•  418
    Early in Plato’s Republic, two cities are depicted, one healthy and one with “a fever”—the so- called luxurious city. The operative difference between these two cities is that the citizens of the latter “have surrendered themselves to the endless acquisition of money and have overstepped the limit of their necessities” (373d).i The luxury of this latter city requires the seizure of neighboring lands and consequently a standing army to defend those lands and the city’s wealth. According to the ma…Read more
  •  191
  •  184
    Self-deception
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2023.
    Virtually every aspect of the current philosophical discussion of self-deception is a matter of controversy including its definition and paradigmatic cases. We may say generally, however, that self-deception is the acquisition and maintenance of a belief (or, at least, the avowal of that belief) in the face of strong evidence to the contrary motivated by desires or emotions favoring the acquisition and retention of that belief. Beyond this, philosophers divide over whether this action is intenti…Read more
  •  178
    “Lyric Theodicy: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Problem of Hiddenness”
    In Adam Green & Eleonore Stump (eds.), Hidden Divinity and Religious Belief, Cambridge University Press. pp. 260-277. 2015.
    The nineteenth century English Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins struggled throughout his life with desolation over what he saw as a spiritually, intellectually and artistically unproductive life. During these periods, he experienced God’s absence in a particularly intense way. As he wrote in one sonnet, “my lament / Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away.” What Hopkins faced was the existential problem of suffering and hiddenness, a problem wide…Read more
  •  105
    “Shōjo Savior: Princess Nausicaä, Ecological Pacifism, and The Green Gospel”
    Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 21 (2). 2009.
    In the distant future, a thousand years after "The Seven Days of Fire"—the holocaust that rapacious industrialization spawned—the earth is a wasteland of sterile deserts and toxic jungles that threaten the survival of the few remaining human beings. This is the world of Hayao Miyazaki's film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. In this film, Miyazaki offers a vision of an alternative to the violent quest for dominion that has brought about this environmental degradation, through the struggle o…Read more
  •  82
    In Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, the protagonist Bess McNeill is often viewed as a Christ-figure, in particular, as an image of Christ’s love. In this essay, I address the feminist critique that taking Bess in this way represents a serious distortion of Christ's love, arguing that Bess need not be seen as endorsing a self-destructive and victimizing form of love that feminist critics rightly reject. Instead, I suggest that we can view her love as an indictment of the institutions structur…Read more
  •  80
    Taking Care: Self-Deception, Culpability and Control
    Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 26 (3): 161-176. 2007.
    Whether self-deceivers can be held morally responsible for their self-deception is largely a question of whether they have the requisite control over the acquisition and maintenance of their self-deceptive beliefs. In response to challenges to the notion that self-deception is intentional or requires contradictory beliefs, models treating self-deception as a species of motivated belief have gained ascendancy. On such so-called deflationary accounts, anxiety, fear, or desire triggers psychologica…Read more
  •  37
    In this paper, I argue that John Milton, in his tragedy Smason Agonistes, raises and offers a solution to a version of the problem of evil raised by Marilyn McCord Adams. Sections I and II are devoted to the presentation of Adams’s version of the problem and its place in the current discussion of the problem of evil. In section III, I present Milton’s version of the problem as it is raised in Samson Agonistes. The solution Milton offers to this problem is taken up in section IV and examined in s…Read more
  •  29
    “Scorsese’s Silence: Film as Practical Theodicy”
    Journal of Religion and Film 21 (2). 2017.
    Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Shusako Endo’s novel Silence takes up the anguished experience of God’s silence in the face of human su-ering. .e main character, the Jesuit priest Sabastião Rodrigues, /nds his faith gu0ed by the appalling silence of God. Yujin Nagasawa calls the particularly intense combination of the problems of divine hiddenness and evil the problem of divine absence. Drawing on the thought of Jesuit founder, Ignatius of Loyola, this essay will explores the way Scorsese’s Sile…Read more
  •  23
    Grace and Freedom
    Faith and Philosophy 23 (1): 80-92. 2006.
  •  18
    There Are No Schools in Utopia: John Dewey's Democratic Education
    Education and Culture 31 (2): 69-80. 2015.
    A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias. “The most utopian thing in Utopia is that there are no schools,” writes John Dewey. With these words, Dewey opened his talk to kindergarten teachers on April 21, 1933 at Teachers College, Columbia University. Published a cou…Read more
  • Self-Deception and Moral Responsibility
    Dissertation, Saint Louis University. 2001.
    This dissertation considers a neglected variety of self-deception, namely, culpable self-deception. Briefly, culpable self-deception is self-deception for which one is morally responsible. It argues that this aspect of self-deception has been largely overlooked in the contemporary discussion of self-deception and that consequently the major models of self-deceptive belief formation fail to account for our moral responsibility for some cases of self-deceptive belief. It examines a model of self-d…Read more
  • Divine responsibility
    In Mark A. Lamport (ed.), The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Philosophy and Religion, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 229-240. 2022.