What do you think?
Rate this book
Choosing a World-View and Value-System: An Ecumenical Apologetics
Book by Benedict M. Ashley
326 pages, Paperback
First published May 13, 2000
1 person is currently reading
9 people want to read
About the author
Benedict M. Ashley
17 books9 followersBenedict M. Ashley, O.P. is Emeritus Professor of Moral Theology at Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, Missouri. Before his conversion to Catholicism, Fr. Ashley was a professed atheist and communist. He found his way to the Church through his study of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas under Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago. Before his ordination to the priesthood through the Order of Preachers in 1948, he received his Doctorate in Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Fr. Ashley also holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and a Master’s in Sacred Theology. He is an Associate Faculty of Philosophy for the Institute for Advanced Physics, and was a Senior Fellow of the National Catholic Center for Bioethics. Among Fr. Ashley’s books is Health Care Ethics, co-authored in 1975, a fundamental text on the topic of Catholic medical ethics, now in its fifth edition.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 6, 2016
This is a book I read more than a decade ago for New Oxford Review, whose editor had kindly sent me a complimentary copy.
Dominican priest, moral theologian, and philosopher Benedict Ashley argues for the importance of choosing a religion. By exploring what he calls “the principal articulations that have been given to common human experience by the great religions and their secular equivalents,” Fr. Ashley aims to prod irreligious folk into a tentative embrace of Catholicism. He also seeks to edify people who are already Catholic. The former Marxist and long-time Thomist achieves only the second of these goals.
Fr. Ashley is admirably fair in describing views with which he disagrees. Even while observing that modern humanism lives on the remnants of an ethical consensus derived from the Christianity that it explicitly rejects, for example, Fr. Ashley applauds humanists for emphasizing knowledge and freedom of conscience. Similarly, his discussions of mythology and "emanation religions" are interesting and clear.
Where the book turns unexpectedly tedious is on its home turf of "creation religions" (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). A long defense of the “Unmoved Mover” argument for God that Thomas Aquinas derived from Aristotle drags the narrative down unnecessarily, because Fr. Ashley does not have the swashbuckling attitude that Edward Feser would later bring to the same subject.
Readers who slog through that section into the sunny uplands where italicized terms roam alone rather than in packs will be rewarded, but by the time Fr. Ashley unveiled his end-game demonstration of the Catholic Church as God’s self-communication in history, I was exhausted.
That's not to say that the book lacks heartfelt thinking about cosmic evil and Christian hope. People willing to question received wisdom about the “many ways to God” might find inspiration in Fr. Ashley's awkward but refreshingly orthodox insistence on the supremacy of the Way of the Cross. Unfortunately, they'll have to work for that inspiration, because the manuscript must be called an honorable failure.
Dominican priest, moral theologian, and philosopher Benedict Ashley argues for the importance of choosing a religion. By exploring what he calls “the principal articulations that have been given to common human experience by the great religions and their secular equivalents,” Fr. Ashley aims to prod irreligious folk into a tentative embrace of Catholicism. He also seeks to edify people who are already Catholic. The former Marxist and long-time Thomist achieves only the second of these goals.
Fr. Ashley is admirably fair in describing views with which he disagrees. Even while observing that modern humanism lives on the remnants of an ethical consensus derived from the Christianity that it explicitly rejects, for example, Fr. Ashley applauds humanists for emphasizing knowledge and freedom of conscience. Similarly, his discussions of mythology and "emanation religions" are interesting and clear.
Where the book turns unexpectedly tedious is on its home turf of "creation religions" (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). A long defense of the “Unmoved Mover” argument for God that Thomas Aquinas derived from Aristotle drags the narrative down unnecessarily, because Fr. Ashley does not have the swashbuckling attitude that Edward Feser would later bring to the same subject.
Readers who slog through that section into the sunny uplands where italicized terms roam alone rather than in packs will be rewarded, but by the time Fr. Ashley unveiled his end-game demonstration of the Catholic Church as God’s self-communication in history, I was exhausted.
That's not to say that the book lacks heartfelt thinking about cosmic evil and Christian hope. People willing to question received wisdom about the “many ways to God” might find inspiration in Fr. Ashley's awkward but refreshingly orthodox insistence on the supremacy of the Way of the Cross. Unfortunately, they'll have to work for that inspiration, because the manuscript must be called an honorable failure.
Displaying 1 of 1 review