ethics | morality | law ⁽⁷⁰⁾

Anyone who knows me knows my conviction that contemporary Americans feel too much and think too little. Lack of “impulse control” isn't just for the “poorly socialized” anymore; it's a culture-wide phenomenon. Emotionally charged, cognitively vacuous rants and shout-downs have replaced calm, controlled, rational discussion in many (most?) venues. This trend especially prevails where topics that have always been emotionally charged are concerned. One such topic is rape. As a couple news…

Although this modified image is not in the public domain because modified, visitors in search of public domain, and other free-to-use, Hayek images may find Flickr user Levan Ramishvil's Friedrich Hayek album, which I discovered in 2024, worth visiting. – D.M.H. “‘Social’ or Distributive Justice.” Chapter 9 in Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice. Chicago:…

In a couple book reviews, I took issue with one author's anti-individualist rhetoric and expressed gratitude (though not perfect satisfaction) for another's effort to distinguish between different uses of the word “individualism.” I've just discovered that the use of “individualism” to refer to quite different things, so that true individualists may end up condemning and arguing against what they and others wrongly label “individualism,” is not a new phenomenon at all. In…

Frazee, Randy. The Connecting Church 2.0: Beyond Small Groups to Authentic Community. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013. 978-0-310-49435-5. Cover price $16.99. Something is wrong with the contemporary church in America. But what? Where did the church go wrong and how can it be put back on the right course? Books exploring these questions have become their own genre. The Connecting Church 2.0 is one recent addition to the genre. A new edition of…

Concerning the Manhattan Declaration (available on the Manhattan Project site, accessed 04 February 2013)….I have just signed this declaration). However, I thought I should note that my signing is not a blanket endorsement of all the wording found in it (though I do endorse most of the wording). Specifically, I am not entirely comfortable with all the wording in the preamble. For instance, that preamble states that Now, none of the actual…

I just posted a comment on a Salon.com article by Mary Elizabeth “Kill ’Em All, Let God Sort ’Em Out” Williams. My comment should appear here, but my own testing of the link has not yielded positive results. If your results are equally bad, feel free to simply read my comment below. “Yet,” Williams writes, “a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose…

J. I. Packer. Puritan Portraits: J. I. Packer on Selected Classic Pastors and Pastoral Classics . Ross-shire, Scotland, U.K.: Christian Focus Publications, 2012. Kindle (Mobi) Format. ISBN 978-1-78191-076-4. (Location numbers in the review are sometimes approximate.) For some years, an introduction by J. I. Packer has served among Protestant evangelicals a function roughly equivalent that of the nihil obstat among Roman Catholics. For a Protestant evangelical like myself to give a Packer…

I continue to sign online petitions. While not so deluded as to believe signing these will have any influence on policy (all my representatives have strong ideological commitments, either in agreement with or opposed to my own, so that no change in their actions or rhetoric can realistically be expected), signing them does make me “feel better” for a time, and I hope gives some encouragement to those who have gone to…

Alas, I remain incapable of achieving extremest-of-the-extreme status. Compared to blogger Justin Edwards (a man likely more pious than myself), even my cherished pro-life convictions seem moderate. Edwards proposes a ban on abortion without even a self-defense (preserve the life of the mother) exception. In response to this proposal, I posted the comments below. (I've changed the URL in this version, since the original uses a customized domain that may no longer…

Like his typical remarks on foreign policy (remember those Republican primary debates?), Ron Paul's response to Wayne LaPierre shows what happens when praiseworthy ideals are wedded to a weak grasp of reality. Though common grace (God's pervasive positive influence on even those who will never become Christians) does seem (in combination with, or possibly expressed through, "traditional values" social conditioning) to guarantee that most people in most places most of the time…

Featured image inspired by Wikimedia Commons user Shubjt’s animated GIF, “Not equal to symbol in math and computer,” which see. U-T San Diego letter writers have continued trying, within the U-T word allowance for letters (125 words per the letter editor's email to me a while back, though the paper's posted guidelines only warn vaguely against being too “lengthy”), to debate whether “marriage” should be redefined to include homosexual unions. Leonard Foster's…

This was created as an op-ed for the U-T San Diego, my local paper, and posted here as a draft on the same day I emailed it to the U-T (that is, 08 December 2012, the day of the U-T article that prompted my remarks). It would not be made visible here until I either got some sort of response from the U-T or decided that a positive response was unlikely. One…