Guest Cross Post: Extremism And The Sensible Centre
Written by Tony Coady , Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne and Honorary Professor at the Australian Catholic University, Honorary Fellow in the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics in Oxford.
There are a plethora of terms in widespread political and social use that often obfuscate more than they elucidate. One of those is “terrorism” and its derivatives such as “terrorist”, but I have had my say about this elsewhere, most recently in my 2021 book The Meaning of Terrorism and will simply commend it to readers. Here I want to address instead the cluster of expressions around “extremist/extremism”, “radical/radicalism” and best of all “the sensible centre”.
Typical quotes about extremism show the standardly condemnatory nature of its widespread current usage. Examples are almost endless, but here are two examples from very different well-known people: “A people inspired by democracy, human rights and economic opportunity will turn their back decisively against extremism.” – Benazir Bhutto;[1] “Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.” – Milan Kundera [2] Continue reading
Catholic Identity and Strong Dissent—How Compatible?
Written by Professor Tony Coady
University of Melbourne
In a previous Uehiro blog[1] I offered a number of fairly radical criticisms of church disciplinary practices, and of several prevailing “official” teachings of the Church, such as on artificial contraception, abortion and much else in the area of sexual and reproductive ethics. Subsequently, several people put the question to me: “Given your critical views of so much official church teaching, how can you still call yourself a Catholic?” Continue reading
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