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1760Acedia and Its Relation to DepressionIn Josefa Ros Velasco (ed.), The Faces of Depression in Literature, Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. pp. 3-27. 2020.There has been recent work on acedia and its relationship to depression, but the results are a mixed bag. In this essay, I engage some recent scholarship comparing acedia with depression, endeavouring to clarify the concept of acedia using literature from theology, philosophy, psychiatry, and even a 16th-century treatise on witchcraft. Along the way, I will show the following key theses. First, the concept of acedia is not identical to the concept of depression. Acedia is not merely a primitive …Read more
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22Exit Questions: Crowdsourcing Exam QuestionsAmerican Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy 8 115-116. 2023.
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392Moral enhancement, acquired virtue, and theism: A response to Brummett and CrutchfieldBioethics 36 (8): 891-898. 2022.Recently, Brummett and Crutchfield advanced two critiques of theists who object to moral enhancement. First, a conceptual critique: theists who oppose moral enhancement commonly do so because virtue is thought to be acquired only via a special kind of process. Enhancement does not involve such processes. Hence, enhancement cannot produce virtue. Yet theists also commonly claim that God is perfectly virtuous and not subject to processes. If virtue requires a process and God is perfectly virtuous …Read more
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50Toward a Theology of Psychological Disorder. By Marcia Webb. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017. Pp. xxiv, 183. $26.00 (review)Heythrop Journal 63 (2): 315-316. 2022.The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 2, Page 315-316, March 2022.
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8Fallow season : depression and its forebearsDissertation, Baylor University. 2020.This dissertation is part history, part analysis. It surveys prima facie historical antecedents to our current clinical concept of depression—a chapter each on acedia, tristitia, noche oscura, melancholia, and Tungsindighed. The analytic portion compares and contrasts each historical condition with depression, examining symptoms, etiology, historical context, and more. As it turns out, many, if not all, of these historical conditions can present with or essentially have some kind of spiritual et…Read more
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65Aporia as Pedagogical TechniqueAmerican Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy 4 15-34. 2018.In this essay, I muse upon aporia’s value as a pedagogical technique in the philosophy classroom using as a guide examples of aporia that are found in Plato’s Socratic dialogues. The word aporia, translated as “without passage” or “without a way,” is used metaphorically to describe the unsettling state of confusion many find themselves in after engaging in philosophical discourse. Following a brief introduction in which I situate aporia as a pedagogy amicable to experiential learning, I examine …Read more
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966A Perspectival Account of Acedia in the Writings of KierkegaardReligions 80 (11): 1-23. 2020.Søren Kierkegaard is well-known as an original philosophical thinker, but less known is his reliance upon and development of the Christian tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, in particular the vice of acedia, or sloth. As acedia has enjoyed renewed interest in the past century or so, commentators have attempted to pin down one or another Kierkegaardian concept (e.g., despair, heavy-mindedness, boredom, etc.) as the embodiment of the vice, but these attempts have yet to achieve any consensus. In …Read more
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39Review of The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays (review)Philosophia Christi 20 (1): 303-306. 2018.
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120Depression and the Emotions: An Argument for Cultivating CheerfulnessPhilosophia 46 (3): 771-784. 2018.In this paper, I offer an argument for cultivating cheerfulness as a remedy to sadness and other emotions, which, in turn, can provide some relief to certain cases of depression. My thesis has two tasks: first, to establish the link between cheerfulness and sadness, and second, to establish the link between sadness and depression. In the course of accomplishing the first task, I show that a remedy of cultivating cheerfulness to counter sadness is supported by philosophers as diverse as Thomas Aq…Read more
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90Who you could have known: divine hiddenness, epistemic counterfactuals, and the recalcitrant nature of natural theologyInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 82 (3): 337-348. 2017.We argue there is a deep conflict in Paul Moser’s work on divine hiddenness. Moser’s treatment of DH adopts a thesis we call SEEK: DH often results from failing to seek God on His terms. One way in which people err, according to Moser, is by trusting arguments of traditional natural theology to lead to filial knowledge of God. We argue that Moser’s SEEK thesis commits him to the counterfactual ACCESS: had the atheist sought after God in harmony with how God reveals himself, she would have had ac…Read more
Towson, Maryland, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
1 more
Depression |
Philosophy of Psychiatry and Psychopathology |
Virtue Ethics and Eudaimonia |
Thomas Aquinas |
Søren Kierkegaard |
Emotions |
Areas of Interest
Depression |
Emotions |
Virtue Ethics and Eudaimonia |
Thomas Aquinas |
Søren Kierkegaard |