Stephen H. Webb

Stateside: A North American Perspective on Radical Orthodoxy

Books reviewed in this article: Graham Ward, Cities of God John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas

Teaching as Confessing Redeeming a Theological Trope for Pedagogy

By reclaiming the role of confession in the classroom, we can rethink the fundamental question of what it means to teach religion. That is, the project of thinking about the religious dimension of pedagogy should also force us to rethink religious studies in general. Pedagogy, after all, is not an incidental expression of religious commitments but is instead one significant place where the religious imagination takes shape and form. All religious reflection is confessional, because scholarship is only one form of pedagogy, and teaching is the act of saying who we are, where we are from, and where we are going.

The Chicken and the Bath Water: Exploring a Basic Limit to the Vegetarian Ideal

Critics of the animal rights movement often point out that a perfectly vegetarian world would result in a drastic reduction of the number of farm animals. This article is the first to systematically analysis the merits of this objection. The article provides several alternative ways of naming the objection, including “the animal elimination problem,” “the carnivore’s claim,” and “the chicken and the bathwater dilemma.” It also compares the animal elimination problem to the goal of humane societies to spay and neuter companion animals. The ways in which the animal welfare movement avoids this problem by substituting compassion for rights is also explored. A potentially fatal flaw of the “animal elimination” objection is the difficulty of talking about future or theoretical entities. Can animals not yet born have rights? Moreover, does it make sense to say that animals born into suffering might wish to never have been born? Several hypothetical scenarios are developed to address these questions. The author argues that the animal elimination problem does stall on the puzzle of assigning interests to hypothetical animals, yet there is a moral intuition about our relationship to the future that is worth considering. On secular grounds, there are no strong reasons to claim that we have duties to animals not yet existing, but Christian theology complicates the picture. The article ends with an exploration of the commands in Genesis to both humans and nonhuman animals to procreate and fill the world. The author concludes that Christians do have a duty to bring future animals into existence if they can do so within moral limits prescribed by the Genesis narrative itself.

Postmodernity’s Transcending: Devaluing God – Laurence Paul Hemming

Book reviewed: Postmodernity’s Transcending: Devaluing God, Laurence Paul Hemming, SCM Press 2005 (0-334-02992-9), 269 pp., pb £30.00

A Voice Cursing in the Wilderness

Book reviewed in this article: John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (eds), The Hauerwas Reader

Companion Animals and Us: Exploring the Relationships Between People and Pets

been better than others in caring for the earth’ (p. 143). Although some of the essays proffer examples of Mennonite or Amish believers becoming involved in local environmental issues, others point to normal lifestyle practices among Anabaptist agriculturalists—raising livestock for food, having large families, or placing limitations on education, for instance—that demonstrate that Anabaptists are as likely as any other community to place custom or personal preference before strict environmental responsibility (Bean, pp. 186–188). While Klaassen claims that ‘consciousness among Mennonites about the need to care for the creation has not come from our own tradition’, a few essays contain a heavy dose of biblical analysis showing how Anabaptist beliefs about creation, while not necessarily conscious elements of everyday traditions, are nevertheless woven into Anabaptist theology about the world. It was useful to read the essays by Hiebert and by Weaver, which connect the Genesis creation narratives theologically to Gospel and Pauline narratives, explaining in a sophisticated way the nuts and bolts of how a ‘Christian environmental ethic’ works, and tying it to beliefs about the promise of redemption for both man and nature. However, the analytical sophistication of the environmental theology expressed in these essays may in fact be a more recent feature of Anabaptist scholarship, or it may be derivative of other Protestant writings on the environment. This needs to be seen alongside the dismay expressed by several of the essayists that the Anabaptist denominations seem institutionally out of step with other Protestant groups on environmental action. One author points to the absence of any American Mennonite group in the National or World Councils of Churches, ‘both of which have strong commitments to environmental theologies’ (Bean, p. 189). The book’s overall message is to concede that ‘whether Mennonites are more environmentally conscientious than others’ is hardly clear (Yoder, p. 88). While the editor challenges Christianity in general, and not just Anabaptism, to ‘clean up its act’ environmentally (Redekop, p. 210), he also notes that there is a no-less important challenge to the non-religious ‘to understand the religious sources of a great many of our attitudes toward the environment’. Some portions of Creation and the Environment accomplish precisely that, while others balance the romanticization of the rural Anabaptist traditions with refreshing and informative critiques of those traditions. These positive points should allow one to forgive the absence of any uniquely Anabaptist prescription for environmental responsibility.

The Return of Religion to North American Public Education

Books reviewed: Jon H. Roberts and James Turner, The Sacred and Secular University D. G. Hart, The University Gets Religion, Religious Studies in American Higher Education Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion, The Discourse of Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia

Putting Animals on the Theological Agenda

Book reviewed in this article: Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto eds, Animals on the Agenda.