A puzzle has been presented in the recent past in Northern Ireland: what is the correct description of the person who dies as a result of a hungerstrike? For many the simple answer is that such a person commits suicide, in that his is surely a case of ‘self-inflicted death’. Where then is the puzzle? It is that a number of people do not see such deaths as suicides. I am not here referring to political propagandists or paramilitaries, for whom (...) the correct description of such deaths is ‘murder by Mrs Thatcher’ or ‘killed by British intransigence’. I am rather thinking of some theologians who, despite being opposed to the hunger-strike and indeed publicly condemning the whole campaign, refused to describe what the hunger-strikers did as suicide. (shrink)

A puzzle has been presented in the recent past in Northern Ireland: what is the correct description of the person who dies as a result of a hungerstrike? For many the simple answer is that such a person commits suicide, in that his is surely a case of . Where then is the puzzle? It is that a number of people do not see such deaths as suicides. I am not here referring to political propagandists or paramilitaries, for whom the (...) correct description of such deaths is or (to quote advertisements in the Belfast nationalist press at the time of Bobby Sands' death). I am rather thinking of some theologians who, despite being opposed to the hunger-strike and indeed publicly condemning the whole campaign, refused to describe what the hunger-strikers did as suicide. (shrink)

The article begins from a previous attempt by Glenn Graber "(Journal of Religious Ethics 1973)" to characterize Tillich's metaethics as an ontologically based self-realization theory. After proposing a modification of Graber's thesis, the article attempts to show that some of the ambiguities noted by Graber in Tillich's position-notably the tension between a formal and a material account of ethics-have their roots in his early German writings. There the treatment of ethics as a "cultural science" led Tillich to posit a formal, (...) philosophical moment (Kant), a cultural-historical moment, and a normative moment. He refused to identify the latter with theological ethics and instead, following his reformulation of the concept of religion, found it in theonomous forms of legal and community structures, identified with socialism. When Tillich abandoned the "cultural sciences" approach and ceased to see socialism as the concrete and normative content of ethics, he was forced to replace it with a notion of essential human nature and "new being," coexisting uneasily with Kantian formalism. (shrink)