Prowse, Christopher Where Is Jesus Today in Our Family Life? 'The joy of the Gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus', writes His Holiness, Pope Francis. We apply that now to our Archdiocesan Assembly here in Canberra 2015 and we state with confident faith: the joy of the Gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus in marriage and family life.

Powerful photographs of the grand exteriors and crumbling interiors of America's abandoned state mental hospitals. For more than half the nation's history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States; by 1948, they housed more than a half million patients. The blueprint for these hospitals was set by Pennsylvania hospital superintendant Thomas Story Kirkbride: a central administration building (...) flanked symmetrically by pavilions and surrounded by lavish grounds with pastoral vistas. Kirkbride and others believed that well-designed buildings and grounds, a peaceful environment, a regimen of fresh air, and places for work, exercise, and cultural activities would heal mental illness. But in the second half of the twentieth century, after the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these beautiful, massive buildings—and the patients who lived in them—neglected and abandoned. Architect and photographer Christopher Payne spent six years documenting the decay of state mental hospitals like these, visiting seventy institutions in thirty states. Through his lens we see splendid, palatial exteriors and crumbling interiors—chairs stacked against walls with peeling paint in a grand hallway; brightly colored toothbrushes still hanging on a rack; stacks of suitcases, never packed for the trip home. Accompanying Payne's striking and powerful photographs is an essay by Oliver Sacks. Sacks pays tribute to Payne's photographs and to the lives once lived in these places, “where one could be both mad and safe.”. (shrink)

I am very grateful to Jeffrie Murphy for his response to my article1 and to Jonathan Jacobs for the chance to respond in turn to Murphy’s criticisms. It is a particular honor for me to respond to J...

"This book addresses the apparent contradiction in moral condemnation of good artworks.

In this paper, I attempt to clarify the ideas of equality underlying section 15 claims for benefits such as welfare and health care; I use the name ‘economic rights claims’ for these types of claims. I adopt Joseph Raz’s division of equality claims into rhetorical egalitarian claims, which are based in a failure to equally respect a universal claim , and strict egalitarian claims, which are based on an actually existing unequal distribution of resources . I show how the dignity-based (...) approach to equality stemming from Law v. Canada is an example of a rhetorical egalitarian claim. With this groundwork set, I turn my attention to the economic rights claims. I survey three reasons for thinking that an unequal distribution of some benefit might, even absent any failure to respect or recognize the dignity of those at the losing end, be thought of as wrong or unjust. The first two reasons – an appeal to an idea of sufficiency, and the fear that some stigma might be associated with the inequality – I reject in favour of the third, which is that in a situation in which all the participants have some equal claim to a benefit, a fair procedure will result in their benefiting equally. Following John Rawls, I suggest that our society, as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage, creates in its members at least a prima facie equal claim to share in the society’s benefits. The economic rights claims, then, are claims that this prima facie equal claim has not been respected. But the benefits being claimed for, as benefits created by the society, are not benefits automatically due to everyone just in virtue of their humanity, instead they are due to the worst-off once the best off have come to be able to benefit from them. Thus they take a strict egalitarian form – once some members of our society benefit in a certain way, then the equality of all members as contributors to the cooperative venture for mutual advantage implies that the other members of our society gain a claim to that benefit. The fact that these economic rights claims are strict egalitarian claims means they cannot be grounded in arguments about dignity, as dignity-based claims are rhetorical egalitarian claims for benefits due to all in virtue of their universal human dignity. I conclude by returning to Law to highlight a passage which I believe provides a grounding for a recognition of economic rights in line with my argument; I also make some brief comments on the need for a stricter division of labour between section 15 and section 1 in the context of economic rights claims and on the effect of this argument on Canadian federal law more generally. (shrink)

Some concepts can be individuated partly or wholly in terms of the conditions for knowing certain contents containing those concepts. For these concepts, the conditions for outright judgement mentioned in their possession conditions suffice both for the truth of the contents in question and for the knowledge of those contents. Proper analysis of these conditions provides a means of meeting the Integration Challenge in cases in which the Linking Thesis holds. The model of constitutive causal sensitivity and the model of (...) implicitly known principles are distinguished. Indicators of which model is appropriate for a given domain include a priori status, the role of causal explanation of knowledgeable judgement about the domain, and the role of principles concerning the identity of properties. (shrink)

This chapter will outline a third conception of the role of the teacher, the professional technician or professional for short. The professional teacher is one who most corresponds to the description of professional occupations described in the literature already discussed. The professional described in this chapter will be an ideal type, whose attributes will be found to a greater or lesser degree in actual teachers around the world. Should this be a preferred model of what a teacher should be? The (...) answer depends on what kind of education system a society wants and the degree to which it is prepared to invest in such a kind of education system. (shrink)

One fundamental point of agreement that emerged between Foucault and Habermas is that both rejected the Kantian paradigm of critique grounded in the notion of a transcendental subject. For Foucault, genealogy is a form of history that can account for the constitution of knowledge, discourses, etc. without reference to a constitutive subject; while central to Habermas's approach is his rejection of the "philosophy of the subject" in favor of the "intersubjectivist paradigm of communicative action". For Foucault, the end of "man;' (...) a foundational subject providing ultimate normative yardsticks, is not the creation of a deficiency but "the unfolding of a space in which it is once again possible to think". His critical work seeks "to know to what extent it is possible to think differently, rather than legitimating what is already known" ; to promote new forms of self, thought, and action, and to give impetus to the "undefined work of freedom". Yet without direction, doesn't this amount to an unrestricted notion of autonomy? Influenced perhaps by Nietzsche, Foucault calls on us to "create ourselves as a work of art", but without guidance for self-creation, aren't we left only with arbitrary choices, an "aesthetic decisionism," in which one has to take "irrationalist leaps" to affirm anything? (shrink)

Nicht erst seit dem Aufkommen des Begriffs der »Cancel Culture« scheint es, als könne man schlicht nicht mehr miteinander reden. Die unterschiedlichen Konzeptionen von Ziel und Methode, also von der Strategie gesellschaftlicher Auseinandersetzungen, variieren so stark, dass sie schlicht nicht mehr kommensurabel sind. Diese Situation lässt sich als das Resultat einer langen Geschichte strategischer Entwürfe und Gegenentwürfe begreifen. Christopher Jakob Rudoll gibt anhand der Beispiele von Marxismus, Katholizismus und Feminismus einen systematischen Überblick über Debattenkulturen in Theorie und Praxis seit (...) den 1920er-Jahren - und hilft somit, die aktuelle Sprachlosigkeit besser zu verstehen. (shrink)

A conspicuous feature of modernity has been the rejection of nature as an authoritative ground of intelligibility and value, a position once defended by nearly all Catholic philosophers. Since Fr. Ernan McMullin’s 1969 article, “Philosophies of Nature,” however, the philosophy of nature has been eclipsed by the philosophy of science in mainstream Catholic philosophy. After examining McMullin’s reasons for setting aside the philosophy of nature and Thomas Nagel’s recent re-affirmation of the possibility of a philosophical reflection upon nature prior to (...) the claims of empirical science, this article responds to McMullin’s critique and defends the viability of an Aristotelian understanding of nature today. (shrink)

Recent work in ethics and epistemology argues that physical surroundings have normative force. The ideas of 'grounding knowledge' and 'real ethics' provide an important way to understand sense of place. This paper uses this work to argue that there is a moral structure to material culture, and that the existence of this moral structure makes it necessary for us to pay attention to the epistemic import of the physical environments we create and live in. Since environments are thick with moral (...) norms, it is incumbent upon us to figure out what kinds of environments are most conducive to our shared visions of the good life. (shrink)

While it appears that respect for autonomy has become the fundamental principle in medical ethics, it is not clear what various authors have in mind when they use the term "autonomy." Accounts range from an equation of autonomy with negative freedom to a Kantian emphasis on self-governance. ;My goal here is to characterize that status in persons which we call autonomy and which demands our respect in such applied settings as medicine. What types of behavior must be present for us (...) to honor persons' decisions as autonomous? And what kinds of factors can constrain that behavior? ;My answer is that being autonomous means being as much responsible for one's life as the situation allows and warrants. In explaining what these various claims entail, I note that autonomy is an exercise concept and that it admits of degrees. Being autonomous requires more than simply having the capacity to engage in certain kinds of behaviors; the autonomous person exercises those capacities. Furthermore, persons are more or less autonomous in different situations, and different types of decisions demand varying levels of autonomous behavior in order to warrant our respect. ;In addition to explaining what it means to be autonomous, I discuss the broad range of factors which can constrain autonomy. I extend the traditional analyses of constraints and show how such factors as illness, socio-economic and institutional realities, and interpersonal communication can constrain persons' ability to be autonomous. ;I conclude with an argument that persons have an obligation to be autonomous. This argument is based both on a position of self-respect and on avoidance of harms to others. (shrink)