Evolution, Religion and Natural Law

I'm one of four respondents on a panel at Concordia on Nov. 5. We are taking up the great themes and claims in Craig Boyd's book A Shared Morality (Brazos, 2007). I'm responsible for summing up the last two chapters and offering some comments... which I will keep for the day of.

But, I am impressed with the book. Although I'm not an ethicist or a moral theologian, I am interested in the implications of contemporary interpretations of natural law theory for theological anthropology.

Craig makes the nice move of advocating a necessary mutual interdependence between natural law theory (The Thomist version minus the fuzzy Aristotelian static anthropology) and virtue theory. It's a great argument. I'm going to try to get some points in on how this affects our notion of sin. And maybe I'll try to work in Lonergan, whose own interpretation of ethics involves something of a combined natural law / virtue ethics approach. We'll see. Here's the event poster.

Science and Christianity

It's a long and convoluted historical relationship. And always controversial, especially when it's dealt with stridently. Here is an interesting response to one version of the strident argument that Christianity killed science. Warning: it's lengthy.