Jonas on power and ethics

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technology

Hans Jonas on the inverse relationship between our powers and our ethics:

Now we shiver in the nakedness of a nihilism in which near-omnipotence is paired with near-emptiness, greatest capacity with knowing least for what ends to use it.

The Imperative of Responsibility (University of Chicago Press, 1984), 23

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Ellul on the 20th century decline of the church

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Ellul

The decline of the western Church seems fortunate to me in the sense that those who drift away from the church never really belonged to it. There was a crisis in this church. But it was a crisis dating back to the eighteenth century whose results appeared only in the nineteen-fifties. And it had to happen to purify the situation: now the truth of God can again be proclaimed, free from political and social compromises, from class distinctions, and above all, from the illegitimate use of the Christianity. By God’s grace, it is no longer useful to be a Christian or to make reference to the church and the Bible.

FROM: Jacques Ellul, In Season Out of Season: An Introduction to the Thought of Jacques Ellul (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 210–211.

My Recent Writing on Climate Change in the South Pacific

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climate change

I have recently published or given three papers on climate change in the Pacific. They are collected here for your convenience:

• “The Rainbow Covenant, Climate Change, and Noah’s Exile,” The Pacific Journal of Theology Series II, 54 (2015): 37–44. [read PDF]
• “The Commons: A Pacific and Theological Perspective on Managing Common Resources”. Presented to ECREA’s ‘Seminar and Deliberative Forum on Climate Justice in Rethinking and Reclaiming our Common Home’, at the Novotel. Lami, 13 April 2016. [read PDF]
• “The Politics of the City and the Sea—Revelation 21:1-6” Political Theology Today. 18 April 2016.