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80 Cards in this Set

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-Not enough hours in the day to think about larger issues.



David Brooks: The Organization Kid


- For decades, writers from different perspectives have been warning about the erosion of shared moral frameworks and the rise of an easygoing moral individualism.
David Brooks: If It Feels Right
-Dominant View since 1800s- Religion and morality are independent.

-Some say that religion and morality are the same- but this risks taking the theology out of the equation.

-Endowing moral rules with objectivity endangers deifying them.

-In Christian morality you're a player in something bigger, but there's no way to judge morality neutrally.
Alasdair McIntyre: Religion and Morality
-5 sources of christian morality: divine guidance, bible, conscience, moral traditions, church leaders.

-During the Holocaust, lots of Christian moral failure bc people weren't looking at specifically Christian sources.

- All Christian thinkers use the Bible, but they give it differing degrees of authority. Catholics are more about tradition, whereas reformation emphasized sola scriptura.

-Wesleyan quadrilateral- scripture, tradition, reason, experience.

-Jesus's example contradicts the idea that scripture and tradition are somehow equal.

-Jesus wasn't sola scriptura or adoptive of some ethereal morality: hebrew scriptures weren't gonna be interpreted thru scribal casuistry but instead through the interpretation of the prophets.

-Torah is gracious divine covenant, not a law.

-Prophets have disdain for rituals, sacrifice.

-What's in one's heart matters as well as conduct.

-Must look at moral conduct, not just death and ressurection.
Glen H. Stassen & David P. Gushee: Authority and Scripture
-Christianity versus atheism.

- Monotheism versus dualism versus life-force/pantheism.

-How has God made a world that went so wrong? Well if there is no God then the "evil" in the world simply doesn't "fit your fancy."

-Christianity and water- God's up in heaven and everything's all good down here is too simple.

-Dualism is flawed bc why do we prefer the "good" power to the "bad" power- is it just like preferring beer to cider?

-Morality has to do with each human individually, the interaction between different people, and how it all fits with God's overarching plan.

- If an individual is to live forever, he will have to live with his sins forever --> hell.
C.S. Lewis: Mere Christianity
-Principle acknowledged to be true must never be abandoned.

-Truth must always be told. not matter what the danger associated.

-Lie even if it doesnt harm another directly harms mankind bc it violates source of law itself.
Immanuel Kant- On a Supposed Right To Lie
-Some are absolutists, but for many ethical theorists, no moral absolutes.

-Human goods cannot me measured/quantified as the consequentialists suggest.

-It's not just about quantities being measured against eachother- other human concerns are involved.

-Nuclear deterrence has seriously morally deadened society.
Germain Grisez and Russell Shaw- Persons, Means, and Ends
-Some have argued- such as anscombe, that consequentialists have a corrupt mind.

-Characters of the battle of algiers, whilst they did kill innocents and may have been morally mistaken did not exhibit corrupt minds.

-Consequentialist case for not executing innocent man- more deaths would occur.

-If humans had a thick exopskeleton, knife-throwing wouldnt be wrong.

-Is it not worse to remain "morally pure" at the cost of more suffering?
Kai Nielsen- Against Moral Conservatism
-What constitutes torture/ where do we draw the line between what is and what isn't torture?

- Neither a deontologist or a consequentialist.

-Can't make war without getting your hands dirty but must abide by rules.

-Author references Walzer/Camus- if you do soemthing wrong even for justifiable reasons,must still accept consequences/ do penance.

-What is to come? is a question that should animate us.

-Geneva convention says torture is torture, but there's clearly different degrees.

-There is an ought to be a norm. Norm may have to be broken. Person who breaks the norm takes responsibility and does penance.
Jean Bethke Elshtain- Reflection on the Problem of ‘Dirty Hands
-Torture assaults the image of God within a person.

-Attacks individual's capacity to function as a rational creature.

-Torture must be categorically banned
Jean Porter- Torture and the Christian Conscience
-I am generally against torture as a normative matter, and I
forms of non-lethal torture are in fact being used by the United
States and some of its allies today.
prevented by the infliction of torture we would use torture, (even
lethal torture), and the public would favor its use. That is my empirical conclusion. It is either true or false, and time will probably

-ls. For example, William Schulz, the
Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, asks whether I
would favor “brutality warrants,” “testilying warrants” and “prisoner
rape warrants.”
Although I strongly oppose brutality, testilying,
and prisoner rape, I answered Schulz with “a heuristic ‘yes,’ if requiring a warrant would subject these horribly brutal activities to
judicial control and accountability.”

-Do you prefer
the current situation, in which brutality, testilying and
prison rape are rampant, but we close our eyes to these

-If we try to control the
practice by demanding some kind of accountability, we
add a degree of legitimation to it while perhaps reducing
its frequency and severity.

-The major downside of any warrant procedure would be its legitimation of a horrible practice, but in my view it is better to legitimate and control a specific practice that will occur, than to
legitimate a general practice of tolerating extra-legal actions, so long
as they operate under the table of scrutiny and beneath the radar
screen of accountability

-Citizens can't approve or disapprove of governmental actions of which they are
Alan Dershowitz- The Torture Warrant

Augustine- The City of God
-Problems in ethics typically occur not in normal cases, but in extreme cases.

-Borderline situation characterized by confrontation w/ opponent bent on exercising power and who is clearly on the side of Evil.

-Must not view opponent as agent of evil, but rather as a child of God gone astray, and in bondage to evil.

-Best to avoid the borderline situation in the first place.
Helmut Thielicke- The Borderline Situation of Extreme Conflict
-This principle implies that , other things being equal , it is just
as wrong intent ional ly to ref rain f rom administer ing an ant idote
to someone who is dying of poisoning as it is to administer the
poison, provided that the same motive is operative in both cases

-V/hat the object ion to the moral si 'mmet ry pr inciple has in
ef fect done is to confuse that pr inciple wi th consequent ial ism in
ethics. I f consequent ial ism is t rue, then so is the moral symmet ry
pr inciple. But the converse is emphat ical ly not the case. I t is very
impor tant to real ize that one can accept the moral symmet ry pr inciple wi thout commi t t ing onesel f to a consequent ial ist posi t ion.

-Many otherwise
thought ful people somehow iose sight of the fact that what they
refer to as "moral intui t ions" regarding euthanasia sprang or igi -
nal ly f rom a cer tain theological : -out look, one that is no longer
taken ser iously by most people who have taken the t rouble to
examine i ts credent ials careful ly and impar t ial ly.
Michael Tooley- An Irrelevant Consideration: Killing Versus Letting Die




Prayers for the Sick








John Paul II- Euthanasia
-Human life is sacred and a good, but perhaps not an absolute good.

-There is a subordination of the physical aspect of man to the whole person, which also includes the spiritual side.

-For euthanasia to be morally acceptable, it must be a sign of deep christian care for the individual.

-Transcendance of human life over sheer biological existence- sometimes continued life cannot offer the person meaningful personal existence.

-Death while not a good in itself can be understood as bringing the person into final union with god.

-Death can be a lesser evil than suffering.
Lisa Sowle Cahill- A Natural Law Reconsideration of Euthanasia
- Difference of killing and letting die: aim is different. In a DNR case, if the patient were to miraculously start breathing again, we wouldnt smother him.

-On the other hand, if the suffering of a person is so great that he requests death, on what grounds could we refuse to assist?- consequentialists would support our doing this. Consequentialists remain morally serious but have ceased to believe in God's divine providence.

-Life is no second God.

-Death is not greatest evil- disobedience to God is.

-Euthanasia is to go outside our limits.

-Not minimize suffering but maximize love and care.

Gilbert Meilander- Euthanasia and Christian Vision
-T h e d o c t r i n e o f t h e d o u b l e effect is based o n a di s t inc t ion
b e twe e n w h a t a m a n foresees as a result o f his v o l u n t a r y a c t ion
a n d wh a t , i n t h e s t r i c t sense, he int ends .

didn't want t o kill him . . only to blow him into small pieces'
o r even '. . . only t o blast h im o u t o f t h e cave.') I believe that
thos e w h o use the doc t r ine o f the doubl e effect wo u l d r ight ly
reject such a suggestion, t h o u g h they will, o f course, have
considerable difficulty in explaining wh e r e the line is to be
dr awn. What is to be the criterion o f 'closeness' if w e say that.
anything very close to wh a t w e are literally a iming at count s as
if part o f o u r a im?

-T h e distinction
between direct and oblique intention is crucial here, and is of
great importance in an uncertain world. Nevertheless this is n o
way to defend the doctrine of double effect. For the question is
whether the difference between aiming a t some thing and obli-
quely intending it is in itself relevant to moral decisions; not
whether it is important when correlated wi th a difference of
certainty in the balance o f good and evil.

-T h e
clue that w e should follow is that the strength of the doctrine
seems t o lie in the distinction it makes between wha t w e do
(equated wi th direct intention) and wha t w e allow ( thought o f
as obliquely intended). Indeed it is interesting that the dispu-
tants tend to argue about whether we are to be held responsible
for what w e allow as w e are for wha t w e d o / Yet it is not
obvious that this is what they should be discussing, since the
distinction between wha t one does and what o n e allows to
happen is not the same as that between direct and oblique
intention. T o see this one has only t o consider that it is possible
d e l i b e r a t e l y t o allow something t o happen

-First of a l l there is the situation in which nothing that can be
done will save the life ofchild and mother, but where the life of
the mother can be saved by killing the child. Thi s is parallel t o
the case o f the fat man in the mo u t h o f t h e cave w h o is bound
t o be drowned wi t h the others if nothing is done. Given the
certainty o f the outcome, as it was postulated, there is n o
serious conflict ofinterests here, since the fat man will perish in
either case, and it is reasonable that the action that will save
someone should be done.

-T h e wor s t dilemma comes in the third kind o f example
where to save the mother we must kill the child, say by
crushing its skull, while if nothing is done the mother will
perish but the child can be safely delivered after her death.
Philippa Foot- The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect



-Suppose you filed yourself trapped in a tiny house with a growing child. I mean a very tiny house, and a rapidly growing child--you are already up against the wall of the house and in a few minutes you'll be crushed to death. The child on the other hand won't be crushed to death; if nothing is done to stop him from growing he'll be hurt, but in the end he'll simply burst open the house and walk out a free man. Now I could well understand it if a bystander were to say. "There's nothing we can do for you. We cannot choose between your life and his, we cannot be the ones to decide who is to live, we cannot intervene." But it cannot be concluded that you too can do nothing, that you cannot attack it to save your life. However innocent the child may be, you do not have to wait passively while it crushes you to death Perhaps a pregnant woman is vaguely felt to have the status of house, to which we don't allow the right of self-defense. But if the woman houses the child, it should be remembered that she is a person who houses it.

-But it might be argued that there are other ways one can have acquired a right to the use of another person's body than by having been invited to use it by that person. Suppose a woman voluntarily indulges in intercourse, knowing of the chance it will issue in pregnancy, and then she does become pregnant; is she not in part responsible for the presence, in fact the very existence, of the unborn person inside? No doubt she did not invite it in. But doesn't her partial responsibility for its being there itself give it a right to the use of her body? On the other hand, this argument would give the unborn person a right to its mother's body only if her pregnancy resulted from a voluntary act, undertaken in full knowledge of the chance a pregnancy might result from it. It would leave out entirely the unborn person whose existence is due to rape. Pending the availability of some further argument, then, we would be left with the conclusion that unborn persons whose existence is due to rape have no right to the use of their mothers' bodies, and thus that aborting them is not depriving them of anything they have ~ right to and hence is not unjust killing.


-We have in fact to distinguish between two kinds of Samaritan: the Good Samaritan and what we might call the Minimally Decent Samaritan.

-First, while I do argue that abortion is not impermissible, I do not argue that it is always permissible. There may well be cases in which carrying the child to term requires only Minimally Decent Samaritanism of the mother, and this is a standard we must not fall below. I am inclined to think it a merit of my account precisely that it does not give a general yes or a general no. It allows for and supports our sense that, for example, a sick and desperately frightened fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, pregnant due to rape, may of course choose abortion, and that any law which rules this out is an insane law. And it also allows for and supports our sense that in other cases resort to abortion is even positively indecent. It would be indecent in the woman to request an abortion, and indecent in a doctor to perform it, if she is in her seventh month, and wants the abortion just to avoid the nuisance of postponing a trip abroad. The very fact that the arguments I have been drawing attention to treat all cases of abortion, or even all cases of abortion in which the mother's life is not at stake, as morally on a par ought to have made them suspect at the outset.
Judith Jarvis Thomson- A Defense of Abortion
-Good moral reasons why consensus about abortion eludes us.

-More he studied the arguments, the more difficult they became.

- Fetus has a value greater tha n 0.

-Abortion is sui-generis.

-We dont ascribe same value to fetus bc we generally think it's ok to kill a fetus to save mother's life but wouldnt do the same in the case of an infant.

-Potentiality- the foetus is already something in motion.

-Woman need not nurture seed implanted against her will.

-Commitment to fetal life is prima facie but not absolute.

-Civil government shouldnt commend abortion as it does religious freedom, or criminalize it as it does murder.
Gene Outka- The Ethics of Love and the Problem of Abortion
-Prolife feminists, like myself, argue on good feminist principles that women can never achieve the fulfillment of feminist goals in a society permissive toward abortion.

-From one perspective, the fetus is, as Petchesky says, a "biological parasite" taking resources from the woman's body. During pregnancy, a woman's whole life and energies will be actively involved in the nine-month process. Gestation and childbirth involve physical and psychological risks. After childbirth a woman will either be a mother who must undertake a twenty-year responsibility for child rearing, or face giving up her child for adoption or institutionalization. Since hers is the body, hers the risk, hers the burden, it is only just that she alone should be free to decide on pregnancy or abortion.

-Prochoice argument: Women have a moral right to full social equality. They should not be restricted or subordinated because of their sex. But this morally required equality cannot be realized without abortion's certain control of reproduction. Female social equality depends upon being able to compete and participate as freely as males can in the structures of educational and economic life. If a woman cannot control when and how she will be pregnant or rear children, she is at a distinct disadvantage, especially in our male-dominated world.

-But true sexual and reproductive freedom means freedom to procreate as well as to inhibit fertility. Prochoice feminists are also worried that women's freedom to reproduce will be curtailed through the abuse of sterilization and needless hysterectomies. Besides the punitive tendencies of a male-dominated health-care system, especially in response to repeated abortions or welfare pregnancies, there are other economic and social pressures inhibiting reproduction. Genuine reproductive freedom implies that day care, medical care, and financial support would be provided mothers, while fathers would take their full share in the burdens and delights of raising children.

-The moral right to control one's own body does apply to cases of organ transplants, mastectomies, contraception, and sterilization; but it is not a conceptualization adequate for abortion. The abortion dilemma is caused by the fact that 266 days following a conception in one body, another body will emerge. One's own body no longer exists as a single unit but is engendering another organism's life.

-Fortunately, in the course of civilization there has been a gradual realization that justice demands the powerless and dependent be protected against the uses of power wielded unilaterally. No human can be treated as a means to an end without consent. The fetus is an immature, dependent form of human life which only needs time and protection to develop. Surely, immaturity and dependence are not crimes.

-We do not sanction killing the innocent if it can be done painlessly or without the victim's awareness. Consciousness becomes important to the abortion debate because it is used as a criterion for the "personhood" so often seen as the prerequisite for legal protection. Yet certain philosophers set the standard of personhood so high that half the human race could not meet the criteria during most of their waking hours (let alone their sleeping ones).

-It is a chilling inconsistency to see prochoice feminists demanding continued access to assembly-line, technological methods of fetal killing--the vacuum aspirator, prostaglandins, and dilation and evacuation. It is a betrayal of feminism, which has built the struggle for justice on the bedrock of women's empathy. After all, "maternal thinking" receives its name from a mother's unconditional acceptance and nurture of dependent, immature life. It is difficult to develop concern for women, children, the poor and the dispossessed-- and to care about peace--and at the same time ignore fetal life.

-With legal abortion freely available, a clear cultural message is given: conception and pregnancy are no longer serious moral matters. With abortion as an acceptable alternative, contraception is not as responsibly used; women take risks, often at the urging of male sexual partners. Repeat abortions increase, with all their psychological and medical repercussions. With more abortion there is more abortion. Behavior shapes thought as well as the other way round. Abortion becomes no longer a choice but a "necessity

-A more male-oriented model of erotic or amative sexuality endorses sexual permissiveness without long-term commitment or reproductive focus. Erotic sexuality emphasizes pleasure, play, passion, individual self-expression, and romantic games of courtship and conquest. It is assumed that a variety of partners and sexual experiences are necessary to stimulate romantic passion. This erotic model of the sexual life has often worked satisfactorily for men, both heterosexual and gay, and for certain cultural elites. But for the average woman, it is quite destructive.
Sidney Callahan- Abortion and the Sexual Agenda: A Case for Prolife Feminism
will address three
of the ethics
of research on biotechnologies,
stem cell research, that are driven by
to be
in a
text of vastly unequal
access to health
care and other human

One of the
ical difficulties we have in meeting
global justice
is that
we (in North America
tend to contrast
autonomy or
and distributive
justice as constitut-
ing different
that are
to be mutually

-As Daniel Callahan has worried,
biomedical policy
ethics is afraid of
advancing community
ideals or chal-
the individualism of the
rhetoric of choice and
In par-
ticular it has not
taken on
conceptions of human life, wel-
fare, and the human future that are
in the biomedical research

-2 In the marketplace
where buyers and sellers meet, cer-
tain kinds of activities and
should be forbidden or limited.

-"4 Within a model of broad-
based and dialectical moral discern-
ment, a variety of moral and
stances and traditions can play a valu-
able role. These traditions may bring
to the table a
to values in
addition to
autonomy, and
concern for the common

-In the view of
Jeremy Rifkin, "a
is already
to wield unprecedented
over the vast biological
sources of the planet."6 Many
fields of
research science "are being
ed under the umbrella of
in the
emerging biotech
Lisa Sowle Cahill- The new Biotech World Order
-By the same token, strictly speaking
ours is not a debate about stem cell research. No one would object to the use
of pluripotent stem cells in biomedical research or therapy if they could be obtained from non-embryonic sources, or
if they could be acquired by using embryos lost in miscarriages.

-The threshold question is
whether it is right to kill members of a
certain class of humans–those in the
embryonic stage of development–to
benefit others.

-’ But one need not
engage questions of whether human beings have spiritual souls in considering
whether human embryos are human beings

-A human embryo is not something different in kind from a human being, like
a rock, or a potato, or a rhinoceros.

-Unless severely damaged
or deprived of a suitable environment,
an embryonic human being will, by directing his or her own integral organic
functioning, develop himself or herself
to each new stage of developmental maturity along the gapless continuum of a
human life.

-to say that embryonic human beings do not deserve full respect, one
must suppose that not every human being deserves full respect. And to do that,
one must hold that those human beings
who warrant full respect deserve it not
by virtue of the kind of entity they are, but,
rather, because of some acquired characteristic that some human beings

-If human
beings are worthy of full moral respect
only because of such qualities, and those
qualities come in varying degrees, humans should possess rights in varying
degrees. The proposition that all human

-You and I were never either a sperm cell
or an ovum. Nor would a person who
was brought into being by cloning have
once been a somatic cell. To destroy an
ovum or a skin cell whose constituents
might have been used to generate a new
and distinct human organism is not to
destroy a new and distinct human organism–for no such organism exists or ever

-we value
oak trees not because of the kind of entity they are, but because of their magni½cence. The magni½cence of an oak
tree reflects either accidental properties
or instrumental worth; a mature tree
provides our house with shade and is
aesthetically pleasing to behold. Neither acorns nor saplings are magni½cent,
so we do not experience a sense of loss
when they are destroyed. If oak trees
were valuable by virtue of the kind of entity they are, then it would follow that it
is just as unfortunate to lose an acorn as
an oak tree.
Robert George- Embryo Ethics
-Those who oppose embryonic stem cell research have, in my view, made the right moral choice.

-Opponents of stem cell research do not think that good results are the only--or even the most important--factor in determining how we ought to live. However fervently and sincerely they may hope that we find ways to relieve the condition of those who suffer, they do not take the further moral step of concluding that any and every avenue to that good end may be used.

-What, then, is sacred? Each individual person, any one of whom we might be tempted to misuse in the cause of progress for others.

-But what if the issue is not improving but, more starkly, preserving society? However great the promise of such research for relief of suffering and prevention of death, the fact that we continue to suffer and die is not an emergency. If we take to describing that sad fact of life as a crisis or emergency, there will be no end to what we might contemplate doing in the cause of medical progress.

-In torture we seek to overcome another person's conscientious resistance to our will. We aim to "break the conscience which is commanding him to keep silence." This differs from what Thielicke calls "temptation by desire," which seeks to work "by way of the man's own decisions." Nor can torture be equated with coercion, with an attempt to force a decision out of the person. Torture seeks to inflict pain severe enough to eliminate the ego, to bypass "the sphere of decision altogether." It seeks, we might say, to turn the person--a subject--into an object, a thing.

-Thus, while it may be paradoxical to hear former Vice President Cheney now calling for full disclosure of the beneficial results of enhanced interrogation methods used in secret during his tenure in office, he is quite right to do so. If we wish to renounce those tactics, we should estimate as best we can the cost of doing so.

- If human beings were simply members of our species, it might sometimes make sense to sacrifice one or another of them for the sake of the species as a whole. But human beings are not just members of the species or parts of a whole. Each human being is a "someone" who belongs to no earthly community to the whole extent of his being.
Gilbert Meilander- Stem Cells and Torture
-Some Catholics, going beyond the bishops and the Pope, maintain that the death penalty, like abortion and euthanasia, is a violation of the right to life and an unauthorized usurpation by human beings of God's sole lordship over life and death.










-Capital punishment does not reintegrate the criminal into society; In our day death is usually administered in private by relatively painless means, such as injections of drugs, and to that extent it may be less effective as a deterrent; It is an effective but rarely, if ever, a necessary means of defending society against the criminal; Its retributive value is impaired by lack of clarity about the role of the State.


Avery Cardinal Dulles- Catholicism and Capital Punishment
-According to Humanitarian theory, to punish a criminal because he deserves it is wrong- crime is all pathological.

-It can actually be a very bad model bc it forces people to conform to some agreed upon norm and paints people as sick.
C.S. Lewis- The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment
-Conditions of just war: just occasion, lawful authority, upright intention, just means, last resort, reasonable hope of victory, probable good must outweigh probable evil.

-Made no clear attempt to rectify the treaty of versailles.

-Civilians must not be killed, even though they are helping the war effort.- it is not an example of double effect.

-The war is wring on account of means, bc britain already blockading germany to starve it.

-Lasting peace probably won't happen in Europe to outweigh bad effects.
G.E.M. Anscombe- The Justice of the Present War Examined
-Wedding banquet with the man who got in without a wedding robe who was cast out.

-Greatest commandment: love the lord and love your neighbor as yourself.
Matthew 22

Romans 13
-Turn the other cheek doesnt mean allowing others to be slapped on the other cheek too.

-Love for neighbor is limited- sometimes one must fight but one can't approve of an unlimited attack on human life.

-Pacifism teaches people that there's no significant moral difference between killing innocent life and other killing. They see no way of avoiding wickedness and so set no limits on it.
Paul Ramsey- Justice in War
-For augustine, self-love is source of evil.

-city of god- love of god to point of contemt for self.

-Realism becomes cynical/nihilistic when it equates natural w/ normative.

-Neighbor love can help guide us in race relations but cant compel us to sacrifice State efficiency for a federal Fair Employment Practices act.

-Christian stance cant cause one to claim absolute validity of his claims but rather to humility.

-Life will always be fragmentary, frustrating, incomplete.

-Strive for kingdom of God in history but do not expect its full realization there.
Reinhold Niebuhr- Augustine and Christian Realism
-Love of neighbor factors in w/ war on terror- helping the afghan people.

-Right intention, right authority, and since afghanistan has been liberated, success.

-We don;t condemn muslims wheras the terrorists condemn all americans.

-On the rule of discrimination, every effort is being made to separate combatants and noncombatants.
Jean Bethke Elshtain- Just War Against Terror
-May a christian be a patriot?

-God's people transcend all nations.

-Is it legitimate for christians to love any group as their own?

-Our relationship with god doesnt mean we need to repudiate our earthly existence.

-Church alter's author's patriotism- not always proud of certain aspects, views some aspects of America w/ sorrow. esp. militarism
Nicholas Wolterstorff- Reflections on Patriotism
-Niebuhr felt that pacifism was dubious in religion and dangerous in politics.

-Naturalists couldn't see WW2 coiming.

-Niebuhr would dismiss politician seeking to conform to God's will.

-Science can't give us values- why was I born? and for what should i live?
John Patrick Diggins- Why Niebuhr Now?
-Us must entertain the possibility that not all of al-qaedas roots are malevolent and irrational- legitimate grievances there too.

-Must give these grievances attention.
Nigel Biggar- Burying the Past After 9/11
-What nation today has a navy bigger than all other navies combined? The U. S. A. What nation today is steadily adding to the only known stockpile of atom bombs? The U. S. A. --What nation today is tops in the development of buzz bombs, jet planes, bacterial poisons and death rays?

-There are no antiwar organizations in the colleges these days, at least not in the Catholic colleges. There is a sense of the inevitable, that war is to come, that mora1ity has nothing to do with it, that it is a question of licking Russia before she gets too strong, before she gets the atomic bomb. Around the local churches they are distributing leaflets and cards asking the Italians here to write to their relatives in Italy not to vote Communist. It would be interesting to know who is financing this campaign. It would be interesting to know why Communism has become such a threat in Italy. Is it perhaps that we have failed?

-to go to war means to go against every decent sentiment and against all cries for justice and against all love of man for his neighbor The policy of the United States is anti-Catholic because it is atheistic.

Dorothy Day- We Are Not Un-American, We are Catholics
-‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.










Matthew 5
-What would you do if someone dependent upon you were being attacked?

-War is different- in the case of a single attacker innocent bystanders less likely to be harmed. Defending a house doesnt change everything like war does.

-Tragedy, martyrdom, natural way out (emotionally disarm attacker), providential way out.

-Not only christians have faith in providence.

-Suffering can be meaningful.
John Howard Yoder- What Would You Do If?
-Elshtain's justification of war on terror: nothing more than an uncritical justification of the ideology of America as empire. It is'itself
a deeply ideological work rather than one of careful
and critical thought.

-when America sees srares organized on principles it doesn't like (this is what Elshtain
means by "failed srares") it should remake them by
force"(if n1gssary) into states organized onprinciples it
does like- new imperialism.

-Her argument is a foil to that of its demonic other, the terrorisg the Islamist, the Islamic fundamentalist, of whom Osama bin Laden serves as the paradigm and archetype. Her Americanism glows
throughout as the dangerously radiant mirror image of
bin Laden's "ideological fanaticism"

-In this book (as opposed to much of her other
work, which stands in dramatic contrast), Elshtain
describes America in the most favorable light possible. better interpretation would reveal huge flaws.

-She righdy argues that those who kill themseives in
attacks on civfians are not marbrrs but murderers. but
she fails to draw the obvious conclusion that yol., do
not go
"war' against murderers. Instead, you try to
arrest them.

Stanley Hauerwas and Paul Griffiths- War, Peace, and Jean Bethke Elshtain
-I am accused of having become
an apologist for Empire; for unrestrained capitalism;
for all things American, including abortion, throwing
people in jail, and so on.

\flhat is disturbing and destructive about Hauerwas and Griffiths' moral equation of bin Ladenism
with Americanism is that it pulls the rug out from
under current efforts by thousands of devout Muslims to achieve in their own societies the minimal
basic freedoms that are our civic inheritence

-Nowhere do I call for the importation of American
culture wholesal*as if that could be done. Nowhere
do Flauerwas and Griffiths note that I mention forceful interdicdon in the conrexr of stopping violence.
Nowhere do they indicare that my discrission falls
under the heading "Defending Human Digntqr," antmated by a principle of "equal moral regard" for all
persons. Nowhere do they acknowledge that my primary concern is to stop the slaughter of innocents.

-what is
stunningby its omissionintheF{auer-
\ X / was/Griffiths'diatribe is any sustained disVY cussionof either jwsadbellwmor jwsinbello
criteria. My book revolves around the just war tradition and the loss-a devastating one, I believe-to the
American Christian community of that tradition, as
.the many statements issued by denominations about
the war against terrorism make clear
Jean Bethke Elshtain- Response to Hauerwas & Griffiths
-Dialogue doesn't mean conflicts and diferences between religions should be downplayed.

-Different religions argue about the very nature of divine reality- not simply different approaches to the same divine reality.

-Dialogue can't aim at uniting the different religions institutionally.

-Interreligious dialogue different from ecumenical christian dialogue.

-Gospel of John says Jews worship the devil because they killed Jesus.

-In Christian judgement, the divine reality of other religions is expressed in a manner that has undergone refraction.

-Can people of other religions be saved?- various interpretations for idea that salvation comes thru christ alone. Perhaps all that is required is acting the was Jesus wants us to act. many who aren't christians do this. perhaps those who arent saved explicitly reject the message of christ.

-We can learn from interreligious dialogue bc theological knowledge is provisional.
Wolfhart Pannenberg- The Religions from the Perspective of Christian Theology and the Self-Interpretations of Christianity in Relation to Non-Christian Religions








-Palestinians must abandon violence.

-The third source of tension is our shared interest in the rights and responsibilities of nations on nuclear weapons. (Iran)

-No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation by any other.




Barack Obama- Speech in Cairo, June 4, 2009
-In relations between religions, commonalities and differences count.

-If we only see commonalities, we distort others and ourselves.

-For Qutb there's either radical islamic totalitarianism or secular totalitarianism.

-Faith in one god commits us to pluralism.

-Christianity is not a culture or a civilization- many different cultures and civilizations within christianity.
Miroslav Volf- A Public Faith
-Common sentiment- God is most accesible to individuals acting on their won, not to members of organized religion.

-Faith in God helps us lose our religion and spirituality contributes to confining christianity to private life and not to the public sphere.

-origin of modern concept of religion in 15th sentury thinkers.

-For Finicio (15th century), worshipping God in one's heart was most important.

-Religion came to be thought not as the product of rational thought, but as the product of feeling and intuition.

-God is simply a divine prozac for readers of the chicken soup movement.

-In modern, secular world, religion is private and kept out of public life.

- State becomes the only thing worth fighting and dying for.

-If all religions are climbing the same mountain, they must all be relativized to some extent.

-Because of privatization of religion, a whole area of human concern, namely religion, has been cordoned off. we love our neighbor in our hearts and then go bomb the fuck out of them in war.
William T. Cavanaugh- God is Not Religious
-One thing is so certain that it seems stupid to verbalize it: both
modern technology and modern science are distinctively Occidental.

-The new Frankish calendars, which set the style
around them--plowing, harvesting, chopping trees, butchering pigs. Man
and nature are two things, and man is master.
These novelties seem to be in harmony with larger intellectual
about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology is

-Our daily habits of action, for example, are dominated by an implicit
faith in perpetual progress which was unknown either to Greco- Roman
Judeo- Christian theology.

-Christianity is the most
anthropocentric religion the world has seen.

-To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The
the West.

-The greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history, Saint
Francis, proposed what he thought was an alternative Christian view of
nature and man's relation to it; he tried to substitute the idea of the equality
of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man's limitless rule of
Lynn White- The Theological Roots of the Ecological Crisis
-Defense of nature is a universal value.

-Each species is a master of biology and worth saving.

-Our minds are powerful but we are physically dependent on our environment.

-We use natural products to find solutions and cures- biodiversity matters.

-Darwin;s reverence for life remained intact after he repudiated religion.

-Why havent the evangelical churches joined the fight to preserve and protect the creation.
E.O. Wilson- Apocalypse Now
-I want to begin with a problem: namely, that the culpability of Christianity in the destruction of the natural world, and the uselessness of Christianity to any effort to correct that destruction, are now established cliches of the conservation movement. This is a problem for two reasons: First, the indictment of Christianity by the anti-Christian conservationists is, in many respects, just. secondly, because, however just it may be, it does not come from an adequate understanding of the Bible and the cultural traditions that descend from the Bible. The anti-Christian conservationists characteristically deal with the Bible by waving it off.

-We might, let us suppose, turn to another religion--a recourse that is sometimes suggested by the anti-Christian environmentalists. Buddhism, for example, is certainly a religion that could guide us toward a right respect for the natural world, our fellow humans, and our fellow creatures. I have a considerable debt myself to Buddhism and Buddhists. But there is an enormous number of people, and I am one of them, whose native religion, for better or worse, is Christianity.

-We will discover that we humans do not own the world or any part of it: "The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof: the world and they that dwell therein" (Ps. 24:1).

-We will discover that God found the world, as he made it, to be good; that he made it for his pleasure; and that he continues to love it and to find it worthy, despite its reduction and corruption by us.


-"The sense of the holiness of life" is not compatible with an exploitive economy. You cannot know that life is holy if you are content to live from economic practices that daily destroy life and diminish its possibility.

-he presence of his spirit in us is our wildness, our oneness with the wilderness of Creation. That is why subduing the things of nature to human purposes is so dangerous, and why it so often results in evil, in separation and desecration.


-I have been talking, of course, about a dualism that manifests itself in several ways; it is a cleavage, a radical discontinuity, between Creator and creature, spirit and matter, religion and nature, religion and economy, worship and work, etc. This dualism, I think is the most destructive disease that afflicts us. In its best known, its most dangerous, and perhaps its fundamental version, it is the dualism of body and soul. This is an issue as difficult as it is important, and so to deal with it we should start at the beginning.

-If we think of ourselves as merely biological creatures, whose story is determined by genetics or environment or history or economics or technology, then, however pleasant or painful the part we play, it cannot matter much. Its significance is that of mere self-concem.

-If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of mortal human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures--then all our acts have a supreme significance.
Wendell Berry- Christianity and the Survival of Creation
-Life of man is animally vegetative but life of plants is vegetative.

-Man has to think and act responsively.

-Animals and plants do not belong to man but to God.

-When man kills animal, he does something a bit like homicide.

-We can only kill animals knowing that they do not belong to us but to god.

Karl Barth- Church Dogmatics
-Essays on the morality of abortion, whether they be anti or pro, have
begun to take on a ritualistic form. Each side knows the arguments and
counterarguments well, but they continue to go through the motions. Neither
side seems to have much hope of convincing the othir, but just as in some
rituals we continue to repeat words and actions though we no longer know
why, in like manner we continue to repeat arguments about why a6ortion is
right, wrong, or indifferent.

-we have fai]ed to exhibit
our deepest convictions that make our rejection of abortion intelligible.

-We have not understood, as
Christians, how easily we have presumed that the presuppositions of our
"liberal" cultural ethos are "Christian. "

-As Christians we have assumed that we were morally and politically
required to express our opposition to abortion in terms acceptable in a pluralist

-the very character of debate in a liberal,
secular, pluralist culture like ours shows that there is no rational method for
resolving most significant matters of moral dispute. Any rational method for
resolving moral disagreements requires a shared tradition

-Maclntyre argues that we must
look to the moral presuppositions on which our society was founded. For in
spite of the appeal to self-evident truths about equality and rights to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

-The ideal of liberalism is thus to make government neutral on the
very subjects that matter most to people, precisely because they matter most.

-we attempt to change our language so our cornmitment to greater
individual liberty concerning abortion will not contradict our traditional views
about what kind ofpeople we should be to deserve to be free. The reason that
our arguments conceming abortion are bound to fail is that we cannot resolve
the morally antithetical traditions that form our society and our Christian
ambitions for ourselves

-if christians are to make their
moral and political convictions conceming abortion intelligible we must show
how the meaning and prohibition of abortion is correlative to the stories of
God and his people that form our basic conviction.

-singular kind of
behavior from a particular community's moral perspective. The removal of
the fetus from the mother's uterus before term can be called an "intemrption
of pregnancy, " the child can be called "fetal matter, " and the mother can be
called a "patient." But from the Christian perspective, to see the situation in
that way changes the self and the community in a decisive way

-From a Christian perspective children represent our continuing commitment to live as a historic people.

Stanley Hauerwas- Abortion: Why the Arguments Fail
-At a conference in 1979, did the Pope attack liberation theology or sanction it?

-Pope wished to get rid of idea that christianity was reducible to marxism.

-Pope john paul II rejected specifically biological, economical, or psychological view of man.

-Pope wanted to safeguard the christian character of the message of liberation.

-Lots of bishops have looked upon marxism favorably.

-Latin american and spanish clergy felt themselves victimized by anglo-saxon bias, studied nouvelle theologie, and realized the power of popular religion among the masses.

-innovation and entrepreneurialism isnt really a part of latin culture.

-as an explanatory system, marxism explains little and has been used to justify totalitarian regimes. It still speaks to utopian fantasies, however.
Michael Novak- Liberation Theology and the Pope
-Charity has been fruitfully rediscovered as center of christian life.

-Vatican II reaffirmed church of service not of power.

-Theology must be critical reflection on basic human principles.

-Theology as a critical reflection on historical praxis is a liberating theology.

-Poor countries arent modeling themselves after the rich countries bc they see the rich countries as exploitive, but they are trying to overcome material insufficiency to achieve more human society.

-Poor countries realize that their underdevelopment is bc theyve been exploited by the rich countries.

-For Marx, to know was connected to transformation of the world through work.

-Shouldnt endorse ideas without critical examination.

-Liberation expresses aspirations of oppressed peoples and social classes.

-what relation is there between salvation and the historical process of human liberation?

-Radicalization of social praxis
-people are wising up to causes of their economic oppression.

-To put oneself in perspective of the Kingdom is to participate in struggle of the oppressed.

-conversion of oppressed neighbor must occur

-Commitment to creation of just society presupposes confidence in the future.

-We are on the verge of a historic breakthrough for humanity.

-Recovery of more authentic and radical witness to poverty in the church.

-Vatican II asserted church's role as the church of the poor.

-In Bible, poverty portrayed as scandalous condition inimical to human dignity.

-Bible speaks of active and concrete measures to fight against poverty.

-Bible: what remains in the fields after the harvest shouldnt be collected- it is for the alien, the orphan, the widow.

-Poor person is client of yahweh, there to welcome God, etc.

-Luke by saying blessed are the poor doesnt mean the poor shoudl accept their condition- he means that the poor are blessed bc the kingdom of god has begun.

-Poverty has a redemptive value- deepest reason for voluntary poverty is love of neighbor.
Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation
-Church much proclaim liberation in the way jesus announced it.

-uncritical acceptance of marxism.

-kingdom constructed by means of struggles for liberation.

-orthodoxy replaced by orthopraxy.

-encounter with the lord enlightens us.

-"god becomes history" leads to relativism.

-can the eucharist really be celebrated as a sacrament of liberation?
Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith- Ten Observations on the Theology of Gustavo Gutierrez
-Catholic church transformed from bastion of ancien regime to supporter of human rights.

-Catholic skepticism of democracy in 19th century.

-Church equated liberalism with the jacobinism of the french revolution.

-Church's response to liberalism was to adopt a modern, bureaucratic structure.

-Church officials worried that liberalism came as package deal w/ darwinism and socialism.

-Fear that religious freedom would lead to religious indifference and govt hostility to religion.

-The fact of America changed this- liberal, pluralistic society that was good for roman catholics. Vigor of american catholicism kept the issue alive.
-Democracy began to be viewed as an antidote to totalitarianism.

-purpose of human person is to pursue freedom to work for their own development.

-Liberal democracies in modern times have best met catholic church's criteria for human dignity.

-Religious freedom is a crucial aspect of civil society.

-John Paul II- evangelizer of the gospel, and if democracy is in line with human rights message of the gospel, then he supports it.

-In an age of human rights, however, the pope fears that the right to life is being trampled upon.
George Weigel- Catholicism and Democracy
- in America, the problem of pluralism was unique in the modern world, chiefly because pluralism was the native condition of American society. It was not, as in Europe and in England, the result of a disruption or decay of a previously existent religious unity.

-the first article of the American political faith is that the political community, as a form of free and ordered human life, looks to the sovereignty of God as to the first principle of its organization. In the Jacobin tradition religion is at best a purely private concern, a matter of personal devotion, quite irrelevant to public affairs.


- There have never been "two Americas," in the sense in which there have been, and still are, "two Frances," "two Italys," "two Spains." Politically speaking, America has always been one. The reason is that a consensus was once established, and it still substantially endures, even in the quarters where its origins have been forgotten.

-"A free people": this term too has a special sense in the American Proposition. America has passionately pursued the ideal of freedom, expressed in a whole system of political and civil rights, to new lengths; but it has not pursued this ideal so madly as to rush over the edge of the abyss, into sheer libertarianism, into the chaos created by the nineteenth-century theory of the "outlaw conscience," conscientia exlex, the conscience that knows no law higher than its own subjective imperatives.


John Courtney Murray- E Pluribus Unum: The American Consensus


-Market God is emerging renewed from its trial by financial "contagion." Since the argument from design no longer proves its existence, it is fast becoming a postmodern deity—believed in despite the evidence.



-The traditional God of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer is invoked as one "unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid." Like Him, The Market already knows the deepest secrets and darkest desires of our hearts—or at least would like to know them. But one suspects that divine motivation differs in these two cases. Clearly The Market wants this kind of x-ray omniscience because by probing our inmost fears and desires and then dispensing across-the-board solutions, it can further extend its reach.

-All of the traditional religions teach that human beings are finite creatures and that there are limits to any earthly enterprise. The Market that stops expanding dies.
Harvey Cox- The Market as God


-the Church does not have technical solutions to offer. She does, however, have a mission of truth to accomplish

-Paul VI had an articulated vision of development. this meant their active participation, on equal terms, in the international economic process



-The world's wealth is growing in absolute terms, but inequalities are on the increase.






- There is another aspect of modern life that is very closely connected to development: the denial of the right to religious freedom. the deliberate promotion of religious indifference or practical atheism on the part of many countries obstructs the requirements for the development of peoples


-Human costs always include economic costs, and economic dysfunctions always involve human costs.


-he social doctrine of the Church has unceasingly highlighted the importance of distributive justice and social justice for the market economy



Pope Benedict XVI- Caritas in Veritate, #9 and #21-42

-Now you, too, have the information you need to save a child's life. How should you judge yourself if you don't do it?


-Comfortably off Americans who give, say, 10 percent of their income to overseas aid organizations are so far ahead of most of their equally comfortable fellow citizens that I wouldn't go out of my way to chastise them for not doing more. Nevertheless, they should be doing much more, and they are in no position to criticize Bob for failing to make the much greater sacrifice of his Bugatti.

-An American household with an income of $50,000 spends around $30,000 annually on necessities, according to the Conference Board, a nonprofit economic research organization. Therefore, for a household bringing in $50,000 a year, donations to help the world's poor should be as close as possible to $20,000. The $30,000 required for necessities holds for higher incomes as well. So a household making $100,000 could cut a yearly check for $70,000. Again, the formula is simple: whatever money you're spending on luxuries, not necessities, should be given away.
Peter Singer- The Singer Solution to World Poverty
The contemporary Protestant discussion of agape has stressed the concept
of other-regard often epitomized by self-sacrifice. Emphasis on other-regard
has been accompanied by a suspicion toward, or outright condemnation of,

-Niebuhr believed that
human beings naturally long for a state of peace
in which the self lives in har-
mony with her/his fellow human beings
in obedience to God. However, hu-
man sin makes such
lasting harmony impossible within history

-s. The human capac-
ity for self-transcendence permits human beings
to develop extravagant de-

-But paradoxically intimate, mutually loving relationships can be sustained
only by a religious norm of agape (or sacrificial love). Only when each party
acts on behalf of the other without excessive regard
for personal return do
loving relationships blossom

-As soon as Niebuhr's focus shifted to the public world of government and
business he found agape
to be a problematic moral standard. ecause of Niebuhr's acute awareness of
human selfishness, especially corporate selfishness, where economics and
government are concerned, he reduced agape to a remote star. Christians can
use agape as a reference point
to get their moral bearings, but in the public
world the total actualization of love will never be reached

- At least among Protestant ethicists there has been a heavy emphasis on
other-regard and self-sacrifice as distinctive characteristics of an agape
rooted in the doctrine of the Atonement. Feminists contend that this view of
is far too narrow
reflecting largely male experience

-Women have a
tendency to give themselves over to others to such an ex-
tent that
lose themselves

-Agape defined exclusively as other-regard or self-sacrifice is not an ap-
propriate virtue for women who are prone to excessive selflessness

-Shaw advocated that self-sacrifice be balanced by self-assertion and
that sacrifice be made manifest by women in the public realm as well as in
the domestic sphere

-Christian ethicists who have stressed self-sacrifice as a central Christian
virtue have frequently done so on Chris tological grounds. They assert that
the life and especially the crucifixion of Jesus reveal him to be a person who
pours himself out completely
in service to others. Then they conclude that
his followers should also live a life of complete self-giving.
Barbara Andolsen- Agape in Feminist Ethics
-The sbmetimes deeply religious andlor theological underpinnings of our basic attitudes concerning the nature of peoples and
the kind of public policies we must respond with remains unacknowledged or unconscious.

-often, we are t.-pt.J to live our lives as if we
live in a monolithic society and as if our responses to events and histories should reflect this.

-we often rely on positivist approaches
that seek to create scientific descriptions through objective generaltzations.T This is accomplished by banishing (or attempting to banish) all
other human characteristics except rationality and then decontextualizing (or attempting to decontextualize) ourselves to become detached

-actions and relationships change depending on our style of

-The Black Matriarch is an image largely shaped by powerful repre_
sentatives of the wh],.: dominant group through the-fantastic hegemonic imagination. Like all these images and stereotypes of Black
womanhood, she serves to throttle Black life into ,narrow, haunting

- Moynihan
portrayed Black men as deviant, effeminate, and passive. Black
women were labeled doubly devianf, masculine, and unnaturally superior.2

-It is ironic that themodern
day Protestant work ethic has moved so far from the sixteenth-century
theologian and church reformer
John calvin's ideal. This becomes
striking when paired with notions of the poor and poverty.

-As Keith-Lucas notes, there is a fine line bet*eei believing that God
has chosen those who are successful and berieving that if one man-
ages to-be successful, then God will choose one.

- the religious values that are at the core of these policiesa: appeal to the person as an independent unit; the autonomous, selfdetermining ego; stress on personal responsibility; and the abhorrence
of dependency-belie a basic inabilitl ot un*iilingness ro recognize
structural evil and/or inequities that require. public policies that irove
beyond the notion that governmenr must work through individuals
who care about themselves first and foremost, if not exclusively

-What does it mean when more than 93 percent of the budger reductions in entitlements have come from programs for poor people?

-it seems irrelevant to most people that viewing the self as an unproblematic center of the universe turns gospel on its head.

-Everyday life has become commodified as corporate profits shoot
through the roof in an ironic but deadly gambol-in 1994 alone, the
profits of the Fortune 500 companies shot up 54 percent while the
gain of sales was only 8

-Public policy and public policymaking should give us institutions that
guarantee that the mechanisms of a pluralist democracy such as the
United States operate with a great deal of fairness for all citizens.

-The two cuts for 2006 stun.51 They allow people earning upward of
$200,000 a year to claim larger write-offs for a spouse and their children, and expenses such as moftgage interest on a vacation home.

Emilie M. Townes- To Pick One’s Own Cotton: Religious Values, Public Policy, and Women’s Moral Autonomy
-The christian tradition has had exceptional women in every period but this hasnt rly affected official doctrine.

-Patriarchal religion tends to be authoritarian.

-If contraceptives instead of bombs had been dropped on hiroshima- church wouldve protested.

-women's liberation is spiritual bc it humanizes women and species as a whole.

-Mother/father god needed.

-women have been kept in a low caste- perpetuated thru the idea of separate but equal.

-psychoanalysis perpetuated male domination by calling people neurotic.

-women alienated from organized religion have often retained sense of transcendence.

-Exodus community linked with sisterhood. Sisterhood of man is bonding of men and women for liberation from sexual stereotypes.
Mary Daly- The Spiritual Revolution: Women’s Liberation as Theological Re-education
-feminism criticizes yet incorporates elements of liberalism.

-Catholic thought and practice havent adequately addressed contemporary feminism.

-Feminists view catholic church's attempt to define "christian feminism" with skepticism.

-Feminism requires women be taken seriously as moral agents.

-John stuart mill and wollenstonecroft helped develop feminism from liberalism.

-major task of women is extrication from social interdependence.

-liberal feminist critique of parent liberalism is idea of relations as contractual.

-reject idea that what is most worth having and doing is what men think worth having and doing.

-Pope John Paul II viewed women's traditional role as mothers.

-Christ-Bridegroom/Church-Bride analogy. and example of Mary given.

-Before catholics and feminists find common ground church must be able to address their critique.
Mary C. Segers- Feminism, Liberalism, and Catholicism
-the church has used the idea of procreation and the union between male and female as a sign for God's intimate and loving relation to his church. A man is an exemplar of masculinity which enables the priest to represent Christ in the mystery of God made man.

-Israel was feminine and and the church is feminine, therefore the priest representing Christ has to be masculine. And therefore by their gender, women are precluded from being ordained.

- I absolutely agree that the role of women in the church is inadequate. What the most extreme feminist critics say about the actual standing of women is justified. It is a male-dominated institution, and was so even in the heyday of powerful Mother Abbesses. But I should also make clear that I am not in favor of ordaining women.

- It is possible that women can achieve everything that they need, and far more than they have imagined they need, without negating the nuptial mystery, indeed, even invoking it to justify an equal share of authority for women.

-How would the women's powers be circumscribed? What areas of faith and morals would be allocated to their specific care? This would be the most central issue of all. The obvious topics on which women could be expected to advise the Holy See would surely be women's concerns, connected with life, that is with procreation and dying.

-. It does not subvert hierarchical principles, but introduces a countervailing power to strengthen the hierarchy. It does not break the link with the Bible, since it is a new way of appreciating and enacting the feminine principle in the church.
Mary Douglas- A Modest Proposal: A Place for Women in the Hierarchy
-"It's not
like we're creating this. This is happening whether
we're here or not. Our founder was just smart enough
to capitalize on it." GGW's foundel Joe Francis, has
likened the flashing girls he captures on his videos to
seventies feminists burning their bras. His product,
he says, is sexy for men, liberating for women, good
for the goose, and good for the gander.

-"I've had discussions with friends who were like,
'This is so degrading to females,"' said Leist.
that if you walk up to someone all sly and say,
on, get naked, show me your box,' that,s one thing.
But if you have women coming up to you begging to
get on camera and they're having fun and being sexy,
then thatt another story."

-Because we have determined that all empowered women must be overtly and publicly sexual, and
because the only sign of sexuality we seem to be able
to recognize is a direct allusion to red-light entertainment, we have laced the sleazy energy and aesthetic
of a topless club or a Penthouse shoot throughout our
entire culture.

-The values people vote for
are not necessarily the same values they live by. No
region of the United States has a higher divorce rate
than the Bible Belt.

-Raunch culture is not essentially progressive, it is essentially commercial.

-If men have been appreciating the village belly
dancer or the Champagne Room lap dancer for sexual gratification and titillation over the years, we
have to wonder what women are getting out of this
now. Why would a straight woman want to see another woman in fewer clothes spin-around a pole?

actuality, Playboy is a company largely run by

-Raunch culture feels perhaps the most alien to
aging hippies like my parents-they are all for free
love, but none of this looks loving to them; it looks
scary louche, incomprehensible.
Ariel Levy- Raunch Culture

-Thank you, women who are mothers! You have sheltered human beings within yourselves in a unique experience of joy and travail. Thank you, women who are wives! hank you, women who are daughters and women who are sisters! Thank you, women who work! You are present and active in every area of life-social, economic, cultural, artistic and political. Thank you, consecrated women! Following the example of the greatest of women, the Mother of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word, you open yourselves with obedience and fidelity to the gift of God's love.






Letter of Pope John Paul II to Women
-with sex we can be rejected in our bodily entirety.

-same-sex love poses the question of what the meaning of desire is- not instrumental to another process, like having children.
Rowan Williams- The Body's Grace
-Marriage between man and woman normative form.

-Bible, though it speaks of homosexuality rarely, prohibits it.

- Homosexuality is a sin- not a very reprehensible one, but a sin.
Richard Hays- Awaiting the Redemption of Our Bodies
-Off-handed rejection of homosexuality not very reflective.

-we are allowed to interpret bible as we wish.

- do we interepret sex biologically or covenentally- if covenentally, we can put homosexuality and heterosexuality on same plane.

-church musnt fall prey to politics, but can it affirm homosexuality based on homosexual holiness?
Luke Timothy Johnson- Debate and Discernment, Scripture and Spirit
-non-marital sex acts are sodomical- dont result is same biological unity.
Robert P. George -Same-Sex Marriage’ and ‘Moral Neutrality
LL OF US spend our first years single. Most of us
spend our last years single. As adults, we are single
by circumstance or by deliberate choice. Given these simple facts, it is surprising how little attention and how
precious little support the churches have given to

-A new ethic for single sexuality is needed, for the tradition that requires celibacy in singleness is not adequate.

-With the advent of the so-called "sexual revolution"
and the birth control pill, fear of pregnancy was gone.
After the "thou shalt not" of Christian tradition, we en
countered the * 'thou shalt'' of contemporary culture. Here,
"love" was all that counted. Women were "liberated"
and virginity was redefined as ' 'bad.'' Now people talked
about sex all the time, with everyone.

-" I 'm wearing the
'heirloom lace' of my grandmother's generation . . . with
the conscience of my mother's generation . . . coping
with the morals of my generation . . . No matter what
I do tonight, I'm going to offend myself."

-. Let us begin with
Christian tradition, which affirms that sex is a gift from

-Sexuality has to do with vulnerability. Eros, the desire
for another, the passion that accompanies the wish for
sexual expression, makes one vulnerable. It creates possibilities for great joy but also for great suffering.

-Similarly, seduction is wrong, for the seducer guards
her or his own vulnerability and uses sex as a weapon
to gain power over another

-Premarital and postmarital sexuality might express
appropriate vulnerability. Gay and lesbian unions, long
condemned by the church because of their failure to be
procreative, might also express appropriate vulnerability

-A few years ago, the United Church
of Christ proposed a "principle of proportionality" for
single sexuality. According to this principle, the level
of sexual expression should be commensurate with the
level of commitment in the relationship.

-An adequate sexual ethic for singles must therefore attend to what is needed for appropriate vulnerability in

-Ne i ther the " t h ou shalt n o t" of t r adi t ional
prohibitions nor the " t h ou s h a l t" of contemporary culture
provides an adequate sexual ethic for singles. " C e l i b a cy
in s i n g l e n e s s" is not the answe r. An appreciation of t he
link be twe en sexuality and vulnerability is the p r e c o ndition for an adequa te sexual e thi c.
Karen Lebacqz- Appropriate Vulnerability
Galatians 3
-Religious people fear imposition.

-Christians ought to be able to bring their political views into the public sphere.

-For Qutb, no god but god and totalitarian notions of religion.

-faith stands in opposition to some elements of culture and is detached from others.

-christ was a bringer of grace- coercive faith is a malfunctioning faith.

-Christians bear witness to christ- not impose their beliefs on others.

-western christians, once dominant, feel marginalized.

-christians must be willing to listen and learn when they interact w/ other cultures.

-if christians are estranged from the world, it can only be because of and insofar as the world is estranged from god.

-Christians have no place to transform the whole culture they inhabit, but shouldnt pursue a policy of accommodation either.

-christians should engage with all aspects of culture.
Miroslav Volf- A Public Faith



-I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.



-Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition.




Barack Obama- Philadelphia Speech on Race, March 18, 2008

-Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

Cornel West- Dr. King Weeps from His Grave
-religion kept private even though most americans believe in god.

-rhetoric that refuses to acknoweldge that rational people can take religion seriously.

-our culture says religion shouldnt be taken seriously even by those who profess belief in it.

-autonomous religion plays vital role as free critic of secular society.

-what are protesting indians left to do when sacred land is taken for building stuff.

-some take the view that if u cant practice ur faith anymore- no biggie. pick a new one.

-Liberals have shied away from god talk and ceded it to the right wing.
Stephen Carter- The Culture of Disbelief, 3-22
-Mainline protesatntism dying in america.

-Mainline protestants have shied away from public square. why?

-Raushenbusch thought victorian family and democratic ideal were aligned.

-christians shouldnt think democracy is "their" from of govt.

Stanley Hauerwas- The Democratic Policing of Christianity
-courts have increasingly referred to religion as a private matter.

-notion of secular state can be prelude to totalitarianism.

-christian writers such as Niebuhr tend to be dismissed as old hat.

-religion of relativism fills naked public square.
Richard John Neuhaus, “The Vulnerability of the Naked Square”

-"Mr. Obama says he's a Christian, but supports the destruction of innocent and sacred life."- I answered with what has come to be the typically liberal response in such debates - namely, I said that we live in a pluralistic society, that I can't impose my own religious views on another, that I was running to be the U.S. Senator of Illinois and not the Minister of Illinois.







Barack Obama- Call to Renewal Keynote Address
-In early summer, newspaper accounts had created the impression in some quarters that official church spokespeople would ask Catholics to vote for or against specific candidates on the basis of their political position on the abortion issue.

-bishops will teach -- they must -- more and more vigorously and more and more extensively. But they have said they will not use the power of their position, and the great respect it receives from all Catholics, to give an imprimatur to individual politicians or parties.

-God doesn't insist on political neutrality. But because it is the judgment of the bishops, and most of us Catholic lay people, that it is not wise for prelates and politicians to be tied too closely together.

-I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant or non-believer, or as anything else you choose.



-"Yes," we create our public morality through consensus and in this country that consensus reflects to some extent religious values of a great majority of Americans. But "no," all religiously based values don't have an a priori place in our public morality.

-This "Christian nation" argument should concern -- even frighten -- two groups: non-Christians and thinking Christians.

-My church and my conscience require me to believe certain things about divorce, birth control and abortion. My church does not order me -- under pain of sin or expulsion -- to pursue my salvific mission according to a precisely defined political plan.

-I believe that legal interdicting of abortion by either the federal government or the individual states is not a plausible possibility and even if it could be obtained, it wouldn't work. Given present attitudes, it would be "Prohibition" revisited, legislating what couldn't be enforced and in the process creating a disrepect for law in general.

-Unless we Catholics educate ourselves better to the values that define -- and can ennoble -- our lives, following those teachings better than we do now, unless we set an example that is clear and compelling, then we will never convince this society

Mario Cuomo, “Religious Belief and Public Morality
-What is good can still be what is easy. difficult things arent the only things that can be moral

-aquinas- essence of virtue consists in good, not difficult.
Joseph Pieper- Leisure: The Basis of Culture