Benedict XVI's speech at the University of Regensburg has special interest for me. The comments about Islam have people pulling the fire alarm, both Muslims and the left-leaning. More on that later. The deeper question is this: is God bound by reason? Is morality directed toward human flourishing a metaphysical necessity of some kind? Could God have willed other than God has in fact willed? Benedict, following many other Catholics, seem to think that Aquinas's Aristotelianism set the boundaries of rational thought, and traces our current woes back through the Reformers to Scotus.
These questions happen to be the subject of a recent doctoral thesis.
