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531The Doctrine of the Atonement: Response to Michael Rea, Trent Dougherty, and Brandon WarmkeEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (1): 165-186. 2019.--
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31Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics and its Metaphysical FoundationIn Matthias Lutz-Bachmann & Jan Szaif (eds.), Was Ist Das Für den Menschen Gute? / What is Good for a Human Being?: Menschliche Natur Und Güterlehre / Human Nature and Values, Walter De Gruyter. 2004.
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6Hidden Divinity and Religious Belief (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2015.This collection of new essays is a groundbreaking examination of divine hiddenness from the perspectives of different faiths.
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18Faith and GoodnessRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 25 167-191. 1989.Recent work on the subject of faith has tended to focus on the epistemology of religious belief, considering such issues as whether beliefs held in faith are rational and how they may be justified. Richard Swinburne, for example, has developed an intricate explanation of the relationship between the propositions of faith and the evidence for them. Alvin Plantinga, on the other hand, has maintained that belief in God may be properly basic, that is, that a belief that God exists can be part of the…Read more
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61The Openness of God: Eternity and Free WillIn Mirosław Szatkowski (ed.), Ontology of Theistic Beliefs: Meta-Ontological Perspectives, De Gruyter. pp. 137-154. 2018.
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21AtonementOxford University Press. 2018.This work argues that Christ's atonement disarms human resistance to God's love and so brings about acceptance of divine forgiveness.
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1880Wandering in Darkness: Further ReflectionsEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4 (3): 197--219. 2012.
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1654Atonement and the Cry of Dereliction from the CrossEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4 (1): 1. 2012.Any interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement has to take account of relevant biblical texts. Among these texts, one that has been the most difficult to interpret is that describing the cry of dereliction from the cross. According to the Gospels of Mathew and Mark, on the cross Jesus cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?‘ In this paper, I give a philosophical analysis of the options for understanding the cry of dereliction, interpreted within the constraints of orthodox Christi…Read more
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223Personal relations and moral residueHistory of the Human Sciences 17 (2-3): 33-56. 2004.To what extent can one be saddled with responsibility or guilt as a result of actions committed not by oneself but by others with whom one has a familial or national connection or some other communal association? The issue of communal guilt has been extensively discussed, and there has been no shortage of writers willing to apply the notion of communal responsibility and guilt to Germany after the Holocaust. But the whole notion of communal guilt is deeply puzzling. How can evil actions cast a s…Read more
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1The Story of the Stone: Wisdom and FollyIn Melville Y. Stewart & Chih-kʻang Chang (eds.), The Symposium of Chinese-American Philosophy and Religious Studies, International Scholars Publications. pp. 1--163. 1998.
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Topics: their development and absorption into consequencesIn Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny & Jan Pinborg (eds.), Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge University Press. pp. 273--299. 1982.
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28The Philosophical Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (review)Review of Metaphysics 47 (1): 141-143. 1993.This book is the second volume of a two-part study, The Metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas in a Historical Perspective. In the first part, the author concentrated on Aquinas's understanding of "common being"; in this part he considers Aquinas's account of the existence and nature of God. Elders largely follows the order of the first questions of Aquinas's Summa theologiae. He begins by examining Aquinas's views about the demonstrability of God's existence and then devotes considerable attention t…Read more
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37The Reality of Time and the Existence of God: The Project of Proving God's ExistencePhilosophical Review 100 (4): 657. 1991.
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11The Problem of Evil and the Desires of the HeartIn Jonathan Kvanvig (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion: Volume 1, Oxford University Press. pp. 196. 2008.
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1016The Problem of EvilFaith and Philosophy 2 (4): 392-423. 1985.This paper considers briefly the approach to the problem of evil by Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, and John Hick and argues that none of these approaches is entirely satisfactory. The paper then develops a different strategy for dealing with the problem of evil by expounding and taking seriously three Christian claims relevant to the problem: Adam fell; natural evil entered the world as a result of Adam's fall; and after death human beings go either to heaven or hell. Properly interpreted, …Read more
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1The principle of alternative possibilitiesIn Charles Harry Manekin & Menachem Marc Kellner (eds.), Freedom and Moral Responsibility: General and Jewish Perspectives, University Press of Maryland. 1997.
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227 The Problem of EvilIn Eleonore Stump & Michael J. Murray (eds.), Philosophy of Religion: The Big Questions, Blackwell. pp. 6--4. 1999.
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202The Non-Aristotelian Character of Aquinas’s EthicsFaith and Philosophy 28 (1): 29-43. 2011.Scholars discussing Aquinas’s ethics typically understand it as largely Aristotelian, though with some differences accounted for by the differences in worldview between Aristotle and Aquinas. In this paper, I argue against this view. I show that although Aquinas recognizes the Aristotelian virtues, he thinks they are not real virtues. Instead, for Aquinas, the passions—or the suitably formulated intellectual and volitional analogues to the passions—are not only the foundation of any real ethica…Read more
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200The Non-Aristotelian Character of Aquinas’s EthicsFaith and Philosophy 28 (1): 29-43. 2011.Scholars discussing Aquinas’s ethics typically understand it as largely Aristotelian, though with some differences accounted for by the differences in worldview between Aristotle and Aquinas. In this paper, I argue against this view. I show that although Aquinas recognizes the Aristotelian virtues, he thinks they are not real virtues. Instead, for Aquinas, the passions—or the suitably formulated intellectual and volitional analogues to the passions—are not only the foundation of any real ethica…Read more
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141The Nature of a Simple GodProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 87 33-42. 2013.
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35The mechanisms of cognition: Ockham on mediating speciesIn P. V. Spade (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, Cambridge University Press. pp. 168--203. 1999.
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18The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2001.It is hard to overestimate the importance of the work of Augustine of Hippo, both in his own period and in the subsequent history of Western philosophy. Until the thirteenth century, when he may have had a competitor in Thomas Aquinas, he was the most important philosopher of the medieval period. Many of his views, including his theory of the just war, his account of time and eternity, his understanding of the will, his attempted resolution of the problem of evil, and his approach to the relatio…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Religion |
Action Theory |
Normative Ethics |