In Hume's dialogue with the Hobbesian-Mandevillian "selfish system" of morals, Hume seems to reject its conclusions in morals, but accept them in politics. No skeptic of moral claims like Mandeville, Hume sought to ground objective moral standards in his moral sentiment philosophy, yet, like Mandeville, Hume argued that in political life human beings act based largely on self-interest and a limited generosity. I argue that Hume, however, is ultimately ambivalent about the selfish system's conclusions in politics. He puts forth both (...) a nonmoral and a moral solution to the problem of cohesion in modern liberal states. First, he agrees with the selfish system's nonmoral tactic of channeling the self-interest of citizens through well-constructed institutions toward salutary ends. Second, arguing that the first solution is insufficient for the health of a political regime, Hume seeks to expand the limited moral sense of citizens through moral and aesthetic education and through an empowerment of local politics. Hume's second solution is a means within liberalism to combat its own tendencies toward the dissolution of communal ties and the creation of conditions ripe for the emergence of "sensible knaves.". (shrink)

The environment, particularly, land and water, play a powerful role in sustaining and supporting American Indian and Alaska Native communities in the United States. Not only is water essential to life and considered — by some Tribes — a sacred food in and of itself, but environmental water resources are necessary to maintain habitat for hunting and fishing. Many American Indian and Alaska Native communities incorporate locally caught traditional subsistence foods into their diets, and the loss of access to subsistence (...) foods represents a risk factor for food security and nutrition status in indigenous populations. Negative health outcomes, including obesity, diabetes and cancer, have accompanied declines in traditional food use in indigenous communities throughout the United States. (shrink)

Dominant Northern development expertise acknowledges religion mostly as impeding development processes and aim to secularize and ‘modernize’ the South. This paper seeks to map out the various intersections of church and actors’ livelihoods, and explain those nodal points through villagers’ eyes. The study employed ethnographic interviewing to weave life-histories of households, and analyzed data to locate patterns and concepts at intersections of church and livelihood. The paper reports that actors employed church as arena to construct, extend and (...) defend livelihoods; and re-engineering a resource-system church is promising. Thus church interlocks with livelihood construction processes, presenting opportunities for synergy in mission. (shrink)

The church’s mission to the world in the new millennium will require a careful balance of global vision and local sensitivity. Karl Rahner’s ecclesiology supplies useful tools for this balance, in that it moves toward an appreciation of the inherent authority and dignity of the local church community, understood as an interpersonal network within the broader church. Rahner’s focus on the church as sacrament provides the key consideration: that the church necessarily accomplishes its (...) mission in the midst of concrete historical contexts. Rahner also provides a way of understanding the presence of the whole church embodied in the local community, particularly as it gathers for Eucharist. This sharing in the essence of the church also manifests itself in the local community’s roles in nurturing and responding to official authority. Rahner’s trust in the work of the Spirit for the maintenance of unity allows him to revel in the church’s diversity. The local community shows most clearly the aspect of church as pilgrim in the world, which Rahner underscores. Because the local community embodies the universal church in a particular location, the study of the community and its contexts is essential for understanding the reality and the mission of the church in the world. (shrink)

The analysis of UCEPS results obtained during a sociological survey gives grounds to claim that religiosity and the Church are different things for Ukrainian society. First, faith in God does not meet the level of trust in the Church. If 57.8% of our fellow citizens believed themselves to be believers, only 33.7% fully trusted the Church, with less than half being 48%; of the non-believers, only 7.8%. This situation testified to the alienation of society and even believers (...) from the Church itself. (shrink)

This chapter re-examines the evidence for local ecclesiastical and other burial sites in pre-Viking Ireland. It compares local churches and cemetery settlements in pre-Viking Ireland with those found in England and Wales. The chapter describes the density of the pre-Viking ecclesiastical sites in Ireland, church density and social structure in Anglo-Saxon England, and the local ecclesiastical sites in Cornwall and Wales.

Emerging adults (age 35 and below) are the majority of the African population. In South Africa, for example, emerging adults make 63.9% of its population. This age group seems to be marginalised in Christian congregations of the township of Soshanguve where this research was conducted. This research is a case study that interviewed 30 de-churched emerging adults from different denominations to make its conclusions. It is stressing how the church could see the emerging adults’ empowerment as its contribution to (...) building an inclusive society. It was found out that many people under the age of 35 years are leaving their local churches because they feel that their voices are undervalued, and they do not have fulfilling roles to play. It was concluded that some de-churched emerging adults are eager to exercise their agency in making their voices heard and playing fulfilling roles in a missional community structure outside their previous congregations. Many others just complained about the marginalisation they experienced in their previous congregations, but they did not exercise their agency to help build a church they would love to be part of. Marginalisation could, therefore, be an opportunity to create an inclusive community. It could also remain an eternal wound for other people who may just be finger-pointing perpetrators of marginalisation without demonstrating a different praxis.Contribution: This is a practical theology article that is strengthened by sources from political sciences and development studies to stress the need for the church to model inter-generational inclusiveness in how it operates. (shrink)

The latest volume in this prestigious series brings together twenty-five global scholars to reflect on the role of Catholic ethicists in the context of their particular, local churches and in light of the ecclesiological shifts following Vatican II.

Demographic change, change in family structures, growing ethnic plurality resulting from migration, social inequality and so on require new ways of addressing spiritual and social needs in many Western European countries. In view of these current social changes, increasingly more effort is being put into strengthening cooperation between church congregations and diaconal institutions at the local level. This article will focus on the reciprocal relationship between the church and its immediate local context by focusing on one (...) of the church’s ministries – diaconia – as a service of God’s people to the world. Although diaconia is part of the church, it has developed in organisations separate from the church and thus as a parallel structure to the institutionalised church structure in many countries. The current changes offer opportunities for the church and diaconia to join forces and to overcome cooperational difficulties at the local level. The objective of this article is to draw attention to the potential of the social space for collaboration, to analyse hindrances to collaborative efforts on a practical level and to point out what steps the church and diaconia may take to further local collaboration.Contribution: The contribution of this article is to analyse the social space with regard to the collaboration between local churches and diaconal organisations, and thereby to point out its potential for their further development in line with the journal’s focus on original ideas in practical theology. (shrink)

The findings of the Archbishop's Council in their 2004 report, to the effect that traditional forms of church in Britain are under threat because of changing cultural patterns, emphasise the need to re-think church for our contemporary contexts. The 'Fresh Expressions of church' movement is one such initiative identified and approved of by the Archbishop's Council. This article reports on research undertaken in a practical theological interpretation of The Filling Station, a Christian ministry that has grown significantly (...) in its 10-year history and was formed as a missional endeavour in recognition of declining church attendance in traditional churches in Britain. This work explores whether The Filling Station is a Fresh Expression of church and whether it meets the values of authentic missional churches. In examining whether The Filling Station ought to be considered for import into appropriate local congregational contexts, it enquires whether it satisfactorily addresses prevailing social trends affecting churches, including consumerism and the need for identity. (shrink)

This paper is based on an open lecture given at OCMS on Tuesday 21 December 2004.

Church's and Turing's theses dogmatically assert that an informal notion of effective calculability is adequately captured by a particular mathematical concept of computability. I present an analysis of calculability that is embedded in a rich historical and philosophical context, leads to precise concepts, but dispenses with theses. To investigate effective calculability is to analyze symbolic processes that can in principle be carried out by calculators. This is a philosophical lesson we owe to Turing. Drawing on that lesson and recasting (...) work of Gandy, I formulate boundedness and locality conditions for two types of calculators, namely, human computing agents and mechanical computing devices (discrete machines). The distinctive feature of the latter is that they can carry out parallel computations. The analysis leads to axioms for discrete dynamical systems (representing human and machine computations) and allows the reduction of models of these axioms to Turing machines. Cellular automata and a variety of artificial neural nets can be shown to satisfy the axioms for machine computations. (shrink)

Nowadays there are practically no political empires in the world: they have disintegrated. In the ruins of the former communist empire of the Soviet Union, our Ukraine became independent even in 1991. Who would have thought that the Ukrainian people, who for centuries had been taunting about its unbreakable fraternal union as if from a half-Russian people, suddenly decided to stay away from this "brother". Our 350-year-old colonial existence has come to an end.

Many mainline Protestant communities want to be welcoming while preserving their identities; they want to be shaped by the central claims of the faith while making room for those who doubt. And crucially, they want to do this in a way that leads to vibrant, growing communities, where more and more people gather to worship, encourage one another, and live out the Gospel. How should the Episcopal Church—and other mainline Protestant denominations, insofar as they’re similar—try to achieve these goals? (...) I suggest that local churches borrow some resources from John Rawls’s Political Liberalism. On the view I outline, it’s valuable for local churches to see themselves as akin to political bodies composed of reasonable citizens. The idea, in essence, is that the relevant kind of reasonableness would make congregations more unified even while tolerating more diversity, and would accomplish all this without giving up their distinctly Christian identity. (shrink)

This paper proposes a way of navigating the tension between the local and global in Fratelli tutti. The author argues that the encyclical exemplifies and develops an analogical approach for authentic encounter. The analogical approach to God and its use of language emphasize a tensive space between the known and unknown, which the author transposes to human encounter. The encyclical grounds and develops this transposed analogical approach through emphasis on cultural diversity, with a bifocal affirmation of difference and desire (...) for relationship. Francis’s attention to Indigenous peoples grounds attention to the local as disposing toward a global outlook in care for the natural world. Finally, the author applies this approach to reflection on reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and the Church in Canada. Reflection on language is thereby put to the work of engaging the tensive and morally complex space between truth and reconciliation—namely, the space of encount er where healing is ongoing. (shrink)

Originally published 1971, this volume unravels the complicated history of the religious question in British education. The background of the key Acts of Parliament which established the "dual" system – of Church and Local Authority school – is examined. The changing policies of different religious groupings are analyzed, and their outcome in legislation brought out.

This article assesses the shortcomings and the disconnectedness of the current academic theological education in South Africa. It offers a brief history to provide a guiding principle for academic theology. It then proceeds to show the current disconnect and challenges between academic theology and the church, with its primary focus on academic theology. Drawing on original research and reflection on these responses, commodification, euro-centricity and rankings are seen as three traps of modern academics. These three areas have distorted the (...) true content of theological reflection. This article thus clearly highlights the current problem and motivates the need for academic theology and the local church to reconnect with each other. With this article focussing on academic institutions, it calls for the academy to change not in nature but in content, and to draw its content for the local context. (shrink)

In the article by A. Kolodny and L. Fylypovych, dedicated to Ivan Ogienko, the Ogienko's vision of the features of the Orthodox Churches locality, in particular the specifics of their manifestation in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, is presented. The main features of Ukrainian Orthodoxy are revealed.