Theological Studies

An ethics of disinterested goodness governs the testimony of Auschwitz survivors Primo Levi and Jean Amery. For Emmanuel Levinas, ethical goodness such as we find in Levi's and Amery's disinterested testimony to the German people leaves the only possible trace of the divine. Levinas proceeds to dismiss mysticism as an interested, self-serving, a-ethical search for God. The article proposes that Christian mysticism can embody Levinas's ethics of disinterestedness if it is understood as an analogizing ethical grasp of the divine.

The article examines Maximus the Confessor's reaction to the Arab-Muslim invasion of the Byzantine Roman Empire. It also appraises Islam's place in the 7th century as presenting a view of divine-human relations as an alternative to the views of Christian confessions. The article concludes by advancing a hypothesis about the antithetical relationship between Islam and Monotheletism, which was dominant at that time in Byzantium.

The author mines William Spohn's notion of the grace of indirection as it relates to the potential impact of the arts on the moral imagination. The article moves beyond exposition of Spohn's idea, first, by showing how the grace of indirection is a concept with deep connections to long-standing Christian convictions about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit; and second, by offering an extended example of what the grace of indirection might look like relative to a contemporary short story by Tim Gautreaux.

The article is a reply to one by Kenneth Himes and James Coriden published in our September 2004 issue. Except for minor sylistic changes, the article is published as it was received.