Wolterstorff Conference

Rick has already posted about the excellent conference at Notre Dame discussing Nick Wolterstorff's fine work. I learned a great deal from the participants. In fact, it was just the right mix of people for a very useful exchange of views. Nobody too much on the inside of any discussion, and yet everybody enough on the inside to be able to talk well together.

I've posted a few times about Nick's book, The Mighty and the Almighty. My own small conference ticket focused on a fairly narrow issue in the book--the interpretation of certain lines in Romans 12 and 13 dealing with what St. Paul meant about the justification of state punishment, focusing specifically on what Nick called in the book a kind of expressivism. But I came away from the conference thinking that Nick's expressivism seems actually quite close to some communicative theories of retributivist punishment, and it was a pleasure to work through both some textual possibilities and some more general ideas about the relationship between the text and the justification of punishment. Another very interesting issue was the relationship of protectionist and perfectionist accounts of the state to all of these more particular issues. A wonderful event.