I’ll try to do some election analysis (doesn’t that make my bs sound high class) on the Florida election tomorrow (especially if we get a snow day), but I really hope to post some thoughts on Super Tuesday. Classes started this Monday and I don’t feel like I’ve stopped running since.
On a much more serious note, a dear friend and neighbor of mine is currently in ICU and the doctors have little hope of his recovery. He is an elderly man and one of the most vibrant, intelligent 80-somethings I’ve ever met. Moreover, I consider him to be a close friend. He and I hit it off from early on, and I loved to spend time listening to him talk about his latest readings in advanced mathematical theory or his last trip to Wyoming or Montana to join an archaeological crew digging for Wooly Mammoth bones or fishing for trout with his self-made flies. I’ll never forget the night, almost exactly a year ago, when he gave me a book. That gift summed up Walter’s attention to me as a friend. It is a very difficult thing to give a person a book that he will truly relish. It implies a certain perceptiveness and care that is uncommon. But my friend Walter gave me a wonderful little book that pooled what he knew about me and what he wanted me to know into one. I am forever grateful.
I must mention that as far as we know Walter is an unbeliever. I visited him today with my roommate, and, although he was heavily sedated and unresponsive we spoke to him as a dear friend. After a bit of reminiscing my roommate read to him Psalm 103 and a portion from the end of Revelation and I prayed for him. It was hard. I would ask for your prayers both for my friend Walter and for his wife and family. Let us never forget the thief on the cross.
norm ethics is not simply that it is a secularized first time a pure commandment ethics, in the notion that there can be such thins as morel principles, norms, and values which exist independently, simply on their own, as postualtes of ‘pure reason’. Thus the problem of modern commandment ethics; what is questionable is not merely the abstraction through which the enjoining power is moved from a personal God to the rule of a law of reason or–later–mere convention. The questionable thing is already the detachment from the liturgical, life-forming context in which commandment ethics in its Jewish and Christian sense was, and is, embedded, and which even a secularized commandment ethics is not able to dispense with. Consequently, talk about norms remains blind to its own conditioning matrix. For what makes norms be norms is never simply ‘pure reason’, ‘mere convention’, or the like, but has its seat in the depths of the self-reflection of a society and its own images of itself. Norms are the moral side of the idols a society worships, just as commandments illuminate in the light of love the face of God turned towards the worshipping congregation.
A statement from Steve Wilkins, pastor of Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church, can be found 
