Oliver O’Donovan: In Praise of Relativism?

The New Testament can and should exercise authority over our moral thought at both general and specific levels. Yet there remains a work of moral judgment that is properly relative to agents and situations, and this is what shapes the priorities that prevail in given periods. That is why it is more difficult for us [...]

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Richard Dawkins is so 1827

One could easily arrive at the view that a widespread, nearly universal indifference toward the doctrines of faith formerly regarded as essential has entered into the general religiousness of the public.
– G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1827)
What bugs me most about the New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Whats-His-Face etc.) is [...]

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On the Modernity/Post-Modernity Distinction

About two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe.
– Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), p.3
Modernity is often characterized as arrogant atheists asserting the autonomous and apodictic authority of reason. Post-Modernity is often characterized as lily-livered liberals playing loosey-goosey with [...]

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Does Christianity Have Faults?

Particularly when it comes to Christianity, the past is often seen by outsiders as merely a collection of tableaux that sit fixed in one’s mind as stark moral lessons: Christians mounted bloody Crusades against noble Muslims; Christians burned hapless women as witches; Christians foolishly resisted scientists such as Galileo and Darwin; Christians oppressed women and [...]

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