Israel has always mattered to American Christians. They are among the strongest supporters of the State of Israel in the United States. The paper argues that the support that was extended by American Christians in general and the Christian Right in particular, to Israel and the Jewish people is the continuation of a long tradition in conservative American Christians rooted mainly in their theological doctrine. However, the study shows that the Christian Right is (...) ambivalent in its view on Jews. On the one hand, Jews are considered to be God’s chosen people and to have a special Biblical status and role. On the other hand, the Christian Right is allegedly anti-Semitic, as it views Jews as a condemned nation for their rejection of Christ as the Messiah, the reason for which they are unsaved and need to be converted to Christianity. Interestingly, both views, love and hatred of Jews, are based on the Biblical teachings and grounded in conservative Protestant theology; their paradoxical views on Jews are not a new phenomenon among conservative American Christians. Nevertheless, the study found that the support of the American Christians of the establishment of the State of Israel goes beyond theological doctrines or values. In fact, the humanitarian considerations of the liberal Christian and secular organizations in particular, were significant in contributing to the establishment of the Jewish state. (shrink)

Improving structural theories of international politics -- Socializing states in the international system -- Socializing the United States: emergence to major member -- Socializing the United States: structural imperatives and great power status -- Socializing Israel: emergence to major member.

Abstract: The paper deals with “Christian Zionists”, who have born out of Protestantism, conglomerate particularly in the United States of America, provide a non-proportional support for Israel and who at the same time antagonize Islam. The movement’s quiddity, genesis, theology, activities, as well as anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic tendencies are elaborated. According to initial findings, Christian Zionism constitutes an anomaly from a number of perspectives. Most importantly, Jews and Christians symbolize two communities that have been violently antagonizing each (...) other since centuries. Defenders of Christian Zionism believe in the eschatological scenario of “premillennial dispensationalism”, a theology mainly introduced by the Anglo-Irish priest John Nelson Darby that divides world history before the establishment of the global Millennial Empire following the Second Coming into seven dispensations. This scenario determines the raison d’être, purposes, friends and foes of the movement. While the Jewish role in it as frenemies is controversial and ambivalent, Muslims’ role as enemies is unequivocally unfavorable. This situation leads to the demonization of Muslims by Christian Zionist figures. Albeit being criticized by co-religionists in a number of areas including ethics, politics and particularly theology, Christian Zionists occupy a significant position in world politics thanks to their alliance with imperial powers. The paper aims to fill the scholarly gap caused by the scarcity of Turkish literature on Christian Zionism’s quiddity, as well as its nexus with antisemitism and anti-Islamism. -/- Öz: Çalışma Hıristiyanlığın Protestanlık mezhebinden doğan, özellikle Amerika Birleşik Devletleri’nde kümelendiği gözlemlenen, İsrail’i ve Yahudileri orantısızca desteklemesiyle bilinen ve aynı zamanda İslam’a ve Müslümanlara karşı düşmanca yaklaşımları haiz “Hıristiyan siyonistlerini” ele almaktadır. Hareketin mahiyeti, doğuşu, teolojisi, faaliyetleri ve kendisinde mündemiç olan antisemitizm ile anti-İslamizm olguları incelenmektedir. Bulgulara göre, Hıristiyan siyonizmi çeşitli açılardan bakıldığında bir anomali teşkil etmektedir. Bunlardan en önemlisi, Yahudilerin ve Hıristiyanların yüzyıllarca birbirlerine en üst seviyede düşmanlık etmiş olan iki topluluk oluşudur. Hıristiyan siyonistler dünya tarihini Mesih’in zuhuruyla birlikte kurulacak olan bin yıllık küresel krallık öncesindeki yedi bölüm olarak ele alan, sınırları büyük ölçüde İngiliz-İrlandalı teolog John Nelson Darby tarafından çizilen ve “premillennial dispensationalism (premilenyal dispensasyonalizm)” olarak bilinen teolojinin öngördüğü kıyamet senaryosuna inanmaktadır. Bu senaryo hareketin varlık sebebini, amaçlarını, dostlarını ve düşmanlarını belirlemektedir. Dost-düşmanlar olarak Yahudilerin buradaki rolü bazı çelişkiler ve ihtilaflar barındırırken, düşmanlar olarak Müslümanların rolü açıkça olumsuz bir görünüm arz etmektedir. Bunun sonucu olarak Hıristiyan siyonistler Müslümanları şeytanlaştırma eğilimine girmektedir. Her ne kadar dindaşları tarafından ahlak, siyaset ve özellikle teoloji eksenlerinde ağır eleştirilere tabi tutulsalar da Hıristiyan siyonistler emperyalist güçlerle olan uzun ittifaklarının da bir meyvesi olarak dünya politikasında kayda değer bir güce sahiptir. Hıristiyan siyonizminin mahiyeti ve dahi antisemitizm ve anti-İslamizm ile irtibatı konusunda Türkçe yazılmış eserlerin azlığına binaen çalışma literatürdeki bu boşluğu kapatma amacı taşımaktadır. (shrink)

When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential elections with the help of 81 percent of self-identified white evangelicals, liberal commentators, relying on folk-conceptions of religion that privileged concepts like morality and belief, struggled to understand how someone who seemed to lack both could garner such support. Since then scholars have provided various explanations, relating to Christian nationalism evangelical appeals to authoritarianism, and straightforward racism. This article aims to expand this discussion by analyzing the way that evangelical Christian Zionists have supported (...) Trump by rhetorically identifying him as God’s instrument on account of his support for Israel and withdrawal of the United States from the Iran Nuclear Deal. In addition to analyzing the process by which Trump is constituted as God’s instrument, the article also demonstrates more generally how religious discourse functions as a legitimating discourse for those who seek to gain, or maintain, positions of power. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Consistently Pro-Life: The Ethics of Bloodshed in Ancient Christianity by Rob Arner, and: Christ at the Checkpoint: Theology in the Service of Justice and Peace ed. by Paul Alexander, and: Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers: A Virtue Ethic for Catholic Social Teaching and US Policy by Eli Sarasan McCarthyBrian D. BerryReview of Consistently Pro-Life: The Ethics of Bloodshed in Ancient Christianity ROB ARNER Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010. 136 pp. $15.56Review (...) of Christ at the Checkpoint: Theology in the Service of Justice and Peace EDITED BY PAUL ALEXANDER Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012. 182 pp. $19.80Review of Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers: A Virtue Ethic for Catholic Social Teaching and US Policy ELI SARASAN MCCARTHY Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012. 259 pp. $27.00In Consistently Pro-Life, Rob Arner (who teaches at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia) makes the case that Christians should not kill other human beings—regardless of the circumstances. Taking as his point of departure the vigilante killing of abortion doctor George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, in 2009, he argues not only that abortion is always morally impermissible but so also is [End Page 217] the murder of abortion doctors and the use of the death penalty to punish those who murder them. In addition, he turns to the early church fathers to contend that, prior to Constantine, “without exception, the church strongly condemned the taking of human life in any form whatsoever”—thus rejecting abortion and infanticide, the blood sport of the Roman games, suicide, and killing in war (120). This was because the New Testament witness to Jesus and his death on the cross required early Christians to view “the means as just as important, if not more important, than the ends” (xiii).Arner supplements this deontological argument for Christian pacifism, which he learned from John Howard Yoder, with a brief consideration of the virtue of patience cultivated in the early churches, reflecting the influence of Stanley Hauerwas on his thought. This “cardinal virtue” connoting “longsuffering, forbearance, patient endurance”—as found in Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:38–48)—enabled early Christians to practice non-violent resistance “deferring personal revenge in favor of God’s vindicating justice” (98). If Christians were to adopt this same consistently pro-life ethic today, argues Arner, it would “lead to greater healing and peace in our blood-soaked world” (121). The book closes with three appendices—one of which is a chart of terminology that dehumanizes vulnerable victims, including unborn human beings. Unfortunately, the book does not have an index.Christ at the Checkpoint, edited by Paul Alexander (professor of Christian ethics and public policy at the Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University), includes thirteen plenary addresses delivered at a conference on the Arab-Israeli conflict organized by Palestinian Evangelical Christians at Bethlehem Bible College in March 2010. Almost all of the contributors to this volume—including biblical scholars, theologians, ethicists, pastors, activists, and others—criticize the ideology of Christian Zionism and its support of a theology of dispensationalism that, in their view, distorts the scriptures and fosters violence rather than reconciliation between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In his own presentation titled “What Can Pentecostals and Charismatics Do for Peace with Justice in Israel and Palestine?,” Alexander—who describes himself as a former “one-sided” Christian Zionist who later discovered the writings of Yoder and Hauerwas—appeals to Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount and urges Pentecostals to create church communities “that cultivate persons of character and conviction, who through habits, practices, and action live out the core of our faith” (69). Along with being faithful to the “greater challenges” of love, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness, he argues that they should publicly declare that Jesus does not want Israel to continue the occupation of Palestine, and they should engage in the “easier tasks” of promoting human rights, lending support to United Nations Resolutions, and working toward a two-state solution (72). “The time has come in human history,” writes Alexander, “for Pentecostals to speak and act prophetically regarding this present injustice … [End Page 218] and to use every nonviolent weapon in our arsenal—stories, preaching... (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 35, Issue 1, pp 19 - 31 Grotius has often been cited as a crucial link between the ‘Erasmian tradition’ of the Renaissance and Reformation era and the Enlightenment. But there is perhaps a case for identifying him more specifically with the roots of the ‘Radical Enlightenment’. This was partly because of his widely-suspected and commented on tendency towards Socinianism. But it was also due to the uses to which he put his highly sophisticated humanist philology. During (...) the eighteenth century, Grotius’s Bible criticism was seen by some as the root of some of the most subversive criticism of the era. The German deist Reimarus, for instance, author of one of the most vitriolic attacks on Christian revelation of the age, more frequently mentions Grotius’s revisions in his footnotes than he does the criticism of Hobbes, Spinoza, Collins or Toland. This article surveys the aspects of Grotius that significantly contributed to shaping what developed into the ‘Radical Enlightenment’. (shrink)

In the United States, people are deeply divided along lines of race, class, political party, gender, sexuality, and religion. Many believe that historical grievances must eventually be left behind in the interest of progress toward a more just and unified society. But too much in American history is unforgivable and cannot be forgotten. How then can we imagine a way to live together that does not expect people to let go of their entrenched resentments? Living with Hate in American (...) Politics and Religion offers an innovative argument for the power of playfulness in popular culture to make our capacity for coexistence imaginable. Jeffrey Israel explores how people from different backgrounds can pursue justice together, even as they play with their divisive grudges, prejudices, and desires in their cultural lives. Israel calls on us to distinguish between what belongs in a raucous “domain of play” and what belongs in the domain of the political. He builds on the thought of John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum to defend the liberal tradition against challenges posed by Frantz Fanon from the left and Leo Strauss from the right. In provocative readings of Lenny Bruce’s stand-up comedy, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, and Norman Lear’s All in the Family, Israel argues that postwar Jewish American popular culture offers potent and fruitful examples of playing with fraught emotions. Living with Hate in American Politics and Religion is a powerful vision of what it means to live with others without forgiving or forgetting. (shrink)

“Radical Enlightenment” and “moderate Enlightenment” are general categories which, it has become evident in recent decades, are unavoidable and essential for any valid discussion of the Enlightenment broadly conceived (1650-1850) and of the revolutionary era (1775-1848). Any discussion of the Enlightenment or revolutions that does not revolve around these general categories, first introduced in Germany in the 1920s and taken up in the United States since the 1970s, cannot have any validity or depth either historically or philosophically. “Radical Enlightenment” (...) was neither peripheral to the Enlightenment as a whole, nor dominant, but rather the “other side of the coin” an inherent and absolute opposite, always present and always basic to the Enlightenment as a whole. Several different constructions of “Radical Enlightenment” have been proposed by the main innovators on the topic – Leo Strauss, Henry May, Günter Mühlpfordt, Margaret Jacob, Gianni Paganini, Martin Mulsow, and Jonathan Israel – but, it is argued here, the most essential element in the definition is the coupling, or linkage, of philosophical rejection of religious authority (and secularism - the elimination of theology from law, institutions, education and public affairs) with theoretical advocacy of democracy and basic human rights. (shrink)

Contemporary Christian ethics encounters the challenge to communicate genuinely Christian normative orientations within the scientific debate in such a way as to render these orientations comprehensible, and to maintain or enhance their plausibility even for non-Christians. This essay, therefore, proceeds from a biblical motif, takes up certain themes from the Christian tradition (in particular the idea of social justice), and connects both with a compelling contemporary approach to ethics by secular moral philosophy, i.e. with Axel Honneth's reception of Hegel, (...) as based on Hegel's theory of recognition. As a first step, elements of an ethics of recognition are developed on the basis of an anthropological recourse to the conditions of intersubjective encounters. These conditions are then brought to bear on the idea of social justice, as developed in the social-Catholic tradition, and as systematically explored in the Pastoral Letter of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice For All (1986). Proceeding from this basis, aspects of a Christian ethics of community service with regard to long-term care can be defined. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Christian Naturalism: Christian Thinking for Living in This World Only by Karl E. PetersDaniel J. OttChristian Naturalism: Christian Thinking for Living in This World Only. Karl E. Peters. Boston: Wipf & Stock, 2022. xvi + 152 pp. $25.00 paperback; $22.00 eBook; $40.00 hardcover.The number of scholars who would call themselves Christian naturalists and the number of books that think through what it means to be both Christian and (...) naturalist are quite small. Karl E. Peters has been an outstanding figure in this small group for many years. He is a leader in the science and religion dialogue in the United States and has been thinking theologically for a long time about what it means to be a Christian in an age of science. For these reasons, I was eager to read Peters’s Christian Naturalism as it promised to be a concise and systematic summary of his thinking about Christian Naturalist theology. What I found was a book that may have its uses but is not always successful in both its approach and its argumentation.Peters states in the Introduction that the book is “intentionally written for a general audience” (xi), and he maintains an accessible style and vocabulary throughout. Often, the book has an autobiographical quality as Peters weaves in reflection on his own educational journey in both science and theology. Chapters 1 and 3 helpfully lay out a brief comparison of ancient cosmologies and a contemporary scientific cosmology. Chapter 3 is a good example of some of the interesting heuristics that Peters uses throughout as he tells the story of the beginnings of the universe and the emergence of life on Earth in a first-person narrative. The rest of the book proceeds in brief and accessible treatments of categories one would typically find in theology primers: God, Jesus, evil and sin, salvation, ethics, and after death. The remainder of this review will take up two of these categories: 1) evil, sin, and ethics and 2) after death. The former will serve as an example of the book’s relative weaknesses and the latter as an example of the book’s promise and usefulness.“Human Evil,” chapter 4, begins promisingly. Peters builds on an earlier introduction to the idea that we can associate “God” with the creative processes at work in the universe or with creativity itself. Here, Peters argues that being faithful to creativity becomes the norm for Christian faith and morality. “So, being moral means sustaining the well-being of already created dynamic systems and at the same time being open to creativity (God) and the emergence of new systems” (42). Perhaps these arguments would be better positioned at the [End Page 97] beginning of a chapter on morality and ethics rather than the chapter on evil and sin, though, especially since the corollary definition of sin doesn’t come for another twenty-four pages. There, Peters explains that “sin (the Christian term for human evil) is the attempt to limit the work of creativity (God) and to limit what is included in the family of life that arises from the work of creativity (God)” (66). These two definitions taken together offer one of the most theologically pregnant ideas in the book. Unfortunately, they are not pursued and applied in a systematic way throughout the remainder of this chapter and into chapters 7 and 8 on ethics and Christian practice. What we get, instead, is a collection of reflections on various ethical topics including: racism, xenophobia, sexism, and climate change.Perhaps if these sections were retitled “Karl’s Reflections on Wrestling with White, Male Privilege,” the reader would have the right expectation and their usefulness would reemerge. But as they stand they often lose the thread of their connections to his theological definitions and sometimes slip into problematic assumptions. The latter is exhibited when Peters employs the first-person again, this time in reference to certain social histories, as when “you and I” migrated from north Africa to the Caucasus Mountains (47), or when “you and I arrived in America from England in 1630” (58). The assumed “you” seems to be white, male people of anglo origin and therefore cuts... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NOTE ON THE IDEA OF RELJ!GIOUS TRUTH IN THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION HE FOLOWING PAGES claim to be no more than provisional attempt to define a problem of considerble complexity within the Christian tradition. In this introductory note I shall meTely outline how the notion of the truth conveyed by faith soon,after it was established in the New Testament, developed a synthesis with Greek philosophy, at first Platonic, later Aristotelian. (...) In the nominalist crisis this synthesis broke down and two modes of " religious truth " emerged: one within faith with relatively little support from reason, and one of faith within a philosophy henceforth detaiched from theology. Since the nineteenth century we notice that philosophy and theology are moving towards a rapprochement while maintaining their relative aiutonomy. Philosophy appears more inclined to accept religious truth on its own terms without reducing it to an unsuccessful formulation of truth as defined in modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant. Theology, from its side, has increasingly stressed the unique experience implied in faith itself, thus allowing philosophy to include it in its own, general reflection on experience. In a more comprehensive study, to appear in a collective work edited by Daniel Guerriere, I intend to review actual and possible overtures in recent philosophical theories of truth which would rendeT such a rappmchement fruitful. First a word about the biblical context in which the New Testament idea emerged. The earliest articulation of truth in the Bible basically consists in a relation of faithfulness (emet) or :firmness-1a moral quality. Not surprisingly, truth also appears as a correspondence between word and fact-a relation that even to the uncritical mind appears problematic from the start. Thus in Prov1 erbs rn, 17 we read: " He who utters the truth affirms that which will stand; but a lying witness that 499 500 LOUIS DUPRE which will bring dis1a.ppointment." 1 But the more fundamental truth consists in God's steadfastness toward his people and in their participation in it by fidelity to a divinely revealed law.2 In some of the Psalms (such as Ps. 119) the correlation between the law and truth appears particulady clear: the law reveals to us God's fidelity (His truth) and its observance enables us to share in that 3 With the idea that truth requires entrusting one-self to a higher authority, a cognitive quality joins the moml one. We remain in the truth to the extent that we heed the revelation of God's truthfulness as expressed in His commands, and that our deeds, values and attitudes correspond to that divine disclosure. The idea of correspondence, then, which came to dominate the later cognitive discussion started out as a morral-practical one. The same could be said about the idea of coherence. Trust in God's providence and obedience in the Covenant unite all aspects of communal and individual exfatence. The sapiential literature in particular stresses the harmony of a life guided the law. The emphasis upon trust, obedience, and receptivity in the attainment of truth distinguishes the biblical conception from that modem one according to which truth originates in the knowing subject.4 Yet more and more tihe idea of truth as disclosure, that 1 Of course, some of the olcler wisdom literature appears to have consisted of a series of maxims considered useful for promoting a career in Court administration -a relatively" secular" affair. 2 Martin Buber identified the original meaning of faith as steadfastnesseven more than trust in a person. He sees this symbolically represented in the story of Moses' prayer during the battle with Abimelek. As long as his hands remained steady Israel retained the upper hand, but the hands of faith always grow weak and need support. a Ignace de la Potterie relates truth and law in a causal way. "La verite est un concept plus large, plus enveloppant; elle clesigne la r·ev·elation meme de la volonte divine et du mystere de Dieu; par contre la loi, les commanclements, les paroles de Dien, sont autant cl'expressions concretes de la volonte divine." La verite dans Saint Jean (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1977), p. 152. 4 Even when revived in the Reformation the older... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Suffering of Economic Injustice:A Christian PerspectiveUlrich DuchrowTogether we are facing a global kairos of humanity because these years are decisive for whether our civilization will irreversibly continue to produce death or whether we find a way out toward a life-enhancing new culture. So let me try to make a humble contribution to our common search for liberation from suffering toward life through justice.suffering caused by economic injustice in (...) the axial age and in the capitalist civilization of modernityWe do not need to spend much time on describing the sufferings caused by economic injustice. They cry to high heaven every day. Jean Ziegler, the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, speaks of more than 60 million people dying of hunger and its consequences every year, especially children, although there is more than enough to feed them. That is an annual World War II against the poor. He continues to say: “A child that dies of hunger is murdered.” He calls this a daily crime against humanity.1 Others call it structural genocide.2 All these victims are human beings with a human face, according to biblical tradition created in the image of God. So we are talking about murdering living images of God, about blasphemy.Also, the blue planet Earth’s suffering is growing dramatically. The extinction of species is accelerating, desertification is expanding, the poisoning of water and soil is increasing, and climate change is producing irreversible effects like lifting the sea level, devouring islands in the Pacific and growing parts of Bangladesh, creating weather disasters everywhere, and possibly increasing temperature in parts of Africa by ten degrees. We all know this, but so far we have not been able to make the necessary changes in global economics and politics to stop or at least slow it.Often forgotten are the psychological and spiritual sufferings and diseases of a growing number of people. In India an average of more than fifty farmers, driven into debt beyond their means, commit suicide daily out of despair.3 Workers suffer increasing stress and anxiety, and middle-class people fall into depression, projected to be the second most common illness in 2020, according the World Health Organization. So what are the roots of all of this? [End Page 27]My thesis is that what we are experiencing now started nearly three thousand years ago within what is called the Axial Age, beginning in the eighth century bce, in the whole of Eurasia from Greece to China. At that time a new economy started to appear in daily life, built on money and private property. It had tremendous social as well as psychological and spiritual effects. To analyze what happened then helps us understand what is happening today. Looking at the responses to this development by the different faiths and philosophies in Israel/Judah, India, China, and Greece may also help us to better understand the tasks and possibilities of engaged Buddhists and liberation theologians in our age.The philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the term “Axial Age.”4 According to him, the experience of violent crises between 800 and 200 bce might have prompted the parallel efforts of the prophets, the Buddha, Confucius, Daoism, and Greek philosophy to find new foundations for living together. He characterized the new approach as intellectual and spiritual (geistig), looking only marginally at the economic and political context. Recently Karen Armstrong and, based on her findings, Jeremy Rifkin took up this theory, looking particularly at war and violence as causes for the responses within the different cultures.5 Also José María Vigil, who is present here, has just published a chapter in his book on Theology of Axiality and Axial Theology.6 As far as the sociohistoric context of the Axial Age is concerned my thesis comes nearest to what David Graeber has worked out in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years,7 although he is not very interested in the religious responses. Combining his insights with my own research,8 let me summarize how the new economy affects ancient societies.Money as unit of account was used in the palaces and temples of Mesopotamia as early... (shrink)

Preventive War, Pro-Americanicanism and Anti-Americanism. Protests against the war in Iraq or against American support for Israel have led to the accusation that there now exists an Anti-Americanism of the left that is virtually indistinguishable from an Anti-Americanism of the right. D. Losurdo points out that the United States was actually endowed with a certain fascination for Marx, Engels, Lenin, Boukharin or Gramsci, and that the indignation which they voiced concerning the regime of white supremacy was not unmitigated. (...) In contrast, an American Herrenvolk democracy met with widespread admiration in the leading circles of the Hitlerian regime, while American racial theorists such as Ford and Stoddard received a warm welcome in Berlin. The current celebration in the US of the imperial presidency on the part of fundamentalist Christians, along with the contempt recently shown toward America’s « allies », stems from an exclusivist nationalism which harks back to this tradition. (shrink)

The notion of the best interest of children figures prominently in family and reproductive policy discussions and there is a considerable body of empirical research attempting to connect the interests of children to how families and society interact. Most of this research regards the effects of societal responses to perceived problems in families, thus underlying policy on interventions such as adoption, foster care and temporary assumption of custodianship, but also support structures that help families cope with various challenges. However, reference (...) to the best interest of children can also be applied to a more basic issue in family policy, namely that of what is to be considered a family in the first place. This issue does not raise any questions regarding the proper conditions for when society should intervene in or change the family context of a child. Rather, it is about what social configurations should be recognized as a potentially fitting context for children to enter into and (if all goes well) eventually develop into adulthood within /.../ such that society’s default institutional arrangements allow it to have (by sexual and artificial reproduction, adoption, and combinations of these), care for and/or guard children. [This] will frame any further discussion of /.../ policies having further implications for, for example, the practices of adoption and reproductive technology, as well as regulation of custody in the event of separation or parental disagreement. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article introduces the Hyperbole Identification Procedure, a first systematic method for identifying linguistic hyperbole in discourse. We start by comparing existing definitions of linguistic hyperbole. Based on the commonalities shared by these definitions, we provide our operational definition of hyperbole as “an expression that is more extreme than justified given its ontological referent.” The next section argues why it is useful to identify hyperbole, as with metaphor in Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit, at the level of lexical units, and (...) subsequently introduces the steps of HIP. We follow up with two sample analyses of HIP in practice. First, we show how to unitize and analyze one complete sample sentence. Second, we present sample analyses of a number of selected cases. Then we present data showing that HIP can be reliably applied to a sample corpus of Dutch news texts. We end with discussing applications and implications of using HIP in corpus research. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Paul Merkley draws on the published literature of the World Council of Churches, the Middle East Council of Churches, the Roman Catholic Church, and other Christian organizations that have an interest in the question of Israel's past, present, and future, and on interviews with numerous key figures within the government of Israel, spokesmen for the Palestine Authority, and leaders of all the major pro and anti-Zionist Christian organizations to demonstrate that Christian attitudes towards Israel remain remarkably polarized. (...) To most evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, loyalty to Israel is a kind of second patriotism, nurtured by the conviction that Israel's restoration is a part of God's plan for history. However mainstream Protestantism champions "Palestinian nationalism" and, drawing on the rhetoric of the Middle East Council of Churches, does not hesitate to portray Israel as an Aoppressor." Merkley concludes that Christian attitudes towards Israel reflect fundamental theological attitudes that must be studied against the long historical background of Christian attitudes towards Judaism and Islam. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Configured to Christ: On Spiritual Direction and Clergy Formation by James KeatingChristian Raab O.S.B.Configured to Christ: On Spiritual Direction and Clergy Formation by James Keating (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road, 2021), xxix + 312 pp.Deacon James Keating has served the Church by forming her clergy for thirty years. While he has been a seminary professor and a director of deacon formation at the diocesan level, his prolific scholarship as (...) well as his time as director of theological formation for the Institute for Priestly Formation in Creighton, NE, made him a national figure. Configured to Christ is a collection of Keating's most important essays.While this book is a retrospective, it couldn't be more timely. In 2016 (on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 8), the Congregation for Catholic Education issued The Gift of the Priestly Vocation—Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis, a text which provides guidelines for the whole Church concerning priestly formation. In the fall of 2021, the United States Council of Catholic Bishops completed their revision of the sixth edition of the Program of Priestly Formation (PPF), which translates the principles of the Ratio for the American context. With these two documents in place, it now falls upon seminaries to examine their programs in light of the vision provided by the magisterium. The next five to ten years promise to be a time of reform and renewal in seminary formation. Institutions will be looking for fresh and orienting ideas. Keating's book can be recommended as among the best resources for the venture that awaits.One reason Keating's book is so valuable is its focus on the "perichoresis" of the various aspects of formation (107). This emphasis is consonant with the terminological change found in the new PPF from the language of formational "pillars" to the language of formational "dimensions" (see the USCCB's 5th edition of the PPF, §28). The thinking behind this change seems to have been that it was too easy to imagine "pillars" as separate from [End Page 1110] one another. The human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral dimensions of formation are in fact interwoven, interdependent, and interpenetrating. While they can be distinguished, they cannot be divided. Growth in one fosters growth in the other. Keating has long understood this, as his various essays show.The book is divided into three parts and eighteen chapters. Part 1 is entitled "The Interior Life of the Cleric." Here, readers are introduced to the integral relationship between the spiritual and intellectual formational dimensions. For example, Keating provides, in chapter 1, a sustained theoretical reflection on the relationship between academic theology and spirituality, and, in chapter 2, he examines John Henry Newman's writings as a concretized test case for the right relationship of prayer, study, and thought. Authors such as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Jean Leclercq have investigated this relationship in classic works, but Keating's presentation is notable for its accessibility, coherence, and concision. The remaining chapters of part 1 address the topics of silence and spiritual direction. Emerging from these analyses are the insights that interiority expands through discovery of Christ within. We participate in Christ as we behold, wonder, think, theologize, and pray. Keating's plea that we introduce ministerial candidates to the romance of silence is most welcome.The second part of the book is entitled "The Formation of the Cleric." It brings together nine essays which explicitly explore the art of formation. The key to this section, and maybe to the whole book, is chapter 7, "Christ is the Sure Foundation: Priestly Human Formation Completed in and by Spiritual Formation." This chapter makes the case not only for the perichoresis of formational dimensions but also for a much stronger emphasis on spiritual formation than is often the case. Of special note is Keating's observation that spiritual formation can truly support human formation. This is an important insight. In his 1992 apostolic exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis (on the formation of priests), John Paul II had articulated that human formation was "the basis of all priestly formation" (§43).Unfortunately, this line could be (and has been) interpreted problematically to mean human formation... (shrink)

A social responsibility (SR) theory of the press has emerged in various democratic societies worldwide since World War II. The Hutchins Commission in the United States is the source of this paradigm in some cases, but a similar emphasis on serving society rather than commerce or government has also arisen in parallel fashion without any connection to Hutchins. Professionalism and codes of professional ethics are too narrow to serve as the framework for a global SR paradigm of the 21st (...) century. Instead, universal ethical principles are the most appropriate framework, and the cross-cultural axis around which these principles revolve is the sacredness of human life. Embedded in the protonorm of human sacredness are such ethical principles as human dignity, truthtelling, and nonmaleficence. These principles are citizen ethics rather than professional ethics; they are set in the social domain where SR gets its rationale. They provide a frame of reference internationally for assessing local news media practices and formulating codes of ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Catholic Conscience and Civil Disobedience:The Primacy of TruthAngel Perez-Lopez and Israel Perez-LopezIntroductionSacred Scripture describes different examples of moral conscience dictating civil disobedience. For instance, think of the situation of Daniel (see Dan 6:6–10). In this and many other cases, we always find, above all, a defense of truth and of its primacy over conscience and civil authority.1 In a culture that rapidly abandons Christendom and rejects the Catholic (...) social values once prevalent, this same issue is gaining prominence.Recent civil mandates related to Covid-19 vaccination are raising anew the challenging moral question, among faithful Catholics, concerning the legitimacy of civil disobedience.2 Part of the difficulty consists in the struggle [End Page 773] to harmonize two statements from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) concerning the Covid-19 vaccines.On the one hand, it is affirmed that, under certain circumstances, the use of some of these vaccines is morally permissible: "When ethically irreproachable Covid-19 vaccines are not available (e.g. in countries where vaccines without ethical problems are not made available to physicians and patients, or where their distribution is more difficult due to special storage and transport conditions, or when various types of vaccines are distributed in the same country but health authorities do not allow citizens to choose the vaccine with which to be inoculated) it is morally acceptable to receive Covid-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process."3On the other hand, the CDF also affirms that vaccination should be voluntary; it is not obligatory as a rule: "Practical reason makes evident that vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary."4Some Catholics are clinging to the first affirmation to advocate for the primacy of authority in the civil mandate to be vaccinated. Others, instead, are clinging to the second affirmation to uphold the primacy of conscience and the right to civil disobedience. The controversy is reaching a boiling point in the United States. It seems that tertium non datur.In this essay, however, aided by the guidance of our moral magisterium and Thomas Aquinas, we would like to show how these two statements from the CDF are not incompatible. We would like to offer a third option to the ones previously described. Our thesis is that the way to bring about the harmony of both statements consists in underscoring the primacy of truth, in our comprehension of conscience, authority, and civil disobedience.The essay will be divided into two different sections. The first section deals with the general principles at play in the Catholic understanding of conscience and civil disobedience under the primacy of truth. Thus, it focuses on providing some needed information to get rid of the relativistic and political lenses through which many Catholics today are approaching the vaccine mandates. The second section of the essay is instead more particular. It makes a moral evaluation of the recent mandates to be vaccinated. [End Page 774]General PrinciplesToo Political?As Catholics, we should not be so radical as to think that moral theology has nothing to say about these political matters. A legitimate understanding of the separation between church and state does not forbid the Church's magisterial teaching and moral theology to be concerned with this issue.The Church is not only a mother but also a teacher: "The church's motherhood can never in fact be separated from her teaching mission, which she must always carry out as the faithful Bride of Christ, who is the Truth in person."5Moreover, "life in common within the State possesses a relevant moral value and presents specific demands that—according to the law of the Incarnation, though with a completely particular modality—enter in to form a part of the following of Christ. Therefore, moral theology must treat of it."6Thus, we would like to invite our readers to divest from political biases that may be influencing their reasoning. This is not about being Republican or Democrat first and then using one's faith to express our political views. The... (shrink)

‘Researcher identity’ affects global health research in profound and complex ways. Anthropologists in particular have led the way in portraying the multiple, and sometimes tension-generating, identities that researchers ascribe to themselves, or have ascribed to them, in their places of research. However, the central importance of researcher identity in the ethical conduct of global health research has yet to be fully appreciated. The capacity of researchers to respond effectively to the ethical tensions surrounding their identities is hampered by lack of (...) conceptual clarity, as to the nature and scope of the issues involved. This paper strives to provide some clarification of these ethical tensions by considering researcher identity from the perspective of (1) Guillemin and Heggen's (2009) key distinction between procedural ethics and ethics in practice, and (2) our own distinction between perceptions of identity that are either symmetrical or asymmetrical, with the potential to shift research relationships toward greater or lesser ethical harmony. Discussion of these concepts is supported with ethnographic examples from relevant literature and from our own (United States (US) Government-funded) research in South Africa. A preliminary set of recommendations is provided in an effort to equip researchers with a greater sense of organization and control over the ethics of researcher identity. The paper concludes that the complex construction of researcher identity needs to be central among the ethical concerns of global health researchers, and that the conceptual tools discussed in the paper are a useful starting point for better organizing and acting on these ethical concerns. (shrink)

This article explores reverse mission as practised by African Christians in Britain. The main research question is what crucial role does African identity play in African mission in Britain and how does that lead towards developing African British theology? It is argued that such a theology will help African Christians in Britain be affirmed in their cultural identity whilst at the same time reach beyond African communities in their mission engagement. African British theology is related to Black British (...) theology in that they both take the black experience seriously for theological reflection. However, African British theology is also distinct in that it seeks to understand African identity and mission in a postmodern multicultural British society. My research methods have been as an African Practical Theologian involving active participation as well participant observation. My approach has been interdisciplinary engaging the fields of practical theology, diaspora missiology, African theology and Black theology. (shrink)

Our aim in this brief essay is not to defend a particular policy or attitude toward lockdown measures in the United States or elsewhere, but to consider the scope and limits of different types of arguments that can be offered for them. Understanding the complexity of these issues will, we hope, go some way to helping us understand each other and our attitudes toward state responses to the pandemic.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.3 (2005) 199-203 [Access article in PDF] Lived Time and to Live Time Christian Kupke Keywords time, dimensional time, temporality, dialectics, subjectivity In this paper, I argue that a phenomenological description of temporality is a description of what it is to "live" time, that is, to live time in its three-dimensional aspects: past, future, and present. And it is suggested that this dimensional time can (...) be analyzed on two different levels: on a microstructural level that is part of the subject–object relationship (cognitive–intentional time), and on a macrostructural level that is part of the subject–subject relationship (intersubjective time). In a close reading of Martin Wyllie's paper "Lived Time and Psychopathology" (2005) some implications and consequences of these suggestions are discussed. Conceptual Problems: Personal and Intersubjective Time One of Martin Wyllie's main theses is that to accurately describe suffering one may have to use a conceptual framework of a bipartite structure that includes the embodied temporal subject on the one hand and the temporal world on the other. It is this what the author calls a "dialectical relationship" between the time of the individual person called "personal time" and the time of the world called "world time" or "intersubjective time" (Wyllie 2005, 173).But then Martin Wyllie also deals with another model, another conceptual framework that follows a different logic and that—in contrast to the dualistic model—is usually associated with dialectics: the tripartite structure of past, future, and present. "Now in lived time", Wyllie claims, "is a unity of the past, present, and future, and is more than simply a succession because the immediate 'no-more', 'present', and 'yet-to-come' are ordinarily never sharply separated" (Wyllie 2005, 174).I want first to discuss the conceptual problems that come along with Martin Wyllie's use of these models. It seems to me that the author is dealing with the complexity of the relationship between these models by means of a double strategy: to conceptualize world time as intersubjective time (a), and to focus the analysis on the external, dualistic model of personal and intersubjective time (b).(a) "World time" may be differentiated at least into three categories: physical and cosmological time; natural and biological time; and social or sociocultural time. But the question is: how are these (quasi-) objective time matrices realized (and perhaps even "constituted") by the individual subject? To answer this question it is, also in my view, a good strategy for a psychopathology of time to concentrate on intersubjective [End Page 199] time, for, as Martin Wyllie states, there is indeed no doubt that "the embodied human subject is always already in an intersubjective world" (Wyllie 2005, 177).But what I think might be a severe problem with this focal point of the analysis is the tendency to identify the world exclusively with an intersubjective world. That the embodied human subject is always already in an intersubjective world does not mean that the subject's whole world is nothing more than an intersubjective world. Those temporal processes that are, for instance, necessary to "read"—in an intersubjective world—Martin Wyllie's text and to "write" a comment on it (as I do now) are part of at least a double temporal structure.First, reading and writing are formal processes of an integration of cognitive and intentional activities that are the transcendental basis of any intelligible discussion of semantic questions, namely, to recognize signs, retentionally and protentionally, as integral parts of higher temporal units to enable the subject to understand what is read or written. Without such retentional and protentional acts, as they were generally described by Husserl, any text would be a mere accumulation of signs without any formal or logical order.But, second, reading and writing are also informal processes of an integration of those intersubjective activities that result in an intelligible discussion of semantic questions. Here it is necessary to remember what was read or written, by Martin Wyllie, myself, and others (an intersubjective remembrance that is essential for the... (shrink)

We explore different ways to generalize Hintikka’s classic game theoretic semantics to a many-valued setting, where the unit interval is taken as the set of truth values. In this manner a plethora of characterizations of Łukasiewicz logic arise. Among the described semantic games is Giles’s dialogue and betting game, presented in a manner that makes the relation to Hintikka’s game more transparent. Moreover, we explain a so-called explicit evaluation game and a ‘bargaining game’ variant of it. We also describe a (...) recently introduced backtracking game as well as a game with random choices for Łukasiewicz logic. (shrink)

Networks for the exchange and/or sharing of genetic data are developing in many countries. We focus here on the situations in the US and France. We highlight some recent and remarkable differences between these two countries concerning the mode of access to, and the storage and use of genetic data, particularly as concerns two-sided markets and dynamic consent or dynamic electronic informed consent. This brief overview suggests that, even though the organization and function of these two-sided markets remain open to (...) criticism, dynamic e-IC should be more widely used, especially in France, if only to determine its real effectiveness. (shrink)

Troubled times often gives rise to great art that reflects those troubles. So too with political theory. The greatest work of twentieth century political theory, John Rawls's A theory of justice, was inspired in various respects by extreme social and economic inequality, racialized slavery and racial segregation in the United States. Arguably the most influential work of political theory since Rawls—Michael Walzer's Just and unjust wars—a sustained and historically informed reflection on the morality of interstate armed conflict—was written in (...) the midst of the Vietnam War. It should be no surprise, then, that the bellicose period of the past 20 years should give rise to a robust new literature in political theory on the morality of armed conflict. It has been of uneven quality, and to some extent episodic, responding to particular challenges—the increased prevalence of asymmetric warfare and the permissibility of preventive or preemptive war—that have arisen as a result of specific events. In the past decade, however, a group of philosophers has begun to pose more fundamental questions about the reigning theory of the morality of armed conflict warfare—just war theory—as formulated by Walzer and others. Jeff McMahan's concise, inventive and tightly argued work Killing in war is without doubt the most important of these challenges to the reigning theory of the just war. This review article discusses McMahan's work, some of the critical attention it has received, and its potential implications for practice. (shrink)

Dans la discussion qui se poursuit parmi les spécialistes plotiniens sur les Formes d’individus, l’âme non descendue et le moi, la notion d’individualité est d’habitude considérée comme acquise. Le but de cet article est de montrer que Plotin soumet cette notion à une vérification rigoureuse. Dans le monde intelligible, l’individualité n’est pas incompatible avec l’universalité, car chaque individu intelligible est « un-et-multiple », exactement comme l’Intellect universel lui-même. Cette compréhension plutôt platonicienne, anti-aristotélicienne, permet à Plotin d’expliquer l’immortalité personnelle – soit (...) la persistance de l’âme de Socrate en tant que telle après la mort – en situant le principium individuationis des âmes dans l’Intellect lui-même. Nos vrais mois, ou âmes individuelles non descendues, qui restent toujours dans l’intelligible et qui ont une connaissance totalement noétique, sont unies entre elles, avec les Formes et l’Intellect comme une totalité, tout en conservant leur individualité totale ; Plotin suggère même qu’elles soient des Formes. Rien ne prouve que Plotin distingue clairement les Formes des âmes non descendues, comme le prétendent certains savants. L’individualité empirique, qui exclut strictement l’unité avec les autres et avec le tout, est une forme insuffisante d’individualité qui appartient au monde sensible ; ses critères, ou plutôt ses limitations, ne sont pas valables pour la vraie individualité intelligible, ni pour le vrai moi.Qu’est-ce qu’un individu? In the ongoing discussion among Plotinian scholars on Forms of individuals, the undescended soul and the Self, the notion of individuality is usually taken for granted. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that Plotinus subjects this notion to a thorough revision. In the intelligible world, individuality is not incompatible with universality, because each intelligible individual is a One-Many just as the universal Intellect itself. This distinctly Platonic, anti-Aristotelian understanding of individuality enables Plotinus to account for personal immortality – i.e. the persistence of Socrates’ soul as Socrates’ soul after death – by locating the principium individuationis of the souls in Intellect itself. Our true selves or individual undescended souls, which always remain in the intelligible and have full noetic cognition, are one with each other as well as with the Forms and with Intellect as a whole while preserving their full individuality ; Plotinus even suggests that they are Forms themselves. There is no evidence that Plotinus sharply distinguished Forms from undescended souls, as some scholars have maintained. Empirical individuality, which strictly excludes unity with the others and the whole, is a deficient form of individuality that belongs to the sensible world ; its criteria, or rather its limitations, are not valid for true, intelligible individuality or for the true self. (shrink)

Alfred Müller-Armack was one of the very important policy-makers who initiated the West-German economic recovery after WWII. He devised the underlying economic program of the so-called “German Miracle”, which was not a miracle at all. It was the outcome of a rigorous rule transformation from the bankrupt central planning of the Nazi- regime to a market economic order based on the principles of classical liberalism combined with a social safety net for all who suffered from the terrible consequences of war (...) destruction. He called his program “Social Market Economy”, thereby expressing that the risky game of the market needs a social safety net to make his program acceptable for the majority of the German citizens.Müller-Armack was not only the Head of the Central Policy Unit at the Federal Economic Ministry under Ludwig Erhard for twelve years but also a well-known university teacher of economics. In the tradition of Max Weber he combined this subject with the theory of economic sociology, and especially, the sociology of religion. In this respect he was an early author in the field which nowadays is named “cultural economics”. His publications on the impact of religious beliefs of greek-orthodox societies on the economic performance of South-East European countries are still of great interest for the present debates about the economic consequences of Islam.Alfred Müller-Armack fut l’un des très importants politiciens qui initièrent l’économie de l’ Allemagne de l’Ouest après la 2ème Guerre Mondiale. Il conçut dans ses grandes lignes le programme économique du soi disant « Miracle Allemand ». Ce fut le résultat d’une règle rigoureuse de transformation à partir de la faillite de la planification centrale du régime Nazi vers un ordre marchand fondé sur les principes du libéralisme classique combiné à un filet de sécurité sociale pour tous ceux qui avaient souffert des conséquences terribles des destructions de la guerre. Il appela son programme « Economie sociale de marché », exprimant ainsi que le jeu risqué du marché nécessite un filet de sécurité sociale pour rendre son programme acceptable par la majorité des citoyens allemands. Müller-Armack n’était pas seulement le chef de l’unité politique centrale au ministère fédéral de l’économie sous la direction de Ludwig Erhard pendant 12 ans, mais également un professeur très réputé d’économie à l’université. Dans la tradition de Max Weber, il associe ses sujets avec la théorie économique de la sociologie et plus particulièrement, la sociologie de la religion. Dans cette mesure, il fut un pionnier dans le champ de ce que l’on appelle aujourd’hui « l’économie de la culture ». Ses publications sur l’impact des croyances religieuses des sociétés grecques orthodoxes sur la performance économique des pays du Sud-Est Européen restent d’un grand intérêt pour les débats actuels au sujet des conséquences économiques de l’Islam. (shrink)

Despite the increasingly multinational nature of the workplace, there have been few studies of the convergence and divergence in beliefs about ethics-based leadership across cultures. This study examines the meaning of ethical and unethical leadership held by managers in six societies with the goal of identifying areas of convergence and divergence across cultures. More specifically, qualitative research methods were used to identify the attributes and behaviors that managers from the People’s Republic of China (the PRC), Hong Kong, the Republic of (...) China (Taiwan), the United States (the U.S.), Ireland, and Germany attribute to ethical and unethical leaders. Across societies, six ethical leadership themes and six unethical leadership themes emerged from a thematic analysis of the open-ended responses. Dominant themes for ethical and unethical leadership for each society are identified and examined within the context of the core cultural values and practices of that society. Implications for theory, research, and management practice are discussed. (shrink)

This article introduces the Verbal Irony Procedure (VIP), a first systematic method for identifying irony in natural discourse. The first section discusses previous operationalizations of irony and demonstrates that these are not explicit about which criteria were used to separate irony from non-irony. The second section argues why irony can be defined as an “utterance with a literal evaluation that is implicitly contrary to its intended evaluation.” This section also explains why ironic utterances can be placed on an evaluation scale. (...) In the third section, clauses are proposed as a good unit of analysis when looking at irony in natural discourse. The different steps of the VIP are then introduced in the fourth section and subsequently applied in a sample analysis of a natural text in the fifth section. The sixth section discusses a reliability analysis of the VIP protocol. The article ends with an outlook on how future research on verbal irony might benefit from applying the VIP. (shrink)

The failure to maintain a canonical Christian understanding of the family as a microcosm of the church oriented toward deification instead of a microcosm of society aimed at social ends has opened Christians up to an uncritical adoption of non-Christian approaches in medical decision making. This article begins by identifying the Christian family crisis not as a liberal versus conservative debate centered on the form and function of the family, but more fundamentally as an ecclesial versus sociological understanding of (...) the Christian family. The article presents a historical sketch of the circumstances that have led to this contemporary crisis in the Western Christian family, followed by an analysis that provides a canonical account of the Christian family as exemplified in the thought of Gregory the Theologian. This article concludes by looking at the specific issue of labor and delivery in the United States, and the implications for a canonical Christian understanding of labor and delivery in light of contemporary medical practices. (shrink)

Since Sen's insightful analysis of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem (Sen, 1970/1979), Arrow's theorem is often interpreted as a consequence of the exclusion of interpersonal information from Arrow's framework. Interpersonal comparability of either welfare levels or welfare units is known to be sufficient for circumventing Arrow's impossibility result (e.g. Sen, 1970/1979, 1982; Roberts, 1980; d'Aspremont, 1985). But it is less well known whether one of these types of comparability is also necessary or whether Arrow's conditions can already be satisfied in much narrower (...) informational frameworks. This note explores such a framework: the assumption of (ONC+0), ordinal measurability of welfare with the additional measurability of a 'zero-line', is shown to point towards new, albeit limited, escape-routes from Arrow's theorem. Some existence and classification results are established, using the condition that social orderings be transitive as well as the condition that social orderings be quasi-transitive. (shrink)

In 1764, Kant published his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and in 1790 his influential third Critique , the Critique of the Power of Judgment . The latter contains two parts, the 'Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment' and the 'Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment'. They reveal a new principle, namely the a priori principle of purposiveness ( Zweckmäßigkeit ) of our power of judgment, and thereby offer new a priori grounds for (...) beauty and biology within the framework of Kant's transcendental philosophy. They also unite the previous two Critiques , the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason . Besides contributing to general and systematic aspects within his transcendental philosophy, Kant's aesthetics also offers new insights into old problems. It deals with feeling versus experience, subjectivity versus objectivity, disinterested pleasure, aesthetic universality, free and adherent beauty, the sensus communis , genius, aesthetic ideas, beauty as the symbol of morality, beauty of nature versus beauty of art, the sublime, and the supersensible. In this article I will limit myself to this critical aesthetics of Kant. But I will also discuss the ugly and the possibility of beauty in mathematics and see whether Kant's theory can successfully explain or deal with them. I will also compare his theory with philosophical ideas from a very different tradition, namely from Confucius, not only as a challenge to Kant's theory, but also because there is a growing interest from the Chinese side in combining ideas from Confucius and Kant, an interest that might well become influential in both East and West during the 21st century. (shrink)

This essay concerns what people should do in conflict situations when a doubt of fact bears on settling whether an alternative under consideration is legitimate or not. Its principal audience are those who believe that abortion can be legitimate when not having an abortion gives rise to serious harms that can be avoided by having one, but who are concerned that fetuses might feel pain when being aborted, and who believe that causing unnecessary pain should be avoided when doing so (...) would not pose an undue burden. The essay remains neutral on the substantive questions of the moral status of the unborn and the morality of abortion. The question of fetal pain has taken center stage in the last few years in the .. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Murray N. Rothbard argued that there are many philosophic and non-philosophic arguments that provide a satisfactory basis for individual liberty. Rarely, however, did he discuss the claims of Christianity to be a suitable foundation for individual freedom. By looking at the Christian libertarians of the Old Right, between 1950 and 1971, the article contends that religious values were the most important reason for libertarians pursuing a society composed of free individuals during that period. By examining the journals Faith and Freedom, (...) Christian Economics, and the Freeman, and the positive views of Rev. Carl McIntire, the author explains the philosophy of Christian libertarianism. It is the belief that individual freedom is only the highest political end; the necessary means for God’s Creation to develop unhindered their conscience and the full ‘sacredness of their personality.’ Christian libertarians maintain that individuals cannot be coerced by government to lead a virtuous life. They must instead be persuaded, by a true understanding of the life of Jesus especially, to choose to follow the moral life sanctioned by the Bible. The desire to follow the Golden Rule voluntarily, Christian libertarians explain, is the God-given template that allows a society of individuals to live in freedom. It was this Christian ethic, Christian libertarians insist, couched in terms of the Natural Law, that inspired the founding fathers to establish a system of government where the individual is free to enjoy their ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ The article concludes by discussing Frank S. Meyer’s ‘fusionist’ attempt to find a uniting theme for traditionalists and libertarians, and suggests that it was the Christian libertarian philosophy in all but name. It also suggests that if America has any valid claim to be ‘Exceptional,’ then it is based on the nation’s traditional defence of individual freedom as a God-given grant. (shrink)

Cet article étudie, à partir d’archives suédoises, les raisons du retard pris par la Semaine de Prière pour l’Unité dans un pays comptant parmi les pionniers de l’œcuménisme. Le premier obstacle fut un réflexe de méfiance envers l’origine « romaine » de ladite Semaine, initiative de l’abbé Paul Couturier importée par la minorité Haute Église. À partir des années 50, la concurrence avec la Semaine de l’Alliance évangélique, indispensable à l’unité des Églises Libres en voie d’intégration à l’œcuménisme national, entrava (...) l’expansion de la Semaine œcuménique. Based on Swedish records, this study investigates the reasons why the Week of Prayer for Unity has been so delayed in a country which has been a pioneer of the ecumenical movement. The main reason was the suspicion about the « Roman » origins of this Week of Prayer, initiated by father Paul Couturier and imported by the High Church minority. From the fifties, the competition with the Week of Prayer of the Evangelical Alliance, essential for the unity of the Free Churches on their way to national ecumenical integration, hindered the spreading of the ecumenical Week. (shrink)

The central question of this conference is whether the media can contribute to high quality social dialogue. The prospects for resolving that question positively in the “sound and fury” depend on recovering the idea of truth. At present the news media are lurching along from one crisis to another with an empty centre. We need to articulate a believable concept of truth as communication's master principle. As the norm of healing is to medicine, justice to politics, critical thinking to education, (...) craftsmanship to engineering, and stewardship to business, so truth-telling is the news profession's occupational norm. Truth-telling is the ethical framework that fundamentally reorders the media's professional culture and enables them to enrich social dialogue rather than undermine it.Historically the mainstream press has defined itself in terms of an objectivist worldview. Centred on human rationality and armed with the scientific method, the facts in news have been said to mirror reality. The aim has been true and incontrovertible accounts of a domain separate from human consciousness. In Bertrand Russell's formula, “truth consists in some form of correspondence between belief and fact” . In the received view, truth is defined in elementary epistemological terms as accurate representation. News corresponds to context-free neutral algorithms, and ethics is equated with impartiality.The attacks on this misguided view of human knowledge had already originated in Giambattista Vico's fantasia and Wilhelm Dilthey's verstehen in the counter-Enlightenment of the 18th century. They have continued with hermeneutics, critical theory in the Frankfurt School, American pragmatism, Wittgenstein's linguistic philosophy, Gramsci, and in their own way, Lyotard's denial of master narratives and Derrida's sliding signifiers; until the anti-foundationalism of our own day indicates a crisis in correspondence views of truth. Institutional structures remain Enlightenment-driven, but in principle the tide has turned currently toward restricting objectivism to the territory of mathematics, physics, and the natural sciences. In reporting, objectivity has become increasingly controversial as the working press' professional standard, though it will remain entrenched in our ordinary practices of news production and dissemination until an alternative mission for the press is convincingly formulated.The demise of correspondence views of truth has created a predicament for the notion of truth altogether. However, instead of appealing to coherence versions or abandoning the concept, truth needs to be relocated in the moral sphere. Truth is a problem of axiology rather than epistemology. With the dominant scheme no longer tenable, truth should become the province of ethicists who can reconstruct it as the news media's contribution to social dialogue.When truth is articulated in terms of a moral framework, we can mold its richly textured meaning around the Hebrew emeth , the Greek aletheia . In Serbo-Croatian the true is justified as with plumbline in carpentry. In the powerful wheel imagery of the Buddhist tradition, truth is the immovable axle. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa presumes that sufferings from apartheid can be healed through truthful testimony. In Ghandhi's “satyagrapha,” the power of truth through the human spirit eventually wins over force . Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics contends correctly that a truthful account lays hold of the context, motives, and presuppositions involved .Telling the truth depends on the quality of discernment so that penultimates do not gain ultimacy. Truth means, in other words, to strike gold, to get at “the core, the essence, the nub, the heart of the matter” . For Henry David Thoreau – though addressing a different issue – when we are truthful, we attempt to “drive life into a corner and¼if it proves to be mean, why then to get the genuine meanness out of it and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by personal experience and be able to give a true account of the encounter” . For the former secretary general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, “the most dangerous of all moral dilemmas is when we are obliged to conceal truth in order to help the truth be victorious” . In the Talmud, the liar's punishment is that no one believes him.Augustine , professor of rhetoric at Milan and later Bishop of Hippo, illustrates a non-correspondence view of truth. His rhetorical theory is a major contribution to the philosophy of communication, contradicting the highly secular and linear view of the ancient Greeks. As with Aristotle, rhetoric entails reasoned judgement for Augustine; however, he “break[s] away from Graeco-Roman rhetoric, moving instead toward ¼rhetoric as aletheiac act” . Rhetoric for him is not knowledge-producing or opinion-producing but truth-producing . The Epistolae Doctrina Christiana scourges the value-neutral, technical language of “word merchants” without wisdom.Truth is not fundamentally a prescriptive statement. The aletheiac act in Augustine “tends to be more relational than propositional, a dialogically interpersonal, sacramentally charitable act rather than a statement¼taking into account and being motivated by [the cardinal virtues] faith, hope, and charity” . The truth for him does not merely make things clear, but motivates us to belief and action. In truthful communication for Augustine, “it is not enough to seek to move men's minds, merely for the sake of power; instead, the power to move is to be used to lead men to truth”. (shrink)

This article assesses the recently renewed interest in the just war criterion of sovereign authority from a Thomistic perspective. It contrasts the classical conceptualisation of authority as found in the work of St Thomas Aquinas with the argument made by today’s revisionist just war thinkers. The article points out that the two approaches start from fundamentally different units of moral analysis. While the Thomistic just war emphasises the common good of the political community revisionists advocate the perspective of moral individualism. (...) As a result, for Thomism, only those entrusted with the responsibility for the common good of the political community are entitled to wage war while, in contrast, revisionists argue that any individual has the right to wage war. The latter side’s position, the article criticises, is problematic from a moral point of view as it runs counter to the just war tradition’s concern about restraint in the employment of force. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough (...) to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The discipline of parallelization in the manifold of all possible measurement results is shown to be responsible for the existence of all quantum correlations, with the upper bound on their strength stemming from the maximum of possible torsion within all norm-composing parallelizable manifolds. A profound interplay is thus uncovered between the existence and strength of quantum correlations and the parallelizability of the spheres S^0, S^1, S^3, and S^7 necessitated by the four real division algebras. In particular, parallelization within a unit (...) 3-sphere is shown to be responsible for the existence of EPR and Hardy type correlations, whereas that within a unit 7-sphere is shown to be responsible for the existence of all GHZ type correlations. Moreover, parallelizability in general is shown to be equivalent to the completeness criterion of EPR, in addition to necessitating the locality condition of Bell. It is therefore shown to predetermine both the local outcomes as well as the quantum correlations among the remote outcomes, dictated by the infinite factorizability of points within the spheres S^3 and S^7. The twin illusions of quantum entanglement and non-locality are thus shown to stem from the topologically incomplete accountings of the measurement results. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This paper examines beliefs about four aspects of ethical leadership –Character/Integrity, Altruism, Collective Motivation and Encouragement– in Germany and the United States using data from Project GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) and a supplemental analysis. Within the context of a push toward convergence driven by the demands of globalization and the pull toward divergence underpinned by different cultural values and philosophies in the two countries, we focus on two questions: Do middle managers from the United States (...) and Germany differ in their beliefs about ethical leadership? And, do individuals from these two countries attribute different characteristics to ethical leaders? Results provide evidence that while German and US middle managers, on average, differed in the degree of endorsement for each aspect, they each endorsed Character/Integrity, Collective Motivation and Encouragement as important for effective leadership and had a more neutral view of the importance of Altruism. The findings are reviewed within the social-cultural context of each country. (shrink)

For Israel, the demographic significance of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa presents an opportunity to exchange development aid, trade deals and military agreements for votes in global forums. In this article, the author examines the idea of Israel as a trustworthy diplomatic partner of African countries by considering the impact of Zionism on Christian views. The author drew on media articles for examples of initiatives with African countries, and on reports, calls and minutes of global bodies to reflect (...) on ecclesial and spiritual identities. In contrast to the prevailing perception among Christians in Africa, Zionism cannot be associated with liberation theology. Loyalty to Zionism undermines indigenous spiritual notions, the ideal of an authentic African identity, and Christianity itself. There is an urgent need for theological schools, church leaders and clergy to familiarise themselves with the reality and take the lead in critically assessing and reviewing any hermeneutics and beliefs that inform support for Zionism. Contribution: This article highlights the threat of Israel’s diplomacy in Africa to religious identity, integrity and freedom. As an interdisciplinary, contextual contribution to the sociology of religion, it reveals that loyalty to Israel, a Zionist State, jeopardises Christ’s message of inclusive compassion, justice and equality. (shrink)

Recording and manipulating neuronal ensemble activity is a key requirement in advanced neuromodulatory and behavior studies. Devices capable of both recording and manipulating neuronal activity brain-computer interfaces should ideally operate un-tethered and allow chronic longitudinal manipulations in the freely moving animal. In this study, we designed a new intracortical BCI feasible of telemetric recording and stimulating local gray and white matter of visual neural circuit after irradiation exposure. To increase the translational reliance, we put forward a Göttingen minipig model. The (...) animal was stereotactically irradiated at the level of the visual cortex upon defining the target by a fused cerebral MRI and CT scan. A fully implantable neural telemetry system consisting of a 64 channel intracortical multielectrode array, a telemetry capsule, and an inductive rechargeable battery was then implanted into the visual cortex to record and manipulate local field potentials, and multi-unit activity. We achieved a 3-month stability of the functionality of the un-tethered BCI in terms of telemetric radio-communication, inductive battery charging, and device biocompatibility for 3 months. Finally, we could reliably record the local signature of sub- and suprathreshold neuronal activity in the visual cortex with high bandwidth without complications. The ability to wireless induction charging combined with the entirely implantable design, the rather high recording bandwidth, and the ability to record and stimulate simultaneously put forward a wireless BCI capable of long-term un-tethered real-time communication for causal preclinical circuit-based closed-loop interventions. (shrink)