In the 2020 documentary My Octopus Teacher, filmmaker Craig Foster offers us a vivid account of a human undergoing a process of recovering from the depredations of overly managed, hyper productive modernity under the tutelage of a tiny octopus. Foster lives on the ocean, in the western cape of South Africa. After burning out in…

G. P. Wagenfuhr serves as Theology Coordinator for ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. Plundering Eden (2020) is a follow-up to his earlier book, Plundering Egypt: A Subversive Christian Ethic of Economy (2016). The subtitles for both books describe them as “subversive.” Even a casual reading of Plundering Eden reveals this description to be…

There are two kinds of facts: normative and non-normative. Facts about how things should be, what is or is not properly functioning, what is right or wrong, what is healthy or not, and what is good or bad are normative. Facts about how things are or how they could be or statistically tend to be…

Neo-Aristotelianism is indeed resurgent in contemporary philosophy. The renaissance has been underway for at least fifty years, beginning with a new focus on classical metaphysical themes by Roderick Chisholm, David M. Armstrong, Alvin Plantinga, and Robert M. Adams. In the 1960’s and 70’s, these anglophone philosophers began digging themselves out of the rubble of logical…

My overall aim in this brief response to Paul Gould’s lead essay is to draw the reader’s attention to an area of contemporary moral philosophy—Neo-Aristotelian metaethics—that is ripe for rediscovery in the wake of the ongoing resurgence of Neo-Aristotelianism in metaphysics and philosophy of science. Sketching A Metaphysical Picture Let me begin with a thumbnail…

Let me start with saying that I am immensely grateful to the contributors to this Book Symposium for the time they have devoted to reading my book Disability, Providence, and Ethics: Bridging Gaps, Transforming Lives and for the comments they made. My own inclination of how to respond brought back a remark I once heard…

I have profited greatly from Hans Reinders’s previous works on disability, in particular his The Future of the Disabled in Liberal Society and Receiving the Gift of Friendship, both of which I have reviewed elsewhere. In the former, Reinders suggests that the key to securing the future of persons with (mental) disabilities in “liberal” society…

I was reading Dr. Reinders’s book this past September while Hurricane Dorian was wreaking havoc on the nearby islands of Abaco and Grand Bahama so close to the Florida coast. In his chapter on “Cosmic Fairness,” I was struck by the idea that the “Why?” question “gets smothered in silence” (p. 50), though sometimes it…

We briefly considered hitting ‘pause’ on our preaching series in Romans this past summer. We were approaching chapters 9–11, where Paul explores some of the most difficult questions in the Bible, including providence. In the end, we pressed on—and we were glad we did. Read in the flow of the letter, Romans 9–11 doesn’t preach…

The problem of evil and the mystery of divine providence are deep existential issues. Even among those who do not believe in God, the tendency of the human spirit is to look for reasons for “why bad things happen to good people,” to quote the title of a best-seller on the subject. In most people’s…

Outer space stirs the inner soul. Might the unfathomable distances, incomprehensible beauty, and magnificent elegance of the universe we view on a starry night communicate a divine call to us? Might the feelings of awe and reverence elicited within us by the Milky Way constitute God’s still small voice within our soul, beckoning us to…

In Romans 8:19-22, Paul lifts the gaze of his readers from their present circumstances to look around at an entire creation that shares in their suffering and hope and to look forward to the incomparable glory that awaits. Other than John 1:14 (“the Word became flesh”), this text is perhaps the most significant in the…