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Barron on “diversity, equity, and inclusion”
In a recent Word on Fire video, Bishop Robert Barron comments on the currently fashionable chatter about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (or DEI, as they are commonly abbreviated). In much...
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A fallacy in Balthasar (Updated)
In his influential book Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved?”, theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar gives the following argument:If it is said of God that: “God our Savior … desires all men to be saved...
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Hell is not empty
We’ve been talking about Balthasar’s view that we may at least hope that all human beings are saved. Now, Balthasar was a Catholic theologian who was careful to try to avoid contradicting definitive...
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If you’ve been missing links
David S. Oderberg asks “Is Prime Matter Energy?” in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Also, Oderberg on the “Principle of Sufficient Reason,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion,...
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McDowell’s Aristotelian near miss
John McDowell’s paper “Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space” made a big impression on me in graduate school, around the same time his influential book Mind and World was published. Like a...
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Johnson contra Aquinas
My review of Jeffrey D. Johnson’s book The Failure of Natural Theology: A Critical Appraisal of the Philosophical Theology of Thomas Aquinas appears in the March issue of First Things. You can read it...
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The failure of Johnson’s critique of natural theology
At the Reformed Baptist Blog, Jeffrey Johnson has responded to my First Things review of his book The Failure of Natural Theology: A Critical Appraisal of the Philosophical Theology of Thomas Aquinas....
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Sex and metaphysics
My essay “The Metaphysical Foundations of Sexual Morality” appears in The Palgrave Handbook of Sexual Ethics, edited by David Boonin. You can view the anthology’s table of contents and other...
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Taylor on cognition, teleology, and God
In his book Metaphysics, a classic brief and lucid introduction to the subject, Richard Taylor devotes a chapter to the topic of God. Most of the attention philosophers have paid to it seems to focus...
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Just war theory and the Russo-Ukrainian war
One of the striking features of the catastrophe in Ukraine is how unambiguously the principles of just war doctrine seem to apply. On the one hand, Russia’s invasion cannot be justified given the...
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Chomsky’s “propaganda model” of mass media
A common mistake people make when evaluating a theory is to fail to keep in mind the distinction between the theory itself, its application to particular cases, and the auxiliary assumptions an...
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Conspiracy theories, spontaneous order, and the hermeneutics of suspicion
Nobody denies that conspiracies occur. They happen every time two or more people collude in order to secure some malign end. When people criticize “conspiracy theories,” it is a particular kind of...
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Unjust war and false masculinity
I commend to you three excellent articles by traditionalist Catholic scholars on the grave injustice of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: historian Roberto de Mattei’s “Russia's War and the Message of...
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Hart’s post-Christian pantheism
Well, kids, it’s that time again. David Bentley Hart’s new book You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature is now out. So is my review, “David Bentley Hart’s Post-Christian Pantheism,” which you can...
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Touring the fifth circle
For readers who are wondering, yes, I’m on Twitter now. (I’m not referring to the fan account that has been there for some time, but to my own personal account: @FeserEdward) I confess to feeling...
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Two Harts beaten as one
At the blog Jesus and the Ancient Paths, PhD student Seth Hart defends his namesake David Bentley Hart against the objections I raised in my Public Discourse review of the latter Hart’s new book You...
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Benevacantism is scandalous and pointless
In his book The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, David Stove observes that an argument once given by philosopher of science Imré Lakatos “manages to be scandalous and pointless at the same...
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Tales from the Coffin
In my recent post criticizing Benevacantism, I deliberately avoided naming specific individuals, in the hope of preventing the debate from degenerating into a clash of personalities. I also said: “I...
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Whose pantheism? Which dualism? A Reply to David Bentley Hart
Over at Substack, David Bentley Hart has written an open letter in reply to my recentreview, at Public Discourse, of his bookYou Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature. What follows is my own open letter...
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Fr. Gregory Pine on prudence
Modern moral philosophers typically have much to say about abstract principles, but are not of much help for the average person seeking concrete moral advice. Self-help books, meanwhile, have...
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