Religion & Law

I haven't spent a whole lot of time this holiday season thinking about human dignity (unless you count the affront to a parent's dignity that accompanies spending $21 for their child's meal at Disney World).  I did, however, just read Gilbert Meilander's wonderful Neither Beast Nor God: The Dignity of the Human Person. It's an easy and relatively quick read, but it is brimming with insights.  What I take to be his starting point is the apparent contradiction between statements on murderers by Aquinas ("A man who sins deviates from the rational order, and so loses his human dignity.") and John Paul II ("Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity.").  The path of reconciliation is to unpack two different concepts of dignity: human dignity and personal dignity.  I confess to finding the labels a little confusing as applied in the book, but the underlying ideas are on-target.  He's basically trying to distinguish dignity as an attribute to be cultivated from dignity as intrinsic worth.  The book is well worth your time.