This paper responds to John Milbank's essay, `The Poverty of Niebuhrianism' in The Word Made Strange , in which Milbank critiques Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realism for reliance on Stoic natural law thinking and its deficiency in regard to original sin. While Milbank rightly detects naturalism in Christian realism, this naturalism is inaccurately identified as Stoic in conception. Additionally, more detailed analysis of Niebuhr's thought reveals similarities between Niebuhr and Milbank on original sin, as this article seeks to demonstrate.
The first two texts discuss violence and death on personal (suicide and euthanasia) and national (capital punishment) levels, while Duncan Forrester's reflections on unsystematic theology orientate the reader to think about such ethical concerns in expansive and important ways.In light of recent debates over the right-to-die sparked by the case of Terry Schiavo in the US, Nigel Biggar's treatment of suicide and euthanasia provides a timely and important reflection. Beginning and concluding with what he considers 'conservative' prejudices regarding the question of the moral acceptability of suicide and the termination of a patient's life (pp. 11, 166), Biggar's reasoning reflects Thomistic sensibilities and an impressive grasp of the relevant sources related to his subject.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.