“ … the soldiers of the governor took Jesus in to the praetorium, and they gathered the whole battalion before him.”.

The preaching function of the ministry marks the church as the holy community of God in the world as it nurtures and reforms the language of faith, traditions the faithful in a Christian past, and reflects on the crucial crises of historical events in the light of Jesus Christ.

In 2005, President George Bush read John Barry’s The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. After his experiences of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, Bush began the first White...

Much of the recent AI-LLM literature has been apocalyptic in pointing out the risks of AI technology, “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal...

All of our information about the world is derived from the function of our senses, and thus they are the principal source of all our knowledge. This was recognized explicitly by early Greek philosophers, remained an important point of discussion for nineteenth‐century philosophers, and continues to be a key issue for present‐day philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. It is a key issue in cognitive science because, by initiating the processes that store and evaluate information, sensory information transmission can be considered a (...) cognitive initiator. In a very real sense, who we are and how we see the world are the result of the experiences that are mediated by our sensory systems. These are some of the reasons why the study of sensory systems has occupied such a prominent place in modern cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People is recognized as a masterpiece among the historical literature of medieval England and Europe. Completed in 731, it comprises in a single flowing narrative a coherent history of the conversion of the English peoples to Christianity, and the story of the island kingdoms and churches from the 590s to the early eighth century, prefaced by a sketch of the earlier history of Britain. In 1969 the Clarendon Press published the new edition in Oxford (...) Medieval Texts, edited by Bertram Colgrave and Sir Roger Mynors. Mynors's masterly text and textual introduction replaced much of Charles Plummer's great edition of 1896; but the historical notes did not attempt to match in scale and detail Plummer's second volume of commentary. To fill this gap the late Professor J. M. Wallace-Hadrill devoted the last years of his life to a new commentary, one of the finest and most mature fruits of his scholarship - more succinct than Plummer, tauter, more relevant, above all drawing together and adding to the findings of a galaxy of modern scholars. Prepared for the press by Thomas Charles-Edwards, helped by Patrick Wormald and others, this book completes the new Bede, and is prefaced by a paper characteristic of Professor Wallace-Hadrill on `Bede and Plummer'. (shrink)

Confronting fundamentalism: the dangerous God of "control and condemn" -- 1967: What the cake said -- God-talk 101: The art that is Christianity -- The Copernican turn of Christian humanism -- Quantum theology: the symbolic character of God-talk -- Theological weirdness (1): the symbolic claim that God is a person -- Poets as theologians: the moral imagination of Christian Humanist tradition -- Moses debates with a burning bush -- I AM v. I WILL BE: translation and the authority of theologians (...) -- Theological weirdness (2): the symbolic claim that God is necessarily impersonal -- What, then, can be said about God? (shrink)

This book shows that the repeated announcements of the death of Hegel's philosophical system have been premature. Hegel's Philosophy of Freedom, Reality, and God brings to light accomplishments for which Hegel is seldom given credit: unique arguments for the reality of freedom, for the reality of knowledge, for the irrationality of egoism, and for the compatibility of key insights from traditional theism and naturalistic atheism. The book responds in a systematic manner to many of the major criticisms leveled at Hegel's (...) system, from Feuerbach and Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Charles Taylor. It provides detailed interpretations of Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit, large parts of his indispensable Science of Logic, and important parts of his Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Right. Unlike many academic books on Hegel, this one treats him very much as a 'live' thinker, whom we can learn from today. (shrink)

Corporate codes of conduct are a practical corporate social responsibility (CSR) instrument commonly used to govern employee behavior and establish a socially responsible organizational culture. The effectiveness of these codes has been widely discussed on theoretical grounds and empirically tested in numerous previous reports that directly compare companies with and without codes of conduct. Empirical research has yielded inconsistent results that may be explained by multiple ancillary factors, including the quality of code content and implementation, which are excluded from analyses (...) based solely on the presence or absence of codes.This study investigated the importance of code content in determining code effectiveness by examining the relationship between code of conduct quality and ethical performance. Companies maintaining high quality codes of conduct were significantly more represented among top CSR ranking systems for corporate citizenship, sustainability, ethical behavior, and public perception. Further, a significant relationship was observed between code quality and CSR performance, across a full range of ethical rankings. These findings suggest code quality may play a crucial role in the effectiveness of codes of conduct and their ability to transform organizational cultures.Future research efforts should transcend traditional comparisons based on the presence or absence of ethical codes and begin to examine the essential factors leading to the effective establishment of CSR policies and sustainable business practices in corporate culture. (shrink)

_Plato's Dialectical Ethics,_ Gadamer's earliest work, has now been translated into English for the first time. This classic book, published in 1931 and reprinted in 1967 and 1982, is still important today. It is one of the most extensive and imaginative interpretations of Plato's _Philebus_ and an ideal introduction to Gadamer's thinking. It shows how his influential hermeneutics emerged from the application of his teacher Martin Heidegger's phenomenological method to classical texts and problems. The work consists of two chapters. The (...) first, which puts Socratic/Platonic dialectics and ethics in the context of Gadamer's thinking about how we come to shared understanding through conversation, helps to clarify the intentions and trajectory of all Gadamer's subsequent work. The second chapter, on the _Philebus, _will interest everyone who is concerned with the connection between Plato's discussions of ethics and those of Aristotle, and with the substantive issues of the relation between pleasure and reason that Plato explores and Gadamer interprets. This edition includes a new and useful introduction by the translator, Robert M. Wallace. (shrink)

Many readers have suspected that Hegel---in arguing against Kant’s individualistic and critical way of approaching ethics and favoring instead an “ethical life” he associates with custom and habit---is in effect eliminating both individual judgment and any basis for criticism of corrupt or unjust communities. Most specialists reject this view of Hegel’s ethical theory, but they haven’t explained precisely how, on the contrary, ethical life preserves individual judgment and criticism within a new way of thinking about ethics. The goal of this (...) paper is to do that. (shrink)

Many readers have suspected that Hegel---in arguing against Kant’s individualistic and critical way of approaching ethics and favoring instead an “ethical life” he associates with custom and habit---is in effect eliminating both individual judgment and any basis for criticism of corrupt or unjust communities. Most specialists reject this view of Hegel’s ethical theory, but they haven’t explained precisely how, on the contrary, ethical life preserves individual judgment and criticism within a new way of thinking about ethics. The goal of this (...) paper is to do that. (shrink)

This major work by the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg is a monumental rethinking of the significance of the Copernican revolution for our understanding of modernity. It provides an important corrective to the view of science as an autonomous enterprise and presents a new account of the history of interpretations of the significance of the heavens for man.Hans Blumenberg is Professor of Philosophy, emeritus, at the University of Munster in West Germany. This book is included in the series Studies in Contemporary (...) German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy. (shrink)