A Prophet’s Pathos

Instead of seeing prophets as primarily predictors of the future, Heschel wants us to see them as expositors of divine pathos.  The prophets have a deep relationship with Yahweh and thus are attune to his emotional life.  The Heschel quote for this paper states that a prophet is in “fellowship with the feelings of God”.  […]

Black People Mixing Religion and Politics

There are legitimate reasons for wanting to keep politics and religion separate.  There are definitely ways of separating beliefs you have about the world into beliefs that are specifically religious.  That being said, it is much more difficult and nuanced than it may seem for black communities to separate religion from political engagement.  In some […]

The Emotions of a Theory of Justice

Cohen’s criticism of Rawls is that Rawls’s theory doesn’t have any emphasis on the necessity of ethos.  There is no scheme or method on how to cultivate the emotional state of people to be emotionally engaged with the principles of justice.  For Rawls, what makes a society just is if they have laws and regulations […]

Difference Principle Indifferent to History

A historical principle says that the justice of a distribution depends upon how the distribution came about.  So, this means that a distribution is just, if it comes about by all just transfers, and it is unjust if it involves any uncorrected unjust transfers.  This is the sort of principle that Nozick’s entitlement theory is […]