Monday, July 10, 2023

Virtue, Happiness, and Purpose

Virtue, Happiness, and Purpose

Religion is not primarily morality. Morality is not primarily rules. These are two of the conclusions to draw from a new book about virtue by Fr. Basil Cole, published by the Catholic press TAN Books. Fr. Cole's book is essentially a simple and transparent exposition of Christian ethics. I'd wager, though, that many even among believers don't realize to what extent Christian ethics represents a very particular approach to the question of right action, one that differs from ways of thinking dominant in the modern world. Philosophers term the classic Christian approach "virtue ethics" and often contrast it with two other possible viewpoints, known respectively as consequentialism and deontology. Put simply, consequentialism says that what counts is the results of my action, while deontology (from the Greek deon, binding or obligation) says that what counts is following the right moral rules.


Sunday, April 16, 2023

Biblical Manuscripts

Great Isaiah Scroll, 202-107 B.C., facsimile :

The Great Isaiah Scroll is one of the original Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947 and is the most complete of the DeadSea Scrolls found in the Qumran Caves.  The scroll was written on seventeen sheets of parchment, connected into a scroll.  Differences between this scroll and the later Masoretic text are mostly grammatical and spelling differences.

Both this scroll and the Codex Leningradensis are open to Isaiah 40:8: "The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our

God will stand forever." (ESV) Although the manuscripts were written over 1000 years apart, the Word of God had never changed.

Codex Leningradensis is the oldest Hebrew manuscript of the entire Old Testament. This codex was found in Egypt and is

now at The National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg (formerly known as Leningrad).

The early Hebrew manuscripts did not have vowel pointings, chapters, or verses.   A group of scribes called the Masoretes, who

worked in Tiberias and Jerusalem in Israel between the 5th and 10th centuries, added vocalizations (vowels), accents, and a textual apparatus to the Hebrew text. The version was finalized by Hebrew scribe Aaron ben Asher in the early 10th ce.

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How Medievalists Are Restoring the Ancient Religious Text

A 1,750-year-old translation of Matthew's Gospel has yielded a new Bible chapter thanks to medievalist Grigory Kessel's work. According to IFLScience, the mysterious chapter was discovered using ultraviolet photography on manuscripts housed in the Vatican Library.

The remarkable discovery was made as part of the Sinai Palimpsests Project, a research initiative dedicated to recovering erased and overwritten texts from the 4th to 12th centuries CE.

Due to the scarcity of writing materials at the time, manuscripts were frequently repurposed, resulting in palimpsest manuscripts in which previous text was washed or scraped off before new content was added. 



Wednesday, March 15, 2023

What can Virtue Ethics Teach Us About Modern Ethical Problems?



The complexity of modern life makes ethics even more difficult. From new technologies like genome editing and artificial intelligence, to political turmoil and cultural conflict, knowing how to do the right thing is incredibly hard. Could it be that an ancient – indeed, arguably the very first – approach to ethics offers us a solution? This article will explore virtue ethics, its history, several of its key thinkers and its applicability to modern moral problems. Whether or not one becomes a virtue ethicist and believes in this way of doing ethics as a whole, virtue ethics offers a reconsideration of the implications of our character and the importance of developing it in the context of ethical theory.

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Thursday, December 15, 2022

Praying for Scientists and the Science of Prayer



The methods of science are not well-equipped to study prayer, but that doesn't mean that scientists don't pray or that prayer doesn't work. Ciara Reyes-Ton offers a short reflection on the challenges of studying prayer scientifically, followed by Dr. David Anderson's invitation to pray for scientists, healthcare workers, and researchers.

Prayer is a vital part of a Christian's life. It's one of the ways we communicate with God. Sometimes it might be saying a simple prayer of thanks before a meal, or praying with a friend. Other times it can be a more guttural and cathartic experience one on one with God, where we release our deepest pains and heaviest burdens. There's something about prayer that gives me peace when I'm anxious, and comfort when I'm troubled. Even when everything seems the same after I finish praying, I often feel relief after verbalizing my thoughts to a God who already knows them.

I admit that prayer is not always easy. It can take courage to buckle down and pray, especially when we feel disconnected from God, or feel like God isn't listening to us, because things aren't changing fast enough, or unfolding exactly the way we think they should. I think the words of Andrew Peterson's song, The Silence of God, captures these feelings best.

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Saturday, June 04, 2022

The paradox of choice

Barry Schwartz the economic Psychologist found that having the freedom to choose between a variety of choices in the modern world was actually causing people to be less happy with their decisions. 

Consequently, instead of increasing decision satisfaction, having too many options made people less likely

to be satisfied that they had made the best decision. In the face of too many options,

you may be paralyzed making you feel worse.

He used the words " MAXIMIZER" and "SATISFICER" to explain these.


https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choice?language=en


Tuesday, March 29, 2022

The absurdity and necessity of rules during war

 


During the invasion of Ukraine, we have heard frequently terms like ‘war crime’ and ‘just war’. In a fight to the death, when your aim is the taking of the life of another human being, the idea of there even being such a thing as a ‘crime’ or ‘justice’ in that context is seemingly absurd. Furthermore, institutions like NATO are endlessly discussing the ‘rules of conflict’, while in the UN Security Council Russia absurdly has a veto ruling out action against its own aggression. Seeming absurdity on top of seeming absurdity. But the rules of war are necessary. Defining terms like ‘war crime’ and ‘just war’ do have a clear and important role to play, even in the face of the chaos, the heartache and the bloody killing of war.

Ukraine’s heroic struggle against Russia’s wanton aggression has elicited a lot of talk about the possibility of a ‘morally just’ war. At first, the very idea of such a war might seem absurd. After all, wars are horrific. They represent humanity at its worst, in which all our ingenuity, our energies, our capacities, are aimed at killing one another. “War is cruelty,” William Tecumseh Sherman famously said, “and you cannot refine it”. Any attempt to unearth moral principles for war seems not just foredoomed to failure but also morally perverse. On this view, there can no more be rules for war than there can be rules for murder or rape. Worse still, it might seem that ethicists and legal theorists, in discussing the very possibility of a just or legal war, or wars fought justly, serve only to lend a veneer of legitimacy to the politicians and plutocrats who, in their vaulting ambition, drive the machine of war at the expense of countless innocents ground up underneath. 

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Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Why Do We Argue?

 


From Eve’s exchange with the serpent, to Martin Luther King Jr.’s soaring ultimatums, and the throes of Twitter, the desire to prevail with words has been not just a moral, but an existential compulsion. In Why Argument Matters, Professor Lee Siegel, who teaches in the writing program at the School of the Arts, says that the art of argument is the supreme expression of humanity’s longing for a better life, full of empathy and care for the world and those who inhabit it. 

Siegel plumbs the emotional and psychological sources of clashing words, weaving through his exploration the story of the role argument has played in societies throughout history. Each life, he believes, is an argument for that particular way of living. Argument is at the core of human existence, and language, at its most expressive, bends toward argument.

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