Practical Theology Commons^™

Technology, Derek C. Hatch, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Technology takes many shapes. Things such as water heaters, cell phones, intercontinental ballistic missiles, high-defin ition television, and hybrid cars belong to the large family called "technological artifacts." In addition to artifacts, technology includes infrastructure (e.g., roadways, water and sewage lines, fiber-optic phone lines, Wi-Fi transponders) -- systems of technologies that enable the artifacts to function while the system itself remains, for the most part, out of sight and under the moral radar. Further, technology connotes a certain form of life, one not simply auxiliary to the existing social structure but also contributing to its very form (hence, the phrase …

Virtue Ethics, Nikki Coffey Tousley, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Virtue ethics emphasizes the development of moral excellence in terms of character qualities called virtues. Virtue are (1) habituated dispositions involving both an affective desire for the good and the skill to both discern and act accordingly; (2) learned through practice within a tradition (i.e., a historical community with a rich account of the "good"); and (3) directed toward this tradition's particular conception of the good (making virtues "teleological"). From a Christian perspective, virtue ethics is an ethics of discipleship, which emphasizes the development of the habits, practices, and wisdom necessary to pursue the "good" exemplified by Christ. Reading Scripture …

Dynamical Similarity And The Problem Of Evil, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Discussions of evil commonly fault God for not “doing something.” Defenders of God respond that God had good reasons for not “doing something.” Detractors observe that if a human being can snatch the toddler from the path of the oncoming bus, why does not God snatch the bus from the path of the oncoming toddler? The underlying assumption in such discussions is that God’s “doing something” is similar to humans’ “doing something.”

If human beings bear the image of their Creator as the Abrahamic faiths maintain, it is natural to suppose that divine action is similar to human action. But …

Ethics As Grammar: Changing The Postmodern Subject, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Wittgenstein, one of the most influential, and yet widely misunderstood, philosophers of our age, confronted his readers with aporias—linguistic puzzles—as a means of countering modern philosophical confusions over the nature of language without replicating the same confusions in his own writings. In Ethics as Grammar, Brad Kallenberg uses the writings of theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas as a foil for demonstrating how Wittgenstein’s method can become concrete within the Christian tradition. Kallenberg shows that the aesthetic, political, and grammatical strands epitomizing Hauerwas’s thought are the result of his learning to do Christian ethics by thinking through Wittgenstein.

Kallenberg argues that …