Nicholas Wolterstorff on Justice

My Monday morning is brightened with an email in my inbox notifying me
the content of the latest issue of the Journal of Religious Ethics, Volume 37
Issue 2 (June 2009), which has a few articles focusing on Nicholas Wolterstorff and his new book, Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Wolterstorff is the Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School. As many others, I thoroughly benefited from his highly-acclaimed work on the subject, Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Eerdmans, 1983, second. ed 1994).

Here are the articles I referred to above:

*NICHOLAS WOLTERSTORFF'S JUSTICE: RIGHTS AND WRONGS:/ AN
INTRODUCTION (p 179-192)* Paul Weithman

*THE LANGUAGE OF RIGHTS AND CONCEPTUAL HISTORY (p 193-207)* Oliver O'Donovan

*WOLTERSTORFF, RIGHTS, WRONGS, AND THE BIBLE (p 209-219)* Harold W. Attridge

*DOES HE PULL IT OFF? A THEISTIC GROUNDING OF NATURAL INHERENT HUMAN RIGHTS? (p 221-241)* Richard J. Bernstein

*GOD'S VELVETEEN RABBIT (p 243-260)* Paul Weithman

*JUSTICE AS INHERENT RIGHTS: A RESPONSE TO MY COMMENTATORS (p 261-279)* Nicholas Wolterstorff

The last article above is Wolterstorff's response to his commentators. Here is the abstract of the article:

The critical comments by my fellow symposiasts on my book, Justice: Rights and Wrongs, have provided me with the opportunity to clarify parts of my argument and to correct some misunderstandings; they have also helped me see more clearly than I did before the import of some parts of my argument. In his comments, Paul Weithman points out features
of the right order conception of justice that I had not noticed. They have also prodded me to clarify in what way rights are trumps; and both his comments and Bernstein's have prodded me to clarify certain aspects of the theistic account of human rights that I offered. Attridge's comments lead me to see that I was perhaps over-zealous in emphasizing the objective aspects of the semantic range of dikaiosunê as used in the New Testament and downplaying the subjective aspects. And O'Donovan's comments have provided me with the opportunity to make clear that my account of rights is not an immunities account that presupposes nominalism, and to emphasize the ways in which it is not an asocial individualistic account.