NP beyond good and evil"

[Doug Millison]

"I cannot here resist a sidebar comment, namely, that by locating 
"beyond good and evil" in a prelapsarian realm we can neither 
recapture nor reclaim, Bonhoeffer is surely taking a sturdy swipe at 
Nietzsche. To seek to move beyond good and evil once the point of 
origin is lost is to stake out far too much territory for oneself - 
for the creature - and against the Creator. "

from Chapter One of
_Who Are We? Critical Reflections and Hopeful Possibilities _
By JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/e/elshtain-who.html

" As an exercise in the theological, political, and ethical 
imagination, I am going to work through two competing interpretations 
that suggest rather different orientations to human nature and human 
possibility. The thinkers involved are two of the great Christian 
teachers of this century, both philosophical theologians, who 
emphasize or stress contrasting features of the narrative each 
shares. The names of these thinkers will be familiar to everyone: 
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II. Why them? 
Because their lives intersect with the searing events that have 
tortured and tormented our century - Nazism, Stalinism, World War II 
- and, for Pope John Paul II, continuing Soviet domination and a 
lingering Cold War followed by that extraordinary outbreak of hope 
and freedom marked by Solidarity in Poland, Civic Forum in 
Czechoslovakia, and other freedom movements leading up to the end of 
the Cold War. Bonhoeffer died a martyr for his anti-Nazism. Karol 
Wojtyla, studying for the priesthood underground, participating in 
illegal theatrical productions at the risk of his life, witnessed the 
reduction of his country to rubble, the killing of much of the Polish 
intelligentsia and priesthood (as high as 50 percent of priests in 
some regions of Poland), and the indescribable horrors of the Shoah 
set up by the Nazi aggressors on Polish land. Each, then, saw the 
worst. But each calls us to the best - to courage and to Christian 
hope. "Be not afraid!" were the first words of Karol Wojtyla's 
pontificate. Whatever a person's views on the positions taken or 
upheld by this extraordinary pope, all credit him with exceptional 
moral and physical courage. Bonhoeffer, as readers of this volume 
will know, might have lived out his life - all those years beckoning 
him - in safety on foreign shores, as a student and teacher at Union 
Theological Seminary in New York City, but he chose to return to the 
site of greatest danger and there he met his martyrdom. I have, then, 
consciously selected as exemplary figures two men who enacted the 
Christian life and witness in the most dangerous and deadly of 
circumstances - fighting totalitarianism. "


Another take on some of the territory and material that Pynchon 
covers in GR.  I found this first chapter worth reading. You might 
want to do so, too, before taking pot shots at the excerpts I've 
quoted, but that's only a suggestion that never seems to stop anybody 
from doing it.
-- 

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