Desert Daughters, Desert Sons: Rethinking the Christian Desert Tradition by Rachel Wheeler (review)
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BOOK REVIEW 233 717. Desert Daughters, Desert Sons: Rethinking the Christian Desert Tradition by Rachel Wheeler (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2020. Pp. ix, 178, $19.95 ISBN 089-0-8146-8500-6). The apophthegmata patrum have been read and meditated on for centuries. Even the most cursory introduction to early Christian monasticism will expose one to the sayings, and a deep dive into early monastic history reveals that there are thousands of these sayings extant, so we may assume that thousands more did not survive the course of time. They are a wealth of information regarding the mindset, spirituality, and, at times, structure of early Christian monasticism, especially that of the deserts of Egypt. At the same time they can be difficult to understand or puzzling to us moderns because their cultural location, philosophical-theological premises and telos are radically different from ours. Nonetheless, they are not so enigmatic as to be mere historical artifacts but have the power and ability to continue to inspire and guide the modern monastic or non-monastic alike in her quest for union with God. Thanks to the diligence of Tim Vivian and John Wortley over the past decade, many of the sayings are now available in English for the first time. Arranged topically, systematically and alphabetically, the sayings are bursting with meaning, and thanks especially to the scholarship of Tim Vivian (often in the pages of this very journal) we can see how rich the sayings are, showing a depth of theological wealth that has not always been recognized in the earliest desert dwellers. Wheeler's volume is meant to continue this deep exploration of the sayings, especially as they depict women, who are often missing from this literature. Or, as Wheeler shows, they are there but often in the background or on the periphery. Wheeler's goal is to bring these women out of the shadows, if you will. But I am not convinced that she has done this. Wheeler chooses to adopt Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's "creative hermeneutic" as her interpretive philosophy. The weakness of this approach is that Fiorenza's hermeneutic, originally applied to biblical studies, "imaginatively reconstructs" things (17). Yet, what control is there to this imaginative hermeneutic so that it does not become overly subjective? And how is it rooted culturally and linguistically to its source material so that the modern interpreter cannot bend the meaning of a text to suit her/his fancy? Does this imaginative project reveal the saying's meaning(s), or is it only a tool to take the saying's teaching and 234 ABR 72:2 – JUNE 2021 enable "contemporary readers to engage imagination and plumb this interaction for wisdom applicable to our own . . . situation" (46)? If the latter, then it seems reasonable to adopt such a hermeneutic inasmuch as one wants to apply these texts to today, but if it is the former, then what keeps one from the exaggerations of an overactive imagination? One example where Wheeler seems to have overstepped the text's meaning into something too imaginative occurs in her discussion of the systematic saying "Discretion 137." During a famine a monk decides to take food to his mother, but is stopped by a divine voice, assuring him that God will care for his mother. In response the monk returns to his cell. Three days later the mother visits the monk's cell to report that another monk brought her grain to make bread. This causes her son to glorify God and become "suffused with hope." I would suggest that the point of the story is to illustrate the monk's obedience to God and/or see it as an illustration of the truth of Jesus'teaching about anxiousness in Matthew 6:25-34. Or, given the reference to "three days" the author may have intended something more Christological vis-à-vis Jesus' resurrection; or, since it is categorized under the heading "Discretion," it is about that virtue (which Wheeler also concedes). In any case, in her discussion of the saying Wheeler writes, "It is impossible to overstate how ridiculously convenient this is for the man to not have to worry about his mother anymore." For Wheeler, the divine...Keywords:
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In a series of recent writings, Paul Robinson has defended “empirical desert” as the way of deriving distributive principles for determining who should be punished and by how much. Desert is, of course, an idea with a long history, and its precise role in criminal law has been much debated. In addressing various criticisms of desert in criminal law, Robinson distinguishes empirical desert from what he calls “deontological desert” and “vengeful desert.” Robinson’s strategy, which I call “divide and deflect,” fights off various objections traditionally leveled against the use of desert in criminal law by arguing that most of those objections may be valid for “deontological” and “vengeful” desert but are not applicable to “empirical desert.” So, for instance, “vengeful desert” can be too harsh, may be based on anger and hatred, and give only vague guidance, and “deontological desert” judgments may be too contested to be useful for policy makers, but, Robinson claims, empirical desert suffers from no such defects. Robinson’s core claims – about the need to tie desert assessments close to ordinary intuitions and the substantial crime control benefits to be derived when the state can successfully command respect as a moral authority – are valid. However, Robinson’s “empirical desert” needs what he calls “vengeful desert” and “deontological desert” to succeed, and his attempts to make his proposal resistant to the usual anti-retributivist objections by jettisoning the latter two may in the end hurt his project more than help.
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Abstract Beginning in the late third century CE , some some Christians withdrew from city and village life to practice asceticism in the desert and at the edges of settled land in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria.
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Justice requires giving people what they deserve. Or so many philosophers—and according to many of those philosophers, everyone else—thought for centuries, until the 1970s and 1980s, however, perhaps under the influence of Rawls’s desert-less theory, desert was largely cast out of discussions of distributive justice. Now it is making a comeback. This chapter considers recent research on the concept of desert, debate about the conditions for desert, arguments for and against its requital, and connections between desert and other distributive ideals. It suggests that desert-sensitive theories of distributive justice, despite the challenges they face, have a promising future.
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Abstract Popular discussions of justice and fairness are often couched in the language of desert: those who commit crimes are said to deserve punishment; those who work hard are said to deserve success; those in need are often categorized as the deserving or undeserving poor. Justice, it may be said, is happiness according to virtue, with each getting his or her deserts ( see Justice). Given the frequency with which desert is invoked in popular discussions, it might be expected that philosophical debate about justice and fairness would also focus on desert. But in recent times, this has often not been so. Indeed, in the mid‐twentieth century, Brian Barry was able to write of a “revolt against desert,” and describe desert as “a concept which is already in decline and may eventually disappear” (Barry 1965: 112).
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You may think of the desert as a harsh, dry place where no one would ever want to live -- but think again. The Desert People know. so do the animals. Both love the land, and share the feeling of being brothers in the desert, of being desert creatures together. Byrd Baylor's spare, poetic text and Peter Parnall's striking illustrations lime the sky, stone and sand of the desert in this haunting book.
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This chapter examines desert as a distributive principle. It considers the three conceptions of desert evident in the present debates over the propriety of desert as a distributive principle: vengeful desert, deontological desert, and empirical desert. Vengeful desert focuses upon the offense harm and victim suffering and sets the deserved punishment to match that of victim's harm and suffering. Deontological desert focuses not on the harm of the offense but on the blameworthiness of the offender. Empirical desert distributes punishment according to principles of justice derived from the community's shared intuitions. It argues that the failure to appreciate the existence of three quite distinct conceptions of desert commonly leads to confusion in the critique of desert as a principle for the distribution of criminal liability and punishment.
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Abstract This chapter shows that the language of desert provides an idiom in which to discuss substantive questions of justice. To accept justice as fittingness is to accept that to treat people justly requires no more than that they be treated in accordance with their deserts. The chapter begins with an account of desert itself, and the grounds for viewing the concepts of desert and justice as closely related. It then discusses what is required for treatment to be in accordance with desert, considers some reasons which might be offered for avoiding employing the notion of desert, and argues that such reasons are unpersuasive. The chapter concludes by noting the problem cases for the claim that justice requires only treatment according to desert. By implication, these are the problem cases for defending justice as fittingness. Two important problem cases for justice as fittingness are promises and qualification under some general rule or practice.
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