Posts tagged God

All About Evil (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I often do, I’m going to use my Sun­day col­umn to divert us from the con­cerns of the moment. Rest assured, tomor­row Log­a­rchism will return to 24–7 cov­er­age of the upcom­ing elec­tion. View today’s arti­cle as the final pit stop before the polit­i­cal equiv­a­lent of the Indi­anapo­lis 500 roars to its end.

What I offer today is a per­spec­tive on a ques­tion at the root of all our pol­i­tics, all our cul­ture, all our social struc­tures. From a sin­gle com­ment buried in a heated polit­i­cal debate, there is cos­mic sig­nif­i­cance. We can use it to con­sider how the per­ilous issue of rape and abor­tion relates to the nature of our very selves. From there, we can per­haps return to the ques­tions of the moment, with a new and larger sense, and recon­sider our direc­tion as indi­vid­u­als, as a soci­ety, as a nation — per­haps as a species.

Last Thurs­day, in response to an arti­cle by Monotreme,  one of our Gen­tle Read­ers pro­vided a link to a blog post at National Review Online. I thought the arti­cle wrong on all counts, but par­tic­u­larly the­o­log­i­cal ones. It gave me an excuse to write an arti­cle I’ve been intend­ing to do for a long time.

The imme­di­ate topic was a com­ment by Indi­ana Repub­li­can Sen­a­to­r­ial can­di­date Richard Mour­dock on the thorny issues of rape, preg­nancy, and abor­tion, and the rela­tion­ship to pol­i­tics and the­ol­ogy and indi­vid­ual con­science. Though I pro­foundly dis­agree with Mourdock’s answer — and, as an unashamed par­ti­san, I would glee­fully take advan­tage of it — as a the­olo­gian I need to admit it was a thought­ful and con­sid­ered response. There also are fur­ther depths here to explore, depths which reach to the heart of every­thing related to pol­i­tics and social jus­tice, eco­nom­ics and free­dom. (more…)