Mark 10:46-52 records a standard healing miracle. There is a person in need who comes to Jesus. Jesus acts and the person is healed. We may be jaded enough not to believe in the story, or else so familiar with it that we don’t notice what is going on. It is, however, a story that has much to tell us about what it is that theological education should be helping the churches to do.
C. S. Lewis was one of the two internationally famous theologians which Ireland has produced in its long embrace of the Christian tradition. The other was John Scotus Erigena. I find Lewis an intriguing figure as I seek to come to terms with what it means to engage in evangelism in our contemporary Western culture. Even a cursory reading of Lewis reveals a network of proposals which deserve the closest attention. In fact, it is a great pity that those interested in the conversion or evangelization of the West have paid next to no attention to Lewis and what he has to say to us. I can think of at least two reasons why this is the case.
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"]
