"Neither Beast Nor God"

On a recent plane trip, I read Gilbert Meileander's Neither Beast Nor God (buy it here), which is a succinct examination of the ideas of human and personal "dignity."  He writes (among other things):

I doubt whether we can understand dignity well without at least a modest anthropology -- without some notion of what it means to be the sort of creature a human being is.  And I, at least, do not think this understanding can possibly be right if we abstract the human beings we seek to understand from their relation to God.  Abstracted from that relation, they are simply abstract -- not really what human beings are.

Food for thought!