Practical Christianity: Religion in Jane Austen\u27s Novels

A beloved English novelist of the late eighteenth century, Jane Austen captures the attention and emotion of readers through timeless insights into the inner workings of the human heart as characters navigate society, family life, and love. Her novels’ attention to practical morality but reticence toward explicitly religious subject matter raises conjecture concerning the religion behind her values; however, Austen’s Christian upbringing, Anglican practice, and Christian values suggest a foundation of faith from which the morality in her novels emanates. In Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park, Austen demonstrates her eighteenth-century Anglican worldview in the lives of her characters as they grow in virtue and good character

Christian Librarians and the Library Bill of Rights: A Survey of Opinions and Professional Practice

This study used a survey methodology to discover how Christian librarians working in academic libraries responded to the American Library Association’s (ALA) ethical standards as embodied in the Library Bill of Rights (LBR). The results showed that while the Christian librarians surveyed largely support the LBR and adhere to it professionally, their interpretation of its sometimes ambiguous language is made through the lens of a Christian worldview and can conflict with the ALA’s interpretation. Of particular concern to the respondents were issues of collection development and access to content like pornography, violence, or other similar material that conflicts with Christian morality

Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism/ Christian idealism

The foregoing quip captures a realization that came to the young Reinhold Niebuhr in the 192os and that turned the liberal Christian pastor away from pacifism and toward a more realist ethic of politics. From then until his death in 1971, Niebuhr was to remain always a liberal Christian of realist bent. He was a liberal Christian in his concentration on the law of love as the only absolute and in his rejection of Christian fundamentalism, biblical literalism, and the consequent clash with science. He was a political realist, and rose to national prominence as such in the 1930S and 1940s, in his dismissal of pragmatic pacifism and his advocacy of American responsibility to use force in opposing the Nazi and Soviet threats to the world. He was famous particularly for his sharp attacks on those who failed to see the limits on morality in politics. Yet this realism was but one strand of Niebuhr's dualist approach to politics, the other being his Christian idealism

Ética socrática y moral cristiana

This article compares certain aspects of Socratic ethics and of Christian morality. It stresses what Christian morality adds to Socratic ethics on the basis of Revelation, and surveys certain versions of Christian ethics which its author considers to be misguiding. In particular, the author notes defects in Luther’s, Kant’s and Fenelon’s ethical views, and in certain other views which stand in clear opposition to Christian ethics, such ad that of Nietzsche and other postmodern authors

1963: Abilene Christian College Bible Lectures - Full Text

THE CHRISTIAN AND MORALITY” Being the Abilene Christian College Annual Bible Lectures 1963 Price: $3.95 Published by ABILENE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE STUDENTS EXCHANGE ACC Station Abilene, Texa

Anscombe on the mesmeric force of ‘ought’ and a spurious kind of moral realism

I discuss the second of the three theses advanced by Anscombe in ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. The focus is the nature of entities to which – if Anscombe’s diagnosis is correct – ought and cognate modals are assumed by modern moral philosophers to refer. I reconstruct the alternative account offered by Anscombe of viable and justified ‘Aristotelian’ modals – as contrasted with mysterious and unjustified ‘Kantian’ modals; I discuss the nature and status of ‘Aristotelian necessity’ to which such legitimate modals refer to. I conclude with the claims that Anscombe’s account of modern moral philosophy is viciously parochial, reducing it to Oxford philosophy from the Thirties and Forties and its immediate antecedents; that her historical reconstruction is vitiated by lack of awareness of the existence of law-views of morality preceding Christian theology, artful anticipation of secularization in order to fit her picture of modern moral philosophy as the ‘day after’ of Christianity; that Aquinas’s and her own view of natural morality as made of rational moral judgments laws is incompatible with both her predilection for ‘divine law’ instead of plain down-to-earth ‘natural law’; that her strained reconstruction of a Christian-Jewish-Stoic view of morality as law promulgated by God has little to share with any reconstruction of the Biblical moral traditions meeting academic standard and in more detail there is no possible translation of Torah as Law; and that her criticism hits just targets from the old little British world she was familiar with, while leaving Kantian ethics unaffected

10. The Political Thought of Machiavelli

The national state in Western Europe was a new institution, without precedent in the European World. Its rise and almost immediate conflict with the Church challenged political theorists to reexamine the assumptions of a universal church in a universal empire upon which the theory of the two swords was based. These assumptions were so generally accepted that they were not easily abandoned. In the fourteenth century Marsiglia of Padua, for all his disinterest in the two swords, had arrived at his conclusions without denying either the existence of a universal church or the validity of the traditional morality. Other writers who defended the concentration of authority in royal hands sometimes stressed the power accorded the prince in Roman law or appealed to the need for a firm hand in maintaining peace and order in the state. But these writers remained firmly committed to an ideal of justice in political relationship which had its origin in Greek, Roman, and Christian sources. It remained for a figure of the Italian Renaissance, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), to make the decisive break with the past, which indeed Marsiglia had foreshadowed, an divorce politics from morality. [excerpt

Can Christians Join the Overlapping Consensus? Prospects and Pitfalls for a Christian Justification of Political Liberalism

The success of political liberalism depends on there being an overlapping consensus among reasonable citizens—including religious citizens—upon principles of political morality. This paper explores the resources within one major religion—Christianity—that might lead individuals to endorse (or reject) political liberalism, and thus to join (or not join) the overlapping consensus. I show that there are several strands within Christian political ethics that are consonant with political liberalism and might form the basis for Christian citizens’ membership of the overlapping consensus. Nonetheless, tensions remain, and it is not clear that Christians could wholeheartedly endorse the political conception or give unreserved commitment to political liberal ideals