•  238
    In this paper I consider what a person who finds herself religiously incapacitated ought to do. More specifically, I address people who have come to God asking for bread, but who seem to have received stones and serpents in its place. This is a manifestation of the phenomenon that I call religious trauma. My goals in this paper are twofold. First, I aim to demonstrate that, because religious trauma can be genuinely religiously incapacitating, (1) it can result in non-culpable failure to worship …Read more
  •  17
    Has God Indeed Said? Skeptical Theism and Scriptural Hermeneutics
    Journal of Analytic Theology 9 45-66. 2021.
    This paper demonstrates that the skeptical theist’s response to the problem of evil deprives the analytic theologian of theoretical resources necessary to avoid accepting as veridical merely apparent divine commands that endorse cruelty. In particular, I argue that the same skeptical considerations that lead analytic theologians to endorse skeptical theism also lead to what I call “divine command skepticism”—an inability to make certain kinds of judgements about what a good God would or would no…Read more
  •  104
    This article explores the relationship between hermeneutical injustice in religious settings and religious trauma and spiritual violence. In it I characterize a form of hermeneutical injustice that arises when experiences are obscured from collective understanding by normatively laden concepts, and I argue that this form of HI often plays a central role in cases of religious trauma and spiritual violence, even those involving children. In section I, I introduce the reader to the phenomena of rel…Read more
  •  25
    This book addresses the various ways in which key social identities--for example, race, gender, and disability--intersect with, shape, and are shaped by traditional questions in analytic theology and philosophy of religion. The book both breaks new ground and encourages further analytic-theological work in these important areas of research.
  •  230
    Review of The Hiddenness of God, by Michael C. Rea. (review)
    Faith and Philosophy 36 (2): 280-285. 2019.
  •  17
    Over the past several decades, scholars working in biblical, theological, and religious studies have increasingly attended to the substantive ways that our experiences and understanding of God and God's relation to the world are structured by our experiences and concepts of race, gender, disability, and sexuality. These personal and social identities and their intersections serve as a hermeneutical lens for our interpretations of God, self, the other, and our religious texts and traditions. Howe…Read more
  •  946
    There has been little discussion of the compatibility of Theistic Conceptual Realism with the doctrine of divine simplicity. On the one hand, if a plurality of universals is necessary to explain the character of particular things, there is reason to think this commits the proponent of TCR to the existence of a plurality of divine concepts. So the proponent of the DDS has aprima faciereason to reject TCR. On the other hand, many mediaeval philosophers accept both the existence of divine ideas and…Read more
  •  464
    Created and Uncreated Things
    International Philosophical Quarterly 56 (1): 99-112. 2016.
    Theistic activism and theistic conceptual realism attempt to relieve the tension between transcendent realism about universals and a strong aseity-sovereignty doctrine. Paradoxically, both theories seem to imply that God is metaphysically prior and metaphysically posterior to his own nature. In this paper I critique one attempt to respond to this worry and offer a neo-Augustinian solution in its place. I demonstrate that Augustine’s argument for forms as ideas in the mind of God strongly suggest…Read more
  •  291
    In Book 10 of the Republic, Plato launches an extensive critique of art, claiming that it can have no legitimate role within the well-ordered state. While his reasons are multifac- eted, Plato’s primary objection to art rests on its status as a mere shadow of a shadow. Such shadows inevitably lead the human mind away from the Good, rather than toward it. How- ever, after voicing his many objections, Plato concedes that if art “has any arguments to show it should have a place in a well-governed c…Read more