Month: February 2010

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Peter Kreeft: Moral exhortations

Orthodox Natural Law Theory

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Living In God's Creation: Orthodox Perspectives on Ecology (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2009)

As some have argued here, the Church’s witness requires her to clearly articulate her anthropological vision. The challenges that face both the Church and the larger society flow from competing visions of what it means to be human.

The articulation of an Orthodox understanding of the human person is central to our moral witness in the public square, to our evangelical witness in the human heart and (most importantly) the effective preaching of the Gospel from the pulpit. If we cannot present a clear and compelling vision of human life, then on matters of personal and public morality, sexuality, politics and public policy, the Church cedes the public square and the human heart to increasingly pagan and disjointed culture.

Though her immediate concern is the environmental movement, Elizabeth Theokritoff’s Living in God’s Creation: Orthodox Perspectives on Ecology, offers us an Orthodox approach to natural law grounded in Scripture and the Church Fathers and embodied in Christian worship and the lives and witnesses of the saints. Theokritoff articulates for the reader a rich cosmological and anthropological vision that has implications not only for the environment but also economics and politics and it raises themes worthy of further exploration and study. While I do not agree with her policy suggestions, — especially what I would argue are her misguided and very dangerous flirtation with population control — I do think those here interested in an anthropological response to contemporary issues would do well to read Living in God’s Creation.

You can read the whole of my review on Acton’s PowerBlog (Review: An Orthodox Christian Natural Law Witness).

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Wesley J. Smith: Unless we all matter

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The Source

“God loves each of us, as if there were only one of us.” – St. Augustine.

Unless we all matter...

If you want to accurately predict what could soon go wrong in society, just read the professional journals. Case in point: A bioethicist named Alasdair Cochrane, a deep thinker at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights in the UK, argued recently in Bioethics that we should discard our (already tenuous) embrace of intrinsic human dignity as the foundational basis for establishing medical ethics and enacting health care public policies.

Eschewing human exceptionalism and the sanctity of human life would have huge ramifications, and in urging what he calls an “undignified bioethics,” Cochrane does not shy away from describing the stakes:

…the possession of dignity by humans signifies that they [all people] have an inherent moral worth. In other words, because human beings possess dignity we cannot do what we like to them, but instead have direct moral obligations towards them. Indeed, this understanding of dignity is also usually considered to serve as the grounding for human rights. As Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’

Cochrane hits the nail: Simply stated, if all humans do not have intrinsic equal moral value, the philosophical bases of the U.S. Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal…”) and the UN Declaration of Human Rights, are rendered impotent, and universal human rights becomes impossible to sustain. Beyond that, if we deny intrinsic human dignity, we open the door to using human beings as objects and mere natural resources, as Cochrane details:

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Fundamentalism: It’s Not Just for Right Wing Christians Anymore

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On the Acton Institute’s PowerBlog, John Couretas has a good post (Got a feelin’ of Eco-Justice?) response to “the cascading daily disclosures of Climategate . . . global warming alarmist operating within the progressive/liberal precincts of churches and their activist organizations” have taken to dismissing science and playing ” the theology card!” Continue reading →

Albert Mohler: Vanishing Christianity — A Lesson from the Presbyterians

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Albert Mohler

AlbertMohler.com

“Liberal Protestantism, in its determined policy of accommodation with the secular world, has succeeded in making itself dispensable.” That was the judgment of Thomas C. Reeves in The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Protestantism, published in 1996. Fast-forward another fourteen years and it becomes increasingly clear that liberal Protestantism continues its suicide — with even greater theological accommodations to the secular worldview.

The latest evidence for this pattern is found in a report just released by The Presbyterian Panel, a research group that serves the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) [PCUSA]. The panel’s report is presented as a “Religious and Demographic Profile of Presbyterians, 2008.” The report contains relatively few surprises, but it is filled with data about the beliefs of Presbyterian laypersons and clergy.
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