Rights Talk

Wilfred McClay takes issue with the suggestion that there is a "party of death" at work in America, rather than a party "in love with . . . a shortsighted and impoverished vision of life: the dream of complete and unconstrained personal mastery, of the indomitable human will exercised on the inert and malleable stuff of nature by the heroically autonomous and unconditioned individual who is ever the master of his fate and captain of his soul, and whose own existence is, or deserves to be, infinitely extensible."  One obvious symptom of this mindset is, according to McClay, our reliance on rights talk, which "does not necessarily give rise to responsibility-talk. Sometimes it may have the opposite effect, in luring us into a false sense that we have fulfilled all righteousness merely by dutifully observing the rights of others."

Much less eloquently, I try to press a related point in this Christianity Today article, appearing as part of the magazine's coverage of the controversy over pharmacists' claimed rights of conscience.

Rob