Theology and Ethics
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“A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House”: Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State (Cavanaugh, 1995)

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My purpose in this essay will be to focus on the way revulsion to killing in the name of religion is used to legitimize the transfer of ultimate loyalty to the modern State. Specifically I will examine how the so-called “Wars of Religion” of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe are evoked as the founding moment of modern liberalism by theorists such as John
Rawls, Judith Shklar, and Jeffrey Stout.

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Cardinal Pell and the Theology of the Nation State (Cavanaugh, 2005)

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How might a Christian envision the way the world ought to be and how humans ought to live in community. I guess if you take the biblical story, which I do with my very beginning students, and you look at the biblical story as a whole, it can be told as the story of primordial unity and then scattering and gathering again, salvation as a kind of gathering again into a harmony amongst humans and between humans and God. And so the way the story of the Fall in Genesis is told it encapsulates the whole thing: that there is this Creation that begins good and then through sin kind of falls apart and so on and then we are to be gathered back together.

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The Ecclesiologies of Medellin and the Lessons of the Base Communities (Cavanaugh, 1994)

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My purpose in this article will be twofold. First, I will illuminate the general thrust of Medellin’s conflicting ecclesiologies by sketching the political background of the conference and examining the documents themselves. Second, I will show how the base-community movement contributed significantly to the strategies of both traditionalists and liberationists in the church; and I will argue for a theology of the base communities that supersedes both these ecclesiologies.

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The Good of Marriage and the Morality of Sexual Relations: Some Philosophical and Historical Observations (Finnis, 1997)

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Aquinas organized his account of the morality of sexual relations around the good of marriage. The good of marriage is one of the basic human goods to which human choice and action are directed by the first principles of practical reason. Sex acts are immoral when they are “against the good of marriage” and therefore unreasonable (and, inasumuch unreasonable, unnatural).

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Evangelism and Discipleship: The God Who Calls, the God Who Sends (Brueggemann, 2004)

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I begin with four affirmations that I will exposit in some detail: (1) The God of the gospel is a God who calls persons and communities to God’s own self, to engage in praise and obedience. (2) The God of the gospel is a God who sends persons and communities to claim many zones of the world for God’s governance of “justice, mercy, and faith” (Matt 23:23). (3) The God of the gospel lives among and in contestation with many other gods who also call and send, but whose praise and obedience are false, precisely because there is no commitment to “justice, mercy, and faith.”. (4) Consequently, the persons and communities called by this God for praise and obedience and sent by this God for justice, mercy, and faith also live among and in contestation with other gods, other loyalties, other authorities. Inescapably, the ones called and sent are always yet again deciding for this one who calls and sends. This endless process of deciding again is accomplished in freedom from all other calling gods and all other sending loyalties. That endless deciding, moreover, requires great passion, imagination, and intentionality.