Jesse Couenhoven
Biographic Data
| ID | 1695093 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jesse Couenhoven |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jesse |
| FAMILY NAME | Couenhoven |
| SIGNATURE | COUENHOVEN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Villanova University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1087-3011 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Glorious Vices? Reconsidering Augustine's View of Pagan Virtue
St. Augustine famously argued that those who do not orient their loves toward God lack true virtue, offering as a test case pagan sages who cared too much for their own honor. For this polemic he has been lauded and lambasted; however, in significant ways, I contend, he has been misunderstood. A close reading of Augustine in his historical context helps us understand him as a revisionary yet committed classical eudaimonist, whose attack on pagan …
A “Kind Harshness”
Augustine’s theology of divine forgiveness has received surprisingly little sustained attention. This is unfortunate, not least because his approach offers a thought-provoking contrast to the way forgiveness is typically conceived in our own day. We commonly understand forgiveness in therapeutic terms, as overcoming resentment or anger. For Augustine, God’s forgiveness is “metaphysical”—an other-oriented action that changes the moral and spiritua…
Tragic Dilemmas in Christian Ethics
Augustine on the Will
His Sovereignty Rules Over All
The Justice in Mercy
It is natural to wonder how mercy is related to justice. I focus in this essay on a more limited question: how should we relate mercy and retributive justice? My suggestion is that attending to our situation as moral agents can help us solve this conundrum. I offer a pessimistic reading of our situation. Because of original sin and related forms of bad moral luck, we have limited control over our attitudes and actions. This has a surprisingly hop…
Eudaimonism, Virtue, and Self‐Sacrifice
This essay introduces some of the key topics at stake in the ongoing controversies about the place of eudaimonism in Christian ethics and theology. Whether and in what way a person should seek her or his own happiness and flourishing has been a central question in ethics for centuries. Here I summarize the contributions the essays in this focus issue make to that conversation, and conclude by briefly sketching a Neoplatonist approach to eudaimoni…
The Possibilities of Forgiveness
Perhaps the best way to challenge anodyne popular conceptions of forgiveness is to highlight the ways in which “forgiveness,” like “justice” and “freedom,” is a rich and deeply contested term that relies for its content on divergent convictions about who we are and who we should seek to be. The essays in this focus issue articulate some of the many possibilities for practicing and thinking about forgiveness
Fodge-ogs and HedgeOxes
MY ACADEMIC HISTORY has been a hodgepodge of what some might consider incongruous parts, and I have been pulled between the constituents of that history. In college, I remember being struck by the differences between two courses addressing the “problem of evil”: in one, a religion professor assigned complex Jewish reflections on the absence of God in the Shoah; in another, an analytic philosopher of religion offered an array of distinctions I fou…
Sin
Augustine's Inner Dialogue
Journal Article Augustine's Inner Dialogue: The Philosophical Soliloquy in Late Antiquity. By Brian Stock Get access Augustine's Inner Dialogue: The Philosophical Soliloquy in Late Antiquity. By Brian Stock. Cambridge University Press, 2010. 240 pages. $85.00. Jesse Couenhoven Jesse Couenhoven Villanova University [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academ…
Against Metaethical Imperialism
Virtue and deontological ethics are now commonly contrasted as rival approaches to moral inquiry. However, I argue that neither metaethical party should seek complete, solitary domination of the ethical domain. Reductive treatments of the right or the virtuous, as well as projects that abandon the former or latter, are bound to leave us with a sadly diminished map of the moral territories crucial to our lives. Thus, it is better for the two parti…
Forgiveness and Restoration
What Sin Is
Sin is clearly evil, but what differentiates sin from evil? The idea that sin is moral evil is widely held, but important theological arguments have been posed against it. Theologians who reject sin moralism have, however, found it hard to distinguish sin from evil—partially because they share hidden assumptions with sin moralists. Helped by a philosophical theology of deep responsibility, I propound sin responsibilism: sin is culpable evil. This…
Augustine's rejection of the free-will defence
Augustine is commonly considered the greatest early proponent of what we call the free-will defence, but this idea is deeply misleading, as Augustine grew increasingly dissatisfied with the view from an early point in his career, and his later explorations of the implications of his doctrines of sin and grace led him to reject free-will theodicies altogether. As a compatibilist, however, he continued to reject the idea that God is responsible for…
Law and Gospel, or the Law of the Gospel? Karl Barth’s Political Theology Compared with Luther and Calvin
This essay is an attempt to understand the significance of Barth’s redefinition of the “law/gospel” rubric for political theology. Barth’s thought is exposited at length, and illumined by comparison with Luther and Calvin. Luther emphasizes the distance between gospel and the law, distinguishing between serving God in the secular regiment, and serving Christ in the spiritual regiment. He thereby challenges the improper relation of state and churc…
Grace as Pardon and Power
Christians have long understood grace both as a declaration of acceptance and as a power that transforms. This article illumines two theses while investigating the relationship between these understandings of grace in Luther, Calvin, and Barth's development of the law/gospel dialectic and the doctrines of justification and sanctification. First, though each theologian makes use of both understandings of grace, each also tends to emphasize one ove…
Fodge-ogs and HedgeOxes
MY ACADEMIC HISTORY has been a hodgepodge of what some might consider incongruous parts, and I have been pulled between the constituents of that history. In college, I remember being struck by the differences between two courses addressing the “problem of evil”: in one, a religion professor assigned complex Jewish reflections on the absence of God in the Shoah; in another, an analytic philosopher of religion offered an array of distinctions I fou…
Forgiveness and Restoration
Grace as Pardon and Power
Christians have long understood grace both as a declaration of acceptance and as a power that transforms. This article illumines two theses while investigating the relationship between these understandings of grace in Luther, Calvin, and Barth's development of the law/gospel dialectic and the doctrines of justification and sanctification. First, though each theologian makes use of both understandings of grace, each also tends to emphasize one ove…
Law and Gospel, or the Law of the Gospel? Karl Barth’s Political Theology Compared with Luther and Calvin
This essay is an attempt to understand the significance of Barth’s redefinition of the “law/gospel” rubric for political theology. Barth’s thought is exposited at length, and illumined by comparison with Luther and Calvin. Luther emphasizes the distance between gospel and the law, distinguishing between serving God in the secular regiment, and serving Christ in the spiritual regiment. He thereby challenges the improper relation of state and churc…
Augustine's rejection of the free-will defence
Augustine is commonly considered the greatest early proponent of what we call the free-will defence, but this idea is deeply misleading, as Augustine grew increasingly dissatisfied with the view from an early point in his career, and his later explorations of the implications of his doctrines of sin and grace led him to reject free-will theodicies altogether. As a compatibilist, however, he continued to reject the idea that God is responsible for…
What Sin Is
Sin is clearly evil, but what differentiates sin from evil? The idea that sin is moral evil is widely held, but important theological arguments have been posed against it. Theologians who reject sin moralism have, however, found it hard to distinguish sin from evil—partially because they share hidden assumptions with sin moralists. Helped by a philosophical theology of deep responsibility, I propound sin responsibilism: sin is culpable evil. This…
Against Metaethical Imperialism
Virtue and deontological ethics are now commonly contrasted as rival approaches to moral inquiry. However, I argue that neither metaethical party should seek complete, solitary domination of the ethical domain. Reductive treatments of the right or the virtuous, as well as projects that abandon the former or latter, are bound to leave us with a sadly diminished map of the moral territories crucial to our lives. Thus, it is better for the two parti…
Forgiveness and Restoration
Sin
Augustine's Inner Dialogue
Journal Article Augustine's Inner Dialogue: The Philosophical Soliloquy in Late Antiquity. By Brian Stock Get access Augustine's Inner Dialogue: The Philosophical Soliloquy in Late Antiquity. By Brian Stock. Cambridge University Press, 2010. 240 pages. $85.00. Jesse Couenhoven Jesse Couenhoven Villanova University [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academ…
The Possibilities of Forgiveness
Perhaps the best way to challenge anodyne popular conceptions of forgiveness is to highlight the ways in which “forgiveness,” like “justice” and “freedom,” is a rich and deeply contested term that relies for its content on divergent convictions about who we are and who we should seek to be. The essays in this focus issue articulate some of the many possibilities for practicing and thinking about forgiveness
Fodge-ogs and HedgeOxes
MY ACADEMIC HISTORY has been a hodgepodge of what some might consider incongruous parts, and I have been pulled between the constituents of that history. In college, I remember being struck by the differences between two courses addressing the “problem of evil”: in one, a religion professor assigned complex Jewish reflections on the absence of God in the Shoah; in another, an analytic philosopher of religion offered an array of distinctions I fou…
Eudaimonism, Virtue, and Self‐Sacrifice
This essay introduces some of the key topics at stake in the ongoing controversies about the place of eudaimonism in Christian ethics and theology. Whether and in what way a person should seek her or his own happiness and flourishing has been a central question in ethics for centuries. Here I summarize the contributions the essays in this focus issue make to that conversation, and conclude by briefly sketching a Neoplatonist approach to eudaimoni…
The Justice in Mercy
It is natural to wonder how mercy is related to justice. I focus in this essay on a more limited question: how should we relate mercy and retributive justice? My suggestion is that attending to our situation as moral agents can help us solve this conundrum. I offer a pessimistic reading of our situation. Because of original sin and related forms of bad moral luck, we have limited control over our attitudes and actions. This has a surprisingly hop…
His Sovereignty Rules Over All
Augustine on the Will
Glorious Vices? Reconsidering Augustine's View of Pagan Virtue
St. Augustine famously argued that those who do not orient their loves toward God lack true virtue, offering as a test case pagan sages who cared too much for their own honor. For this polemic he has been lauded and lambasted; however, in significant ways, I contend, he has been misunderstood. A close reading of Augustine in his historical context helps us understand him as a revisionary yet committed classical eudaimonist, whose attack on pagan …
A “Kind Harshness”
Augustine’s theology of divine forgiveness has received surprisingly little sustained attention. This is unfortunate, not least because his approach offers a thought-provoking contrast to the way forgiveness is typically conceived in our own day. We commonly understand forgiveness in therapeutic terms, as overcoming resentment or anger. For Augustine, God’s forgiveness is “metaphysical”—an other-oriented action that changes the moral and spiritua…
Tragic Dilemmas in Christian Ethics
Philosophy (15 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Theology (9 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Augustinian Studies and Theology (5 works) · Art (4 works) · Computer Science (4 works)