Michael McFall

In The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology, Paul Moser argues that Jesus’s love commands have important implications for how philosophy should be done by Christian philosophers. He calls for a reorientation of the questions that philosophers pursue, requiring that questions lead to agape-oriented ministry. Yet Moser omits discussion of an important duty of philosophers—teaching. Once the duty of teaching is considered, this essay argues that few philosophers could meet Moser’s ideal. Instead of abandoning Moser’s project to reorient philosophy, though, this essay takes it one step further and argues that many, though not all, Christian philosophers should leave academia to become clergy. Examination of these meta-pedagogical issues, including that of Christian calling and vocational choice, transitions to pedagogical speculation of what Moser’s demands might require in the classroom. Moser’s obedience mode of philosophy is then compared with competing models in the advocacy-neutrality classroom debate.

Aristotle’s account of friendship has largely withstood the test of time. Yet there are overlooked elements of his account that, when challenged by apparent threats of current and emerging communication technologies, reveal his account to be remarkably prescient. I evaluate the danger that technological advances in communication pose to the future of friendship by examining and defending Aristotle’s claim that perfect or character-friends must live together. I concede that technologically-mediated communication can aid existing character-friendships, but I argue that character-friendships cannot be created and sustained entirely through technological meditation. I examine text-based technologies, such as Facebook and email, and engage a non-text based technology that poses the greatest threat to my thesis—Skype. I then address philosophical literature on friendship and technology that has emerged in the last decade in Ethics and Information Technology to elucidate and defend my account by contrast. I engage Cocking and Matthews (2000), who argue that friendship cannot be created and sustained entirely through text-based contact, Briggle (2008), who argues that friendship can be created and sustained entirely through text-based contact, and Munn (2012), who argues that friendship cannot be created and entirely sustained through text-based contact but can be created and sustained entirely in immersive virtual worlds. My account discusses a certain kind of friendship, character-friendship, and a certain kind of technology, Skype, that these accounts do not. Examination of these essays helps to demonstrate that character friendship cannot be sustained entirely by technologically-aided communication and that character-friends must live together

The decision to get married, as well as choosing whom to marry, is of the utmost importance to most people. This decision consists of many amoral considerations, but an ethical relationship arises when a promise is made, especially a vow that binds for a lifetime and affects oneself, one’s spouse, one’s children, and society. This essay provides an account of ideal romantic marriage, arguing that John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty provides an excellent foundation for constructing such an account. Neither dead dogma nor living truth is a healthy model for marriage, so a hybrid model of marriage, living dogma, is developed. The importance of the marital vow becomes apparent as the living dogma account is revealed, and this examination yields a model for how to decide when and whom to marry

Many state that they have a friend in Jesus, but close analysis reveals that this claim is difficult to defend. Furthermore, only once does Jesus claim that humans can be friends with him. This essay explores whether humans can be friends with Jesus. In arguing that this is possible, attention is given to what kind of friendship is possible in Aristotle’s taxonomy of utility, pleasure, and character-friendships. None of these describes the kind of friendship possible between humans and Jesus, but holy-friendship (developed from character-friendship) suffices to demonstrate how such friendship is possible.