Yesterday, I posted the following survey on Twitter: Is a person *morally* obliged to make their body available for organ donation unless they have some overriding moral reason not to (e.g. death by highly infectious disease)? — Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) January 5, 2019 In this article, I’d like to narrow the question to Christians. To […]
Christian ethics
Reckoning with the Peaceable Kingdom: A Review of Disarming the Church
Eric A. Seibert. Disarming the Church: Why Christians Must Forsake Violence to Follow Jesus and Change the World. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018.) Carl Norden was a devout Christian. So when he developed the Norden bombsight, it was with the intent of increasing the accuracy of aerial bombing to the end of decreasing the resulting collateral damage wrought […]
Pro-life Carpet-bombers: On the moral incoherence of neocon conservative Christians
What does it mean to be pro-life? Time and again, I find that Christian conservatives seem to endorse a pro-life vision that is almost completely limited to the fetus-in-utero. Consider, for example, this tweet from Michael Brown: I was just interacting with a pastor friend who referenced a mega church in his area that supported […]
Can a soldier be a Christian?
The catalyst for this brief rumination is a tweet from Bruxy Cavey: "One cannot be aware both of the history of Christian war and the contents of the Gospels without feeling that something is amiss. One may feel that in the name of honesty, Christians ought either to quit fighting or quit calling themselves Christian." […]
What would it take to make Canada the policeman of the world?
In my previous post I asked whether the Golden Rule applied at the geo-political level. That is, are nation states obliged to do unto others just like individuals are? In one sense this is an easy question to answer. Nobody — individual or nation — has the right to treat others wickedly and yet expect […]
Osama is dead! And there shall be dancing in the streets!
First, I should say that if you find recent blog posts rather thin gruel, it’s (probably) because I just weathered graduation weekend and now need to lecture for close to forty hours this week in an intensive theology course. Poor me. Poor students. So as I was prepping for my class last night I saw on CNN […]
Christians and the sin of hating homosexuals
In “Why conservatism is riskier than you might think” I pointed out that those who maintain the status quo are sticking their necks out like everybody else given that the status quo is sometimes wrong. (When you think about it this is so blindingly obvious that it is a surprise we should need to be reminded of […]
