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Tony Coady

Tony Coady is Professorial Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. He is a Catholic.

Tony Coady reviews ‘Worlds in Collision’ by Ken Booth and Tim Dunne & ‘Terror’ by John Carroll

November 2002, no. 246 16 November 2002
These two books represent strikingly different responses to the events of September 11; indeed in some respects they encompass radically divergent human reactions to tragedy of any sort. The Worlds in Collision collection is mostly cool, analytic and carefully reasoned; it contains a pooling of ideas from many different sources, an academic symposium in print. John Carroll’s book is highly perso ... (read more)

Tony Coady reviews 'Saving God: Religion After Idolatry' by Mark Johnston

December 2009–January 2010, no. 317 01 December 2009
Mark Johnston’s Saving God: Religion after Idolatry is an astonishing book. Its surprise consists in its topic, style, passion, range of religious and philosophical scholarship, and its daring blend of human depth and philosophical originality. Johnston describes it as an essay that ‘gradually evolves into a sort of jeremiad’. There are plenty of complaints, and it is at times a tirade, espe ... (read more)

Tony Coady reviews 'Killing in War' by Jeff McMahan

March 2010, no. 319 01 March 2010
One of the most productive and interesting areas of research in applied philosophy is concerned with moral issues around warfare. Although there had been important contributions previously, Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars (1977) was immensely influential in philosophy and well beyond its confines, reinstating ‘just war’ thinking as a mainstream intellectual position. It became, for ins ... (read more)

Tony Coady reviews 'Why Priests? A failed tradition' by Garry Wills

October 2013, no. 355 26 September 2013
Garry Wills is a distinguished American historian whose writings over the past twenty years or so on the frailties of the Catholic Church, notably in such books as Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (2000) and Why I Am a Catholic (2002), have provided stinging critiques of the institution to which he still steadfastly belongs. His new book, Why Priests? A Failed Tradition, continues the theme by reje ... (read more)