What does philosophy have to say about the argument that blasphemous art ought not to be publicly displayed? We examine four concepts of blasphemy: blasphemy as offence, attack on religion, attack on the sacred, attack on the blasphemer himself. We argue all four are needed to grasp this complex concept. We also argue for blasphemy as primarily a moral, not a religious concept. We then criticise four arguments for the public display of blasphemous art: it may be beautiful, provocative, devoutly (...) intended, and is autonomous of religious concerns. Finally, we discuss the notions of blasphemy and blasphemous art as public offences. We conclude that the display of blasphemous art is a public, and not merely a private moral offence, and that there are respectable philosophical arguments for this conclusion. (shrink)

Classical theism has long affirmed impassibility to be both a philosophically sound and scripturally warranted attribute of God. An affirmation of this attribute of divine apatheia is found in the works of theologians and philosophers of classical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. However, over the last century, there has been a significant shift away from this tradition of divine impassibility. Divine impassibility has been challenged from many quarters, especially from Protestant Christianity, as a doctrine foreign to the scriptures of Abrahamic monotheism (...) and philosophically incompatible with a scriptural conception of God as personal, reactive, and relational. Many of the critics of divine impassibility suggest that there is a dilemma for these monotheists: that God may be impassible and yet unable to engage in personal, pathic, or relational ways with creation as the scriptures of the Judaism, Christianity, and Islam suggest, or that God may indeed express some pathos and reactivity but may no longer be understood to be impassible. In this work, I argue that this dilemma is a false one and that a third way, or via media, is possible. In support of the proposal I offer, I provide a critical analysis of impassibilist and passibilist arguments on historical, philosophical, and theological grounds. I demonstrate that strong affirmations of either position are indeed untenable, and in their places I propose a model of divine interaction based on an energetic kenoticism. In the via media offered below, I argue that we may yet retain a robust notion of divine impassibility in the essence or ousia of God, while allowing for a fuller account of divine pathos, reactivity, and interaction with creation via the kenotic and self-limiting divine energies. In this way, we may retain many of the classical commitments regarding the nature of God and yet provide more room to speak to these scriptural accounts of God’s interaction in the cosmos. (shrink)

This paper examines the coherence of naturalistic personal pantheism in an attempt to reconcile pantheism, naturalism, and a personal concept of God. NPP proposes that i) God is identical with the universe, ii) the universe is entirely natural, and iii) God is personal. Several critics of accounts of a God such as this have voiced concerns about a natural — as opposed to a supernatural — God, since a natural God cannot be worship-worthy. In response, I propose a controversial premise (...) — physical primacy — to justify the worship-worthiness of a natural God. Physical primacy maintains that physical existence is a great-making property, therefore a God that exists naturally is greater than a God that exists supernaturally. I maintain that NPP is an attractive alternative to other theisms because it bypasses the pairing problem, presents a worship-worthy concept of God, and boasts ontological simplicity. (shrink)

According to classical theism, impassibility is said to be systematically connected to divine attributes like timelessness, immutability, simplicity, aseity, and self-sufficiency. In some interesting way, these attributes are meant to explain why the impassible God cannot suffer. I shall argue that these attributes do not explain why the impassible God cannot suffer. In order to understand why the impassible God cannot suffer, one must examine the emotional life of the impassible God. I shall argue that the necessarily happy emotional life (...) of the classical God explains why the impassible God cannot suffer. (shrink)

Many Christian theorists notice that love should contain, in additional to benevolence, some kind of interpersonal or unitive component. The difficulty comes in trying to provide an account of this unitive component that is sufficiently interpersonal in other-love and yet is also compatible with self-love. Eleonore Stump is one of the few Christian theorists who directly addresses this issue. Building upon the work of Thomas Aquinas, Stump argues that love is constituted by two desires: the desire for an individual’s good (...) and the desire to be united to that individual. Stump further develops the desire for union within this Thomistic understanding of love, and she maintains that her developed account not only captures the robustly interpersonal nature of one’s love of another but is also compatible with the love of oneself. Unfortunately, Stump’s way of making sense of this latter claim introduces a significant inconsistency in her analyses of the desire for union in self-love and other-love. Nevertheless, the most important features of Stump’s Neo-Thomistic account are salvageable. For there is a way of understanding love’s desire for union that emerges out of Thomas’s views on love and is compatible with the desiderata suggested by Stump, only does not have the same difficulties that beset Stump’s account. What is offered, then, is a modification of Stump’s account that might better serve her purposes. The resulting view of love, however, is one not only relevant to Stump. Rather, the view that emerges is a broadly Thomistic conception of love that is plausible in its own right and captures a certain biblical emphasis on the relational or interpersonal nature of love. (shrink)