It is official. I have lost my job; termination due to medical incapacity. This happened last week, the same day I got my news about my recovery setback, but due to the details needing to be sorted I couldn’t say anything til it was official. Yesterday was my goodbye morning tea, Matt and I cleared [...]
Entries from January 31st, 2009
Capital Punishment in the Old Testament: 2
January 27th, 2009 20 Comments
In Capital Punishment in the Old Testament: 1 I suggested that the capital sanctions found in The Torah in most cases were not intended to be carried out, that instead there operated an implicit assumption that a person who committed a serious crime had forfeited their life and hence was to pay a ransom as [...]
Tags: Capital Punishment · David Brink · David Instone Brewer · Ethics · Gordon Wenham · Hermeneutics · Old Testament Ethics · Theology
Top 10 NZ Christian Blogs December 08
January 26th, 2009 9 Comments
Two New Zealand blog sites run monthly stats ranking the top New Zealand blogs on public discourse, Tumeke and Half Done. Both use different formulae so the stats don’t always come out the same. Previously I have accorded Tumeke’s stats as the official ones and Half Done’s as the shadow report, comparing Half Done’s stats [...]
Tags: NZ Christian Blog Rankings · Top 10 NZ Christian Blogs
Christian Blog Rankings for December 2008 – Tumeke
January 26th, 2009 No Comments
Extrapolating from Tumeke’s December 2008 stats, the top 10 Christian Blogs on Public Discourse in New Zealand are as follows; these stats are used in the calculations for the MandM top 10 NZ Christian Blog rankings for December 08: 1. NZ Conservative (22 + 1)2. Something Should Go Here, Maybe Later (Half Done) (24 + [...]
Capital Punishment in the Old Testament: 1
January 25th, 2009 8 Comments
In “The Autonomy of Ethics,” David Brink writes that a literal reading of the Old Testament, [Y]ields problematic moral claims, such as Deuteronomy’s claims that parents can and should stone to death rebellious children (21:18-21) and that the community can and should stone to death any wife whose husband discovers that she was not a [...]
Tags: Capital Punishment · David Brink · Ethics · Hermeneutics · Old Testament Ethics · Theology
Recovery Update
January 22nd, 2009 2 Comments
I saw my surgeon this week and had confirmed what we expected; my recovery is outside the norm, I am not doing as well as expected. This means an extra month off work, at least, and no time frame as to when I can expect to return to work. Most people are back at work [...]
Tags: Car Accident · Disc Replacement Surgery
Bush’s Legacy
January 16th, 2009 42 Comments
I am always slightly disturbed when I encounter Bush-haters amongst my friends. Disturbed not because it surprises me that Bush-hater exist but because my friends are otherwise smart, informed, thinking people who have a healthy degree of scepticism towards the left-wing, anti-conservative values of the media and hollywood; I just don’t get how they can [...]
Tags: George Bush · Iraq · US Politics · War Ethics
Rest In Peace Richard Neuhaus
January 12th, 2009 No Comments
It is with sadness that I have just read that Richard John Neuhaus died on Thursday the 8th of January at age 72. There are various obituaries hereFor those New Zealand readers who won’t know. Neuhaus was a Lutheran turned Catholic priest who wrote and commented extensively on issues of religion and public life. His [...]
On a Common Equivocation
January 12th, 2009 6 Comments
Recently I did a post on relativism and in earlier posts I have defended a divine command theory of ethics against various objections. In the comments section Mark V raised an interesting and thoughtful response. I hope Mark does not mind if I pick up on his points because the themes he raises are well [...]
Tags: Divine Command Theory · Ethics · God and Morality · James Cornman · Keith Lehrer · Louise Anthony · Mark V · Patrick Nowell Smith · Philosophy of Religion · Walter Sinnott-Armstrong · William Lane Craig
Dissecting a Great White
January 8th, 2009 6 Comments
We took the younger kids to see Madagascar 2 the other day and our youngest, Noah aged 7, loved the bit at the end where the shark came out of the ocean, gave chase snapping its teeth and ultimately fell into a live volcano. When we heard about today’s opportunity to see a dissection of [...]
Tags: Home Education
