This essay addresses moral hazards associated with the emerging doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). It reviews the broad acceptance by the Vatican and the World Council of Churches of the doctrine between September 2003 and September 2008, and attempts to identify grounds for more adequate investigation of the moral issues arising. Three themes are pursued: how a changing political context is affecting notions of sovereignty; the authority that can approve or refuse the use of force; and plural foundations for human rights in a religiously and otherwise plural world such that the human rights protection does not become tyrannical.
This article advocates a pedagogy of Religious Education (RE) based upon a narratival framework informed by both narrative theology and narrative philosophy. Drawing on the work of narrative theologians including Stanley Hauerwas, the article outlines the nature of the framework, describes the four phases of learning that comprise the pedagogy, and explains how such an approach can overcome existing difficulties in how biblical texts are handled within RE. Working from the narrative assumption that individuals and communities are formed by reading, sharing and living within stories, it suggests that the pedagogy might encourage pupils to think about how the lives of Christians are shaped by their interpretations of biblical narratives, to offer their own interpretations of biblical and other texts, and to consider the stories -religious, non-religious or both -which shape their own lives. In so doing, the article moves away from a 'proof-texting' approach to the Bible towards one in which pupils are enabled to think about the significance of biblical narratives for both Christians and themselves.
Religion is commonly deemed to have returned to public life in ways that call attention to legal frameworks and judgments. Relatively little attention has been paid to law and religion internationally, however. This essay offers initial observations about requirements for success in the dialogue between law and religion, and the need for members of the Abrahamic faiths especially to reason together and with international lawyers, whether believers or not, about legal order in the international arena. Particular reference is made to what it might mean in Protestant Thomist perspective to affirm the 'rule of law' and how the inclusion of religious voices in contested debates about the meaning of the 'rule of law' may assist deliberation in diverse international contexts in the context of targeted killings, including in the territories of other states by armed combat aerial vehicles or 'drones'.
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