Tag: <span>01 document</span>

Tag: 01 document

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Being Disabled in the New World of Genetic Testing: A Snapshot of Shifting Landscapes (Brian Brock)

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This paper speaks biographically in order to introduce a real time snapshot of the forces genetic technologies bring to bear on the disabled and their families. We do so as an academic theologian and a neo-natal nurse experiencing the joys and frustrations of first-time parenthood. Our son, Adam, now two years old, has Down’s syndrome, and it is the events of his first six months on which our account draws. This paper will outline the
pressures we experienced as parents of a ‘genetically handicapped’ child, and then, in conclusion, offer a few theological reflections.

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Supererogation and the Riskiness of Human Vulnerability (Brian Brock, 2007)

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What does it mean to investigate human fragility? And what counts as knowledge or results from such investigations? Theology and the empirical sciences will give different but related answers to these questions, answers which will, we hope, mutually illumine one another.

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What Role Ought the Bible to Play in Christian Ethics? ‘Developing a Hermeneutic’ vs. ‘Immersion in Tradition’ (Brian Brock, 2007)

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The contemporary rediscovery of ancient sources of biblical exegesis makes an important contribution to the renewal of Christian ethics. This rediscovery is motivated by a dissatisfaction with modern critical commentaries on Scripture and by a desire to re-engage with the biblical text itself, allowing it to speak to our contemporary ethical challenges in fresh and surprising ways. The article sets out the key objectives and contributions of this new approach to biblical ethics. The heart of the challenge it brings is to encourage us to move beyond a preoccupation with questions of hermeneutical methodology and towards a properly theological appreciation of the role of ʹtraditionʹ in our ethical reading of Scripture.

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Rethinking the Role of Scripture in Christian Ethics: A Précis of Singing the Ethos of God (Brian Brock, 2008)

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Singing the Ethos of God is a meditation on an interconnected set of problems modern western Christians encounter when trying to bring Scripture to bear on the moral questions of the day. My sense that such a book needed to be written crystallized in an Oxford seminar on the use of the Bible in Christian ethics. In that seminar several world-class biblical scholars and moral theologians gathered with a room full of the English-speaking world’s future pastors and academic theologians, attempting to discern the ethical implications of a few classic biblical passages.

The results were disastrous. Occasional flashes of insight emerged, but the participants were left with the overwhelming impression that so much complicated critical machinery has been interposed between us and Scripture that we (i.e., primarily academically trained theologians) no longer have the skills to handle it directly.

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Made Strange by the Word in a Technological Age (Brian Brock, 2003)

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FOR MOST OF US THERE IS SOMETHING GENUINELY EXCITING ABOUT NEW TECHNOLOGY. What child is not viscerally attracted to the gleaming rows of cars at a new car show, or amazed at the world to come promised in science fiction? Even our adult imagination boggles at what is being made possible today by technology, a fact marked by the stories of new hi-tech feats that now regularly appear on the front pages of our newspapers.

Almost all of us are used to having our attention grabbed by new technologies. We are part of a social milieu in which a host of social and cultural forces have succeeded in linking these developments with excitement, a sense of exploring the unknown, a touch of entrancing menace, and aesthetic progress.

But, in this general excitement, have we directed attention away from the miracle at the heart of the universe? In asking about the relationship between the Bible, technology and human identity, the Bible presses us to ask this question. It does so by indicating that human identity can be understood as being formed by that which excites it, because where our interest is engaged, “there will your heart be also” (Mt 6.21).

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“Judge not” and “Judge for yourselves” (O’Donovan, 2013)

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[gview file="http://symposiumonjudgment.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/judge-not-and-judge-for-yourselves.pdf" save="1"]

The presenting question about the category of judgment is its ambivalence: why is it an activity that we are sometimes warned against, sometimes encouraged to undertake? To begin with, we must make some
cursory observations on the scope of the term.

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The Language of Rights and Conceptual History (O’Donovan, 2009)

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In the Journal of Religious Ethics in 2009 O’Donovan offered a critical reading of Nicholas Wolterstorff on rights

Abstract

The historical problem about the origins of the language of rights derives its importance from the conceptual problem: of “two fundamentally different ways of thinking about justice,” which is basic? Is justice unitary or plural? This in turn opens up a problem about the moral status of human nature. A narrative of the origins of “rights” is an account of how and when a plural concept of justice comes to the fore, and will be based on the occurrence of definite speech-forms—the occurrence of the plural noun in the sense of “legal properties.” The history of this development is currently held to begin with the twelfth-century canonists. Later significant thresholds may be found in the fourteenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth centuries. Wolterstorff’s attempt to find the implicit recognition of rights in the Scriptures depends very heavily on what he takes to be implied rather than on what is stated, and at best can establish a pre-history of rights-language.
[embeddoc url="http://enlight.lib.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-AN/an178770.pdf" download="all" viewer="google"]

Wolterstorff’s reponse to him and others appeared in the same issue

[embeddoc url="http://enlight.lib.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-AN/an178777.pdf" download="all" viewer="google"]
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There Are No Just Wars: David Rodin and Oliver O’Donovan’s Divergent Critiques of a Tradition by David A. Hoekema (2008)

 

Abstract
Two recent monographs re-examine the central elements of the just war tradition and its contemporary applications. David Rodin’s War and Self-Defense analyzes, and rejects, the common doctrine that just war is an instance of national self-defense, in parallel with the right of individuals to protect themselves against violent attack. This derivation fails, and it cannot justify resort to war. In contrast, Oliver O’Donovan’s The Just War Revisited dismisses the notion that there are rules for just war and calls instead for careful and deliberate practical reasoning in particular contexts. Indeed, there can be no just wars, only specific acts that pass the
tests of theological, historical, and practical scrutiny.