Iris Murdoch's Secular Theology of Culture

Medieval Consideration and Moral Pace

“…Omitting interpretations of time from debates about virtue, religious tradition, and liberal democracy has meant the loss of conversation partners for whom such interpretations are central to understanding the very terms of the debate. Among such people (whom we might call the “new religious humanists”), we find those influenced by the “critical hermeneutics” of Paul Ricoeur (Browning , Klemm and Schweiker , Schweiker and ), the “reflexive realism” of Iris Murdoch (Antonaccio , ), and the political realism of Reinhold Niebuhr (Lovin ). The importance of “reflexive realism” as a viable perspective in moral philosophy, especially in recent political ethics and international relations, has already been reviewed in Steele and Hom and Steele .…”

On the Future of Religious Ethics: Keeping Religious Ethics Religious and Ethical

“…2 Is it at all possible to "compare" forms of religious ethics or is any attempt at comparison going to be the imposition of one set of ideas on another community (Fasching and deChant 2000;Twiss 2005)? Second, there are disputes in moral theory: particularists versus universalists; constructivists versus realists; and virtue ethics versus deontology of various stripes (Antonaccio 2005;Gamwell 1990;Lovin 2005). Finally, there are endless debates about how graduate education should be organized, what texts ought to be read, what histories to chart, and hence what counts as the "classics" that a scholar should know in order to carry on careful and rigorous work in the field (Dyck 2005;Hauerwas 2003).…”

“…Thinkers are reclaiming a humanistic outlook in various ways (seeAntonaccio 2004;Gaita 2000;Glover 1999;Klemm 2004;Levinas 2003;Mendes-Flohr 2002;Nussbaum 2000;Said 2004; Schweiker 2003 Schweiker , 2004bSen 2000;Todorov 2002;Whitehouse 2004;Wright 2004). I prefer to call the outlook "theological humanism" but cannot explicate the reason for doing so in the present essay (See Schweiker 2004a).…”