders are listening to the faith community as never before. We've spoken to several members of Congress who are considering reading a selection of your prayers for peace into the Congressional Record.
[...]

Will you be a part of this surge of prayer for peace? Click here to let your senators and representatives know that you're praying for them.

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Nevertheless...

Now Reading: Nevertheless: The Varieties and Shortcomings of Religious Pacifism, by John Howard Yoder (Scottdale, Penn.: Herald Press, 1992).

Ch. 2: The Pacifism of the Honest Study of Cases

("Just-War Pacifism")

"A second difficulty is that in many cases, having stated such a doctrine seems to have had the effect of excusing people from applying it carefully. They think the fact that there exists a doctrine of the just war constitutes a justification of war in general. However, it actually constitutes a denial that war can ever be generally justified. The amassing of armament for the potentially justified case of war is not matched by creating institutions or techniques for the control of the use of arms in the other cases.

"Thus the existence of the doctrine has tended to be taken as a proof, when as a matter of fact it should have been meant as a question. Hence, great numbers of Christians in the mainstream denominations assume that the theologians have given them grounds for a good conscience in preparing for war and waging it. Yet this is not at all the case. They feel that the recent groundswell of selective objection to war is revolutionary, when in fact it is a retrieval of traditional commitments." (p. 25)

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Reflections on Divine Obligation

While walking back from class this afternoon, I found myself reconsidering the teaching that we human beings don't deserve anything from God (or, at least, not a salvific, restorative relationship with God).
The doctrine I'm familiar with, as I have accepted it in the past, states that because human beings are fallen, and because we fell because we broke the good relationship between us and God by our sin, God doesn't owe us salvation. God extends salvation to us not based on our own merit, but rather as a free gift, grounded in God's love for us.
Here's what I was thinking earlier this afternoon. According to William James, moral obligation comes from a person making a demand, either on herself or on some other person. Now I'm willing to grant for the present discussion that God's demands, on Godself and on human persons, constitute the highest level of obligation. From James' perspective (which, to be clear, I'm just adopting for the sake of convenience; I'm not committed exactly to his view), because God is ideally, perfectly good, God's ultimate moral demand is that as many demands as possible be harmoniously satisfied. In a sense, this is to say that God wants the best of all possible worlds to be actualized--where every person has as much of what they want as they can, all wants considered. (James steps over the qualitative/quantitative distinction in valuing competing wants/demands in a way I think is awkward and constitutes a serious flaw in his view--but I'll not go into this now).
OK. Now, what does it mean to say that God is or is not obliged to grant salvation to us?
I am not sure a clear distinction can be maintained between what God owes to us and what God wants to give us, because God's demands on Godself, and on us, constitute grounds of moral obligation. We deserve what we deserve, on a theocentric model of obligation, because it's what God wants us to have. God wants us to have a restored relationship with God (which is in my theology equivalent to "salvation"). Therefore, we deserve a restored relationship with God.
Any demand that we make on God, insofar as we are appealing to God's very nature and God's very own desires--such as God's desire to provide for and relate to us in a salvific way--is a righteous demand. So it isn't really that presumptious or arrogant to say that we deserve salvation. As far as God is concerned, since it is something God wants for us, it is something that we deserve.

OK. Now, here's what I'm thinking about this now. We can approach this whole situation from a different model of breaking and reconciling relationships. Since we are the ones who broke the original relationship with God, it is in a sense our responsibility to make things right. God doesn't have any responsibility to initiate reconciliation--nor to accept any of our overtures of reconciliation. (However, God is still responsible to take what action is necessary to accomplish what God wants. If God wants reconciliation, God is responsible to take action to make reconciliation happen; this is closer to the argument I was making earlier).

How about this? Let's go back to the our-own-merit vs. God's-free-gift categories. Even on a system of obligations according to which God owes us salvation because God wants to give us salvation, this recognizes that God's free choice and God's desires and God's love are the determining factors. I'm not sure there is a concept of human merit that makes sense apart from what God determines we deserve, but maybe it is still pretty orthodox to say that we don't deserve anything apart from what God's free love for us makes us deserve. Now it sounds like I'm explaining the Reformed concept of Justification?!

...These rambling thought have been brought to you by....

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Migration; back-to-school; reading & reflections

This marks my first post on blogger. I was perfectly happy with my xanga site, but I find that I changed the password and cannot remember it after not having logged into it for nearly a month. And it was registered to my TU email, so....

I hope everyone finds me here that is looking for me. :)

Teaching Logic is going well. I have two classes this semester, sixty-two students in all as of Monday morning. My goal is to be two weeks ahead in prep by the end of this week. Meanwhile, other things are slightly on a back burner, but I am getting some other work done.

I want to read more John Howard Yoder, and maybe some Stanley Hauwerwas. Have I said that before? I have started two J.H. Yoder books recently: one posthumous anthology of essays, The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, and a shorter more easily digestible one called Nevertheless, which presents mutliple, distinct, potentially overlapping versions of Christian pacifism.

I spent most of last week reading William James essays from The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. One of his central ideas is what he calls the "Triadic Reflex Pattern", or "Reflex-Action Theory of Mind", according to which our cognitive encounter with the world goes through three stages: (1) impression, (2) definition [or conception], (3) reaction. You can think of stage (2) as involving theoretical activity and stage (3) as the pragmatic output of the way we conceive the world. In more than one essay (although he devotes the most space to this idea in his "Reflex Action and Theism", the earliest essay in the anthology) James puts forth the idea that our personal, subjective interests drive our theorizing: we conceive the world the way we do because we need a good enough theory to act upon. Theoretical activity is never an end in itself, says James. Reading these essays have helped me to appreciate pragmatism more. (The notion has filtered into the new title of my new blog: "All Thought Is Practical".) Still, I wonder what the virtue epistemologists I read last Fall would say about this, with their talk of "alethic ends" which are somehow supposed to be qualitatively distinct from our other practical ends.

As I was beginning to write about this yesterday in my notebook (the pencil-and-paper kind--my laptop is on the fritz), I was thinking about how we have to bring our subjectivity to bear on the world in order to know or experience anything at all (a la Kant). And I found myself becoming slightly more open to the meta-ethical views that I've been decrying as "subjectivist" for the past year. However, as my friend said to me last night when I brought this up with her, grounding ethics in human nature seems prima facie problematic just because we are so evil so much of the time (not that she or I are thoroughgoing Augustinians about depravity). And, as I've been trying to argue for the last many months, how can we sensibly regard one person's ethics as superior to another's in any non-egoistic sense, without some sort of "objective" standard? Whether we get that standard from God or not (what is the committed non-theist to do? -- glad I'm not one), we need to postulate it if we aren't going to fall into relativism. Even James sort-of makes this point, and he sounds a lot like the new expressivists, too (e.g. Simon Blackburn). The anti-theocentric criticism comes back with a bite, though: what gives God the right to impose the standard? I suspect he has that right, but why should human beings recognize it? Is there any answer other than "might makes right" or something even more arbitrary? I kind of hope so, and I expect it has something to do with God's special role in creation.

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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