Risen

In Risen (2016), A Roman Tribune, Clavius, is tasked with overseeing Jesus’s crucifixion; more importantly, Pilote tasks his Tribune with making sure that no one steals the body out of the tomb so no one could claim that Jesus is arisen. This would put the Jesus movement within Judaism as much more of a threat to Pilote as well as the Jewish leaders. More than Christians can glean interesting lessons from the film. That is to say, it is by no means a remake of The Greatest Story Ever Told and Son of God.

The full essay is at "Risen."

The Evolution of Just War in Roman Catholic Social Ethics: The Case of Libya

According to The Catholic Herald, there were originally only three conditions laid down by Thomas Aquinas for a just war. According to The Catholic Herald, “The Church later added two more rules, though St Thomas usually gets the credit for them (and why not?). The first is that the conflict must be a last resort. The Catholic Herald describes the last criterion of Catholic just war theory as follows: “Lastly, the war must be fought proportionally. 

The full essay is at "The Evolution of Just War in Roman Catholic Social Ethics." 

On changing theological takes on greed in relation to money and business, see God's Gold, available at Amazon.

Christianity by State: The Religious Dimension of Federalism

According to the  2010 U.S. Religious Census of Religious Congregations & Memberships Study by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, less than 50 percent of the people living in the United States identified themselves as Christian adherents in 2010. There were more than 150.6 million out of 310 million. Even so, candidates for the U.S. presidency still felt the need to vocalize the fact that they are Christian (while the opponent doesn't quite measure up in that respect). President Obama made a point during his first two years in office to stress his Christianity as if it were the membership card to the Oval Office. It would seem that the litmus test was already antiquated and thus needlessly constrictive on potential candidates.

The full essay is at "Christianity by State."

God's Gold through the Centuries

In the wake of the financial crisis that came to a head in September of 2008, people might have been wondering if sufficient moral constraints on the greed on Wall Street are available, even possible. The ability of traders to create complex derivative securities that are difficult for regulators to regulate, much less understand, may have people looking for ethical or even religious constraints. It would be only natural to ask if such “soft” restraint mechanisms really do have the puissance to do the trick.

Here’s the rub: the tricksters are typically the last to avail themselves of ethical or religious systems, and they the wrongdoers are the ones in need of the restraint. Blankfein said of his bank, Goldman Sachs, that it had been doing God’s work. About a week after saying that, he had to walk his statement back and admit that the bankers had does some things that were morally wrong. Although divine omnipotence is by definition not limited by human ethical systems, it is hard to imagine a divine decree telling bankers to tell their clients one thing (buy subprime mortgage derivatives) while taking the opposite position on the bank’s proprietary position (shorting the derivatives, beyond being a counterparty to clients). Divine duplicity seems to represent an oxymoron on a megascale rather than a justification for greed.
As the crisis erupted and was subsequently managed by public officials in government and new managers brought in to salvage AIG, I was researching the history of Christian thought on profit-seeking and wealth. I have since published an academic text and a nonfiction book, which develops further on the treatise on the topic. As the book is too recondite for sane people (i.e., outside of academia), I am writing a non-fiction book on the topic for a broader readership.
To whet the appetites of those of you who are waiting for something more readable that a recondite thesis, I present a brief account of my original research on the topic here. Most significantly, I found evidence of a gradual shift in the thought between Aquinas and the fifteenth-century Christian Humanists (mainly in what is now Italy). Whereas early Christian thought had tended to stress the negative attitude toward riches—the camel being in extreme pain in getting through the eye of the needle—in the Renaissance Christian theologians tended to argue that being wealth is necessary for a Christian to exercise the godly practical virtues of liberality and magnificence (particularly the latter, which alone permits gifts reflective of God’s majesty).
Something had happened in the dominant Christian attitude on wealth that made the religion less of a buttress against greed because it had become possible for a Christian to be both rich and to go to heaven. Cosimo de Medici is a perfect example of a banker who was assured by the pope that a career based on usury would not necessarily bar a banker from entering heaven (assuming he gave financially to the Church).
The various Reformers can be read as efforts to pull Christianity back from being so close to incorporating love of gain, or greed. I looked at the (Standard Oil) monopolist and devout Baptist, John D. Rockefeller, to get a sense of how efficacious the Reformation was in attempting to arrest and reverse the momentum of the pro-wealth Christian paradigm.
Having sketched the shift and subsequent reactions of the Reformers, I turned my attention to trying to explain both the shift itself and the efficacy of the Reformation. I believe the increasingly commercialized environment since the Commercial Revolution does not provide enough of an explanation; I contend that one must look at the religion itself to find the roots of the shift and the results of the Reformation as concerns the religion's theological attitudes toward wealth. In other words, Christianity itself must be examined. As you read through the book, you could do worse than ask yourself: is there something deeper in Christianity at work in the historical shift in thought on wealth and profit-seeking?  You will find my theory in the conclusion. Undoubtedly, you will develop your own as you reflect as you read.
The main question I pose through the treatise is whether religion itself, as a phenomenon touching the human domain of existence, can hold us back from ourselves even when we least want it to do so. If so, then a religion operating in the human domain can operate as a wholly-other mechanism by which sins such as greed can be reduced in force or perhaps even finally extirpated. To expunge the sordid stuff from our banks and corporations, human nature itself would have to be radically changed. Perhaps the question is whether it is possible even if not probable for religion operating through human beings to accomplish this task, given that religion cannot but interact with the world.

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See related essay: "Religious Sources of Business Ethics"

The non-fiction book: God's Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth. Available at Amazon. 

Transcending Limited Notions of the Divine

When religion meets human nature, does the gravitational pull of me, me, me tend to encompass the journey downward in an all too comfortable direction? In his Natural History of Religion, David Hume proposes his theory that any religion begins with a focus on something akin to divine simplicity, but then becomes increasingly robed with anthropomorphic artifacts until the sheer weight of which brings down the tree whose inherently upward-looking striving succumbs to the increasing weight of the human.

In other words, is religion too weak to withstand the human, all too human ornaments that we conveniently adorn of our religions? The ornaments ultimate reflect ourselves, and thus are so convenient. So too is surrounding ourselves with others of like beliefs a matter of convenience. That is, religion can unwittingly become all about the self. Such religions or sects thereof can get sucked into a regular orbit of convenience without any of the congregants noticing the gradual and subtle slide.

As an antidote, transcendence, the unique and core aspect of religion and spirituality, can be utilized to get us outside of ourselves, including our concepts. The concept of God inhabiting a tree or stone relatively easy to transcend as a person looks past the image, both physical and cognitive, toward what is beyond, or through the favored image. Similarly even religious concepts that are themselves invisible, such as justice and mercy, can be transcended as a person moves on to even more basic divine concepts—even that of the One. Because the human mind is finite, even concepts revealed by a divine source are limited as they enter our cognitive atmosphere. Augustine likened this to light coming through a dark window. Accordingly, he warned that the relationship between the Father and Son should not be anthropomorphized into a human father-son relationship. St. Denis of the sixth century claimed that even Son itself as a limited human concept affixed to a divine person (of the Trinity) should be transcended in moving closer to the mystery that shrouds the divine in Christianity.

Simply stated, God lies beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility, and thus beyond our concepts—even those associated with divine revelation. Denis refers to the transcendence of God as the brilliant light that is in the darkness of unknowing. Hence faith is not knowledge. The latter is human, all too human, and thus must be transcended in order to transcend beyond our limited domain. Only when even the lofty religious concepts are transcended—not denied or pushed aside, but, rather, gone through them—can God be yearned for distinctly—meaning distinctly from religion being about the self, and thus a faith that is too convenient. The unknowability or ineffability of the divine is not hostile to religion, but is rather its salvation as distinguished from egoism and even selfishness.

The yearning itself, combined with transcending the religious concepts—especially those that are so very comfortable—is the best way religiously to leave the self behind. From a focus beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility, the spiritualized person returns to herself and our domain newly sensitized. When such a person looks at others, the sensitivity manifests automatically as compassion. This is more reliable, I submit, than relying on human intentionality, as in a decision to treat someone with compassion because of a religious teaching. Given the gravity of the human self, even in the religious sphere, compassion that springs automatically from the sensitivity to our world, including other people, is more reliable. Hence, paradoxically letting go cognitively of our cherished religious concepts of divine attributes can lead to transcendent religious experience—the sui generis essence of religion and spirituality—and more faithful feeling and action regarding religious ethical teachings.