Philosophy and Religion

Deep moral disagreements exist between Christians and non-Christians. I argue that Christians should resist the temptation to pin all such disagreements on the irrationality of their disputants. To this end, I develop an epistemological framework on which both parties can be rational—the key being that their beliefs are formed from different perspectives and, hence, on the basis of different sets of evidence. I then alleviate concerns that such moral perspectivalism leads to relativism or skepticism, or that it prohibits rational discourse. I end by exploring new avenues for resolving deep moral disagreements opened up by the perspectivalist approach.

I argue that some of the most prominent interpretations of Reid's response to skepticism marginalize a crucial aspect of his thought: namely, that our common sense beliefs meet whatever normative standards of rationality the skeptic might fairly demand of them. This should be seen as supplementary to reliabilist or proper functionalist interpretations of Reid, which often ignore this half of the story. I also show how Reid defends the rationality of believing first principles by appealing to their naturalness and irresistibility. The resulting interpretation supplies Reid with a more satisfying and formidable response to the skeptic than interpretations currently offer.

Alvin Plantinga theorizes the existence of a sensus divinitatis – a special cognitive faulty or mechanism dedicated to the production and non-inferential justification of theistic belief. Following Chris Tucker, we offer an evidentialist-friendly model of the sensus divinitatis whereon it produces theistic seemings that non-inferentially justify theistic belief. We suggest that the sensus divinitatis produces these seemings by tacitly grasping support relations between the content of ordinary experiences (in conjunction with our background evidence) and propositions about God. Our model offers advantages such as eliminating the need for a sui generis religious faculty, harmonizing the sensus divinitatis with prominent theories in the cognitive science of religion, and providing a superior account of natural revelation.

Whether evil provides evidence against the existence of God, and to what degree, depends on how things seem to the subject—i.e., on one’s perspective. I explain three ways in which adopting an atheistic perspective can increase support for atheism via considerations of evil. The first is by intensifying the common sense problem of evil by making evil seem gratuitous or intrinsically wrong to allow. The second is by diminishing the apparent fit between theism and our observations of evil. The third is by lowering the initial plausibility of theism. I call this “the perspectival problem of evil”� and argue that skeptical theism does not fully address it.

From an early age, we thought it important to approach our Christian beliefs rationally. Through C. S. Lewis and contemporary Christian apologetics, we encountered various arguments in support of the Christian worldview. Later we discovered the latest and greatest arguments of natural theology, many of which we found convincing. In light of these arguments, we were tempted to endorse a Classical Evidentialist approach to religious epistemology: belief in God or Christianity is justified if and only if it is supported by good arguments. This made sense, for we wanted our beliefs to be grounded in solid reasons rather than wishful thinking or tribal prejudice.

Adorno's essay. The technological advances have, in his estimation, gone so far as to make even a live performance seem less than "natural:" The plucked, bowed, or blown note, unfortified by a battery of microphones, filters, and equalizers, sounds alien next to the shimmering airlessness of the compact disc. This situation clearly puts a music of expression at a disadvantage (Barbiero 1989: 147) But the more interesting half of Barbiero's claim, in the present context, is that regarding listener attention. It is to this half in particular that I wish to give my attention. 3 The old new music, if you will, demands of the listener a temporal rupture that is not easily tolerated by the contemporary ear. "...[O]ur lives come to a standstill as we stop to listen to it; it has nothing to do with or say to our activities".(Barbiero 1989: 145). Barbiero explains that this demand has become so problematic because music has, by and large, become an accompaniment to daily life rather than a suspension of it: The professional with his Walkman, reading the Wall Street Journal or Foreign Affairs on the morning bus, can just as easily be listening to a Schoenberg quartet as he can the latest Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young release. Music has become a background texture for daily life, and we tend to hear it as we hear a film soundtrack: as a supplement to the action within the frame (Barbiero 1989: 147). Successful innovative music, then, will not bemoan these developments, but will consciously tailor itself to work in, with, and under them. Barbiero offers the so-called Ambient music of Brian Eno as an explicit example, though he claims that such music is "not to be confused with Muzak or New Age Music".(Barbiero 1989: 148). Why he is interested in pressing the distinction between Ambient and New Age is not clear, for as Hullot-Kentor (1989: 154) rightly points out, in addition to being a profound influence on many explicitly New Age musicians, Eno has also contributed to the discussion of his music in highly visible contexts defined as New Age (cf. Birosik 1989: xvi). Eno's central aesthetic intentions, regardless of the label that he attaches to them himself, cannot be set apart with any degree of clarity, I would contend, from those of many other musicians whose classification as New Age is much less controversial.

An essay on community and openness to the Other, drawing especially from Derrida, with Durkheim as a sociological reference point.  A revised version is in my book, For a Church to Come.
On page 161, at the beginning of the last paragraph in section I, "The experiment will consist of the paradox that I have..." should be "The experiment will consist of problematizing what I have...."

"Taking a cue from one of the most (in)famous postmodern thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche, the essays in this book put forth “experiments” in thought rather than arguments for fixed conclusions. Blum brings John Howard Yoder to the same table with Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, and provides a provocative glimpse of what the resulting conversation might look like.

As Anne Lamott and others have recently insisted, faith is not the opposite of doubt, but of certainty. Blum’s essays explore some of our commonly held ways of talking about knowledge, meaning, commitment, and action. He suggests that some postmodern theoretical work, often dismissed or assumed to be anti-Christian, is well worth bringing into contemporary Anabaptist-Mennonite conversations about discipleship and corporate life."

In the fourth volume of his study of the Christian tradition, Jaroslav Pelikan observed somewhat cryptically that the Reformation doctrine of justification should be understood as a development not only from Augustinian theological anthropology, but from the dogma of the Holy Trinity as well. 1 That markedly Catholic reading of Reformation theology as a whole stands in rather sharp contrast to the judgment made by the great Adolph von Harnack just a century ago. Having drunk perhaps a bit too deeply from the wells of Ritschlian theology, Harnack labeled Martin Luther's Trinitarian doctrine an "unspeakable confusion." On Harnack's account, Luther's confusion resulted quite naturally from the fact that he did not actually believe in the Trinitarian God of the Catholic tradition. 1. Jaroslav Pelikan, Reformation of Church and Dogma, vol. 4 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 156-58. For a somewhat fuller development of this point, see his Obedient Rebels: Catholic Substance and Protestant Principle in Luther's Reformation (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 47-48. For a more traditionally Lutheran angle on the relationship between Luther's doctrine of justification and his doctrine of God, see Paul Althaus, "Gottes Gottheit als Sinn der Rechtfertigungslehre Luthers," Luther)ahrbuài 13 (1931): 1-28. Althaus does not attempt to ground Luther's doctrine of justification in his Trinitarian theology but instead attempts to show that it rests on his prior insistence that the theologian "let God be God"-i.e., that Christians should understand themselves as creatures utterly determined by God's word of grace and promise.

This work examines Martin Luth er 's inte rpretation of the female charac te rs in the stories of Genesis, d rawing attention to his ap propri ation of pre modern catholic inte1 :pre tations of the bibli cal "sain ts". In Luthe r's ha nds, many of th ese women became heroic examples of the godly life newly adapted to the worldly asceticism of e merging Protestantism. The ir everyd ay sanctity, exercised for the most part within the limits Luther be lieved God had imposed on th eir sex, displayyd the kind of piety h e thought should a nimate Christian women in their own househo lds. Two chapters evalua te Luth er 's inte rpretation of Eve, noting his understand ing of the ideal relations betwee n men a nd women. Five further chapters examine Sarah, Hagar, Rac hel, the daughte rs and wife of Lot, and Potiphar's wife.

Seminary Ridge Review is a scholarly journal offering perspectives which highlight the history and theology of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, eastern Lutheranism and issues that emerge in the cross-currents of theological and cultural debates.