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Whose injustice? Which rights?
As I noted in a previous post, much of Wolterstorff’s work on justice has been in part motivated by his location as a Christian philosopher and a professing member of the church. And while I described...
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Do good philosophers make good citizens?
Most of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Justice: Rights and Wrongs is devoted to building a strong case for a theistic and, more particularly, a Judeo-Christian grounding for human rights. A smaller part of...
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Whig Calvinism?
Tracey Rowland, following the lead of David L. Schindler, has described a recent trend in Catholic social thought as “Whig Thomism”—or what Schindler sometimes called “the John Courtney Murray...
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The fine texture: A response to Smith
I will respond here to the three postings on The Immanent Frame by James K. A. Smith concerning my Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Two preliminary points. I hold that rights and wrongs are manifested in...
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Secular accounts: A response to Chambers
In my response to Jonathon Kahn I dealt with some of the points that Simone Chambers makes in her recent post. But let me re-emphasize one thing, and then respond to some new points. I want to...
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“Bob and weave”: A response to Wolterstorff
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s calm, careful, humble response to my posts might make me look like an overly pugilistic polemicist. But I think he’s just from a different school of pugilism. (As a Canadian...
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Must secular rights fail?
It does certainly seem, as Simone Chambers points out in “Do good philosophers make good citizens?“, that Dr. Wolterstorff ultimately asserts, rather than adequately demonstrates, that only theistic...
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Look elsewhere for agonistic social ontology: A response to Smith
As Jack Marsh noted in his response to James K.A. Smith, there’s deep irony in Smith’s response to me. He attributes to me a “Hobbesian construal of intersubjectivity which sees human relationships...
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We are all Christians now
It takes some time, I think, to figure out what Wolterstorff is after. At first glance, Justice is an internecine wrangle between theists (or better put, Christians). On the one side is Alasdair...
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Wolterstorff’s Bible-as-”frame”
In a way we must call extraordinary, all the interlocking fields that have so far constituted the discussion of the Immanent Frame will find a provocative interlocutor in Nicholas Wolterstorff’s...
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Justice and theism
The central claim of Nicholas Wolsterstorff’s Justice: Rights and Wrongs is that justice is based on natural human rights that inhere in the worth of human beings, a worth that is bestowed on each and...
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Rehabilitating religious rights talk
In December, we celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, it has served as a charter for the...
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Nicholas Wolterstorff’s fear of the secular
The truly dynamic discussion in America today about religion and politics is not between “wall of separation” secularists and Christian political theologians attempting to turn American into a...
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Justice and rights-talk in liberal democracies
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Justice: Rights and Wrongs is a profoundly ambitious book. His normative aspiration is nothing less than “speaking up for the wronged of the world” by reorienting contemporary...
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Not a foundation but a raft
In Justice: Rights and Wrongs, Nicholas Wolterstorff makes a compelling case that the idea of human rights, commonly attributed to enlightenment secularism and subsequently claimed by the tradition of...
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A Christian rehabilitation of rights discourse
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Justice: Rights and Wrongs is a unique—and uniquely readable—book. It skillfully constructs a case for the continuing force of political discussions of rights, properly...
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The paucity of secularism?
Philosophy, for Nicholas Wolterstorff, is not a parlor game. Over the course of a career, he has exhibited a passionate concern about justice driven by a thick self-understanding of his work as a...
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First things
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Justice: Rights and Wrongs is meant as a defense of the language of human rights against charges, on the right, that individual rights are the engine and expression of social...
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