"I went to a Marist Brothers school. I was Catholic, I had good morals instilled by my parents and my school and they have stuck with me."

"I still go to church and I think it is important. Christianity has waned in New Zealand, but I think the rules you learn as a Catholic, as a Christian, really, hold you in good stead."

Kokshoorn, 61, admits the "ants in his pants" that blighted his progress at school are still present, but he harnesses his energy in business, local government and fundraising for the community.

(The photograph above shows Kokshoorn taking a plunge in a swollen river at mid- winter as part a money raising effort)

A successful car dealer and newspaper proprietor, Kokshoorn was propelled to national prominence when the Pike River Mine disaster claimed the lives of 29 miners and contractors in 2010.

In 2012 he told the New Zealand Herald, "I believe in the afterlife. I have Christian values. I believe in family and the right for everyone to work.

" My mother also taught me that you never tell a lie. And I never have. And that is someone who's sold cars for years. That seems impossible, but what goes around comes around."

When asked by Clare de Lore for a recent Listener column if religion helped him at the time of the crisis he said, " Without a doubt, along with my family and the wider community in New Zealand."

"This was the first time a mining disaster of that magnitude was seen on television screens in a serialised manner. It brought a lot of pressure - for example, through the media - but that didn't bother me. It was my job to front up."

Source

• listener.co.nz
• nzherald.co.nz
• Image: listener.co.nz

Religion can help believers relate kindly and justly to other people.

And religion can stiffen the will of believers when they face unjust suffering for their faith.

I was taught these things when I studied Christian ethics, and they continue to motivate me in my work as an ethics professor today.

But experience has me rethinking these claims more than I did at the beginning of my journey.

Now I see that religion can sometimes do a poor job helping believers discern right from wrong or relate kindly and justly to others.

And religion can easily persuade people that the rejection they experience for their hurtful or ill-considered convictions is martyrdom for "God's truth," leaving them even more entrenched in their destructive beliefs.

My two key teachers in the field of Christian ethics in the 1980s were the Baptist theologian Glen Stassen of Southern Baptist Seminary and the Lutheran ethicist Larry Rasmussen of Union Theological Seminary in New York.

These men knew each other and shared many common scholarly interests that shaped me as well. These included the Nazi period in Germany, the extraordinary life of the scholar-pastor-resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the challenge of overcoming racism and the fight against the nuclear arms race during the Cold War.

Both men modeled and taught me an essentially hopeful vision about the role that Christian convictions can play in making believers more faithful and society better.

They taught a faith that had learned the lessons of the Nazi period; that honored Bonhoeffer for standing fast against Nazi seductions when so many of his fellow Christians surrendered their souls; that resisted America's own racism; and that rejected the idea that more nukes would make the world safer. Continue reading

• David Gushee is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics and director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University. He writes the Christians, Conflict and Change blog at RNS.

Basically, it's a system of principles that guides human life in accordance with our nature and our good, insofar as those can be known by natural reason.

It thereby promotes life the way it evidently ought to be, based on what we are and how the world is, from the standpoint of an intelligent, thoughtful, and well-intentioned person.

It's much the same, at least in basic concept, as what classical Western thinkers called life in accordance with nature and reason, and the classical Chinese called the Tao (that is, the "Way").

We might think of it as a system that aims at moral and social health and well-being—which, like physical health, can at least in principle be largely understood apart from revelation.

For that reason, natural law has seemed to many Catholic thinkers the obvious basis for a society that would be pluralistic but nonetheless just, humane, and open to the specific contributions of Christianity.

There's something to that view. Grace completes rather than replaces nature, so natural law includes basic principles of Christian morality.

Also, political life depends on discussion and willing cooperation based on common beliefs. It would be best if those beliefs reflected the whole truth about man and the world—and politics were therefore Catholic—but people who run things today don't accept that and don't seem likely to do so any time soon.

Even so, it might be possible for a governing consensus to form around the principles or at least concept of natural law.

The idea of government in accordance with man's nature and natural good could then give discussion a reference point and some degree of coherence even though disagreements over important issues would remain. Continue reading

Sources:

• The Catholic World Report, from an article by James Kalb, a lawyer, independent scholar, and Catholic convert who lives in Brooklyn, New York.
• Image: The Evening, Caspar David Friedrich, Wikimedia Commons.