Kim Iryeop (1896-1971) fue una de las escritoras feministas más controvertidas de la modernidad coreana y una maestra seon de renombre. Nació el 9 de junio de 1896 en un pueblo al sur de la provincia de Pyeong’an. Su padre era un pastor protestante y su madre una mujer ilustrada para su época, que animo a su hija a estudiar. Tras graduarse en la Ewha Womans University, Kim se convirtió en una prolífera escritora y en una figura primordial del (...) movimiento feminista nueva mujer (sin yeoja). Sin embargo, a principio de los años treinta, Kim abandonó su vida secular y se ordenó monja budista. Este estudio presenta un análisis sobre la filosofía budista que desarrolla Kim, mostrando las principales preocupaciones y aportaciones de su propuesta. (shrink)

Kim Iryeop (1896-1971) fue una de las escritoras feministas más controvertidas de la modernidad coreana y una maestra seon de renombre. Nació el 9 de junio de 1896 en un pueblo al sur de la provincia de Pyeong’an. Su padre era un pastor protestante y su madre una mujer ilustrada para su época, que animo a su hija a estudiar. Tras graduarse en la Ewha Womans University, Kim se convirtió en una prolífera escritora y en una figura primordial del (...) movimiento feminista nueva mujer (sin yeoja). Sin embargo, a principio de los años treinta, Kim abandonó su vida secular y se ordenó monja budista. Este estudio presenta un análisis sobre la filosofía budista que desarrolla Kim, mostrando las principales preocupaciones y aportaciones de su propuesta. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 279—285. Concerning its Transitive Nature, the Conversion of Native Americans of Spanish Colonial California, Indoctrinated Catholicism, & the Creation There’s no direct archaeological evidence that Jesus ever existed. 1 I memorized the Act of Contrition. I don’t remember it now, except the beginning: Forgive me Father for I have sinned . . . This was in preparation for the Sacrament of Holy Reconciliation, where in a confessional I confessed my sins to Father Scott, who looked like Jesus, (...) at least in Western cultural representations of Jesus since the middle ages, and if Jesus put on a few pounds. Father Scott was long-haired, redheaded, bearded, chubby, and tall. When he left church with the procession of altar servers and Eucharistic ministers, yelling, “Sing a Good Song Unto the Lord,” he smiled, hands folded, and he gazed over his parishioners, and bounced along. For four months every year he lived among the Crow Nation in Montana, where towards the end of his tenure at Our Lady of Refuge, they adopted him as an honorary member of their tribe. * This is the prayer we chanted, holding hands, every night before dinner: Bless us oh Lord, for these our gifts, which we are about to receive, our bounty through Christ, our Lord, Amen. Then we all said, God bless the cook! When we were with my grandparents, Grandpa said, God bless Chicky, and Holly, and Harvey, and Boots—all the dead dogs. * My sister tells me that she sits next to a handsome man on a flight across the country. After chitchat, she withdraws her book. She’s reading Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography . After a few moments, the handsome man also reads from his book—his leather-bound Bible. Sister thinks, Oh, Jesus—too bad. She falls asleep. Later, settled in Nashville, she opens her volume and out falls a Jesus-covered card that reads, You can still find God and Salvation! Because that handsome God-fearing young man saw that word— pornography . * I suppose Father Jim’s dark hair, beard, and glasses made me think doctoral-ly of him. He called while I was in the midst of a breakup, after I’d twice attempted suicide, and my mother was desperate for help. She somehow found and phoned him. And Jim, now years out of Our Lady of Refuge’s parish, twenty years since my baptism, years even since he’d left the priesthood and the Catholic faith, still made the effort to bring me back into the fold. He said, “Have you seen a priest?” I did not respond, as I was more shocked to hear his voice than anything, so I said, “How are you, Father Jim? Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t call you ‘Father.’” And I said, “Why did you leave the priesthood? Do you have a girlfriend?” He said that I should call him just “Jim.” He said, “Do you need someone to talk to?” I said, “Not really.” He said, “Call your mother; she’s worried about you.” That was the last time I talked to Father Jim. * Mother let me know just how disappointed Jesus was. I cried and cried, and said I was sorry. Into my hands she placed my missal, ordered forty Rosaries. She said next Saturday I would go to confession. I hated confession. Who wouldn’t? * I realize, of course, that this page is a kind of confessional. * The Kumeyaay, Ipai, Tipai, Chumash, Esselen, Rumsen—all Native Americans of Alta California—shared similarities in their religions. Southern Californian tribes made use of Datura, or jimpson weed, a hallucinogen, for religious rituals. In the creation, God made brother sky and sister earth. Brother and sister mated, and sister gave birth to all things on Earth, including people, but it was difficult to distinguish people from all other aspects of Earth because everything was alive: granite and obsidian, the Pacific and its waves, the San Diego and Los Angeles Rivers. Wiyot—a hero—was very powerful, born from lightning, the son of the Creator and a virgin. When Wiyot thought that human women’s legs were more beautiful than Frog’s, Frog became jealous and poisoned Wiyot. The dying Wiyot went to all the people’s villages, and he distributed his power among them. He said, “When I die, I should be cremated.” The people built the fire and funeral pyre. When the fire was ready, and the people about to place Wiyot’s body upon it, Coyote came and snatched away Wiyot’s heart. * My friend Nick told me once how he ate some jimpson weed and that he hallucinated for three days. His family took a road trip and, while driving over the Sierra Nevada mountains, he kept seeing dinosaurs roaming the open meadows and charging down snowy slopes. So it’s no wonder that Native Americans who ingested this plant would have developed religion. * Walking Castroville’s streets after school I got into fights but mostly watched other boys scrabbling on the asphalt. I went to Burger King for Whoppers. Me and my friends cussed. Antonio admonished me when I said, “damn,” while strutting a sidewalk alongside the church. He said, “Jaime”—pronounced Hi-May, which was what all the Mexicans called me—“you’re crazy, eh. Don’t cuss at the church.” He meant while at church, as in, within its vicinity. I said, “We’re not in church.” Once we’d crossed the street, Tony said, “Damn dude, you’re fuckin crazy!” * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra raised the Eucharistic goblet to his lips, and candlelight danced on the blood’s tiny waves. Incense clouded the church so completely that some of the Pame natives grew nauseous. So, too, felt Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra later that night, as he bent over a ceramic bowl and vomited blood, not only the Lord’s, but his own, for poison had laced the sacred vessel into which he poured the sacrament. The physician tending to the sick prelate urged him to take the remedy he’d prepared. But Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra refused, said that he would pray, for he had never taken any medicine in his life, and he never would. * The Chumash of El Valle de Los Osos called themselves the Stishni, separating themselves from Chumash of other regions, those varying tribes of the central California coast that spoke mutually unintelligible dialects of their Hokan language. This made learning their languages impossible for the Spanish friars, to say nothing of translating the Doctrina. Thus the priests baptized few natives, despite the help that the tribes offered the fledgling settlements in the form of meat and acorn meal, which the Spaniards found repugnant. Some from these cultures, feeling threatened by the newcomers, shot flaming arrows into the thatched roofs of the mission structures. And why wouldn’t they feel threatened when priests chastised them for performing, for example, their Coyote Dance, wherein a man donning a coyote-skin-and-skull costume dances while a singer sings his tale, which laments the human feces strewn imaginatively about the Earth? Coyote, meantime, tries to get an onlooker to lick his genitals, and finally engages in public sexual intercourse with a female tribe member or two, then ends the dance by defecating. Though the Franciscans called such forbidden acts devilry , the Chumash maintained their Datura cult religion, along with the enforced Christianity. For the Chumash, the Earth was made of two enormous snakes that caused earthquakes when they slithered past one another—a vast reptilian tectonics. In the 20th century, long after Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra and his cohorts had died, when asked by an anthropologist about religious contradictions, conflating the Datura and Christian cults, a Chumash man replied, incredulous: “But these are two different religions.” * When Portolá ordered that if by March 19th, the feast day of St. Joseph, the San Antonio had not arrived in San Diego Bay to relieve them, the Sacred Expedition to Nueva California would be abandoned, Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra prayed a novena for San José’s intercession. And lo, a lookout sighted the San Antonio ’s sails—what seemed to the priest a miracle—that very Saint’s feast day. Europeans would stay in California, and Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra would continue to reap a great harvest of souls for the Lord. By the end of mission secularization in 1836—sixty-six years after the San Antonio rescued the Spaniards—Native American populations in California had declined by seventy-three percent. * When Peter the Aleut would not renounce his Eastern Orthodox faith the padre of San Francisco had a toe severed from each foot with each refusal, totaling ten. The native Ohlones employed in this gruesome task—their obsidian chiseled knives tearing through skin and grinding bone—continued as per their orders, and cut off also each of Peter’s fingers (equals a total of twenty refusals). They quartered the martyr, spilled his bowels, as if from bear attack, attack by a bear in the shape of a Catholic. * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra absolutely believed that the slow rate of conversion for the native people was due to the influence of the Devil, who had been outraged by the coming of the Catholics to California, this region that he had long held in his dominion. * In his reception speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, John Steinbeck said, “Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man—and the Word is with Men.” * In 1602, when Sebastián Vizcaíno and his friars sang mass on Catalina Island, as many as a hundred Pimungans witnessed the rite, asking by signs what it was about. According to Vizcaíno’s records, the Californians marveled not a little at the idea of Heaven and at the image of Jesus crucified. * Vizcaíno was brought to a prairie on Santa Catalina Island where the Pimungans worshipped their sun god. Upon the prairie they had placed an icon, a headless figure with horns protruding from the body, a figure that Vizcaíno predictably described as a demon. The Pimungans urged Vizcaíno not to approach the image of their deity, but he ignored them. He placed his crucifix against the wooden figurine and prayed the Our Father. Vizcaíno told the natives that his prayer was from Heaven, and that their god was the Devil. Vizcaíno held out his crucifix, encouraging the Pimungans to touch it and receive Jesus. He pointed at the sky and indicated Heaven. The Pimungans worshipped a sun deity, so they were impressed with this white man and his description of his god, for their gods seemed to be one and the same. It’s no wonder then that Vizcaíno’s diary reports the natives being pleased with this exchange. “Surely,” the diary says, “they will be converted to our Holy Faith.” * The Miwok women wailed and scratched at their faces when their men consorted with Sir Francis Drake and the other Englishmen who had landed on California’s coast in the summer of 1579. “The blood streaming downe along their brests, besides despoiling the upper parts of their bodies of those single coverings . . .they would with furie cast themselves upon the ground . . . on hard stones, knobby hillocks, stocks of wood, and pricking bushes.” Drake and his men fell themselves to their knees in prayer, their eyes Heavenward, so that the natives might see they prayed to God and they too might worship God then their eyes that had been so blinded by the deceiver might be opened. * Father Fray Antonio de la Ascención—Carmelite friar in Vizcaíno’s party—writes that the Indians of California can “easily and with very little labor be taught our Holy Catholic faith, and that they would receive it well and lovingly.” He calls for two hundred older and honorable soldiers to ensure brotherhood during the conquest, so that peace and love—the best tools to pacify pagans—should reign. The religious, the friar says, should likewise be wise and loving to easily quell animosities between Spaniards and the heathen, and therefore avoid war. The Spaniards should bring with them trinkets—beads, mirrors, knives—to distribute amongst the gentiles, so that they might come to love the Christians, and see “that they are coming to their lands to give them that of which they bring, and not to take away the Indians’ possessions, and may understand that they are seeking the good of their souls.” No women are to accompany the conquest, says Father Fray Antonio, “to avoid offenses to God.” * In 1955 Wallace Stevens admitted himself to St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. There, it’s rumored he converted to Catholicism before dying of stomach cancer, exclaiming to his priest after the baptism, “Now I am in the fold.” Stevens’s late-career poems seem less cynical, more in awe of being and death (read “Metaphor as Degeneration” from The Auroras of Autumn ). He could have chosen from at least three secular hospitals in Hartford at the time. * I was reading Stevens’s Collected Poems when I joined eHarmony and listed that as my “currently reading” book among the “more than twelve” books a year that I would read. I fell in love with my wife when she said, “Are you sending your work out to literary journals?” Prior to this, the first girl I talked to on the phone, when I explained my doctoral exams, said, “So, you’re like, reading Stephen King and stuff?” When I said not exactly she responded defensively: “He must be doing something right, since he makes all that money.” * Mom walked me, my brother, and sister, through the Stations of the Cross. We did this on Ash Wednesdays, or whenever she thought we needed extra God after church. It might’ve happened before church, though that’s unlikely because we were always late. Anyway, it’s easiest to walk the Stations of the Cross when there’s no one else around. To walk the actual Stations means one goes to Jerusalem and walks the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. So the Stations elsewhere—usually paintings, or low-relief sculptures upon church walls—serve as a kind of virtual Dolorosa. Mom held our hands and started from the rear of Our Lady of Refuge: the First Station. Mom said we should say a prayer at each Station and to think of all the pain Jesus went through so that we could go to Heaven. It was hard to keep thinking about that one thing for so long. My mind went to that Saturday’s little league game, to the donut and chocolate milk (our after-church reward from Castroville Bakery), and as I grew older I thought about girls. When you’re thirteen you can’t not think about the girl’s butt in the pew in front of yours as she kneels and stands to pray throughout mass. * It grew increasingly juvenile to lie awake at night daring myself to utter a simple sentence. Even if I said I didn’t believe in God, wouldn’t He know the truth? He was omniscient, like a narrator. Even the idea of Him as a him ceased making sense. Not only did this come with a budding realization of my paternalistic culture, but due to the simple question of why? If God was everything, everywhere, all knowing, then why would he be a man? There’s that question: If God is a man then God must have a penis, and if so, what for? * The Catholic Church incorporates some modern scientific research into its dogma concerning the formation of the Universe, Solar System, and Earth, as well as evolution. According to Catholic doctrine, in approximately the fifth millennia BCE, humans began to worship the one true God. Those humans were Adam and Eve, though the Church says humans had been around for thousands of years prior to Adam and Eve. The Church claims to be infallible. Every time the Church changes its doctrine it remains infallible. * One Catholic writer, Tom Meagher, writes that “Modernism[—]the idea that we come to our beliefs individually through emotional or personal experiences[—]has crept into our Catholic schools.” * Catholics believe that evil spirits, given power through Original Sin, can imbue ordinary inanimate objects of everyday use. Thus, such objects should be blessed in order to induce in them the desire to serve the good. Such objects are not limited to, but include, “new ships and boats, railways and trains, bridges, fountains, wells, cornmills, limekilns, smelting furnaces, telegrams, steam engines, and machines for providing electricity.” * In The Sound of Music Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer sing together: “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could...” * To explain competing theories on the very early universe, and pre-verse would be another book. What was the inflaton? Did (mem)branes collide, initiating the Big Bang, as opposed to Lemaître’s primordial atom, a singularity? Without a unified theory there’s gravity hanging out there, fucking everything up. We cannot make sense of the mechanics of the Planck Epoch—0-10-34 seconds into the Universe’s creation—named for Max Planck, who stumbled into the discovery of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century. * My students often ask if I believe in God, since I espouse evolution, the Big Bang, Science, reject a strictly biblical or creationist theory of the Universe. I tell them that yes, I believe in God, though not the God that they imagine one must believe in. * When questioned regarding the rumor that, before his death, founder of quantum mechanics Max Planck had converted to Catholicism, he replied that he did not believe “in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.” * Physicist and Catholic priest George Lemaître, who formulated the theory and wrote the 1946 book The Primeval Atom Hypothesis , was made a household name by then-detractor Fred Hoyle, who pejoratively referred to the idea as a “Big Bang.” * Suicide is a mortal sin. To end one’s own life one must have despair, which is to lose hope, which is to lose faith, and to disbelieve in God. * Archaeology has uncovered graffiti in all of California’s missions—Indian pictographs inscribed into the adobe, covered with layers of whitewash. Native deities and depictions of cultural practices show that tribespeople never fully gave up their native traditions even after baptism and coming to the missions. There was something inside Native Californians that would never die. (shrink)

O papel da Igreja foi fundamental no processo de constituição do território no Novo Mundo. Neste artigo, explora-se a forma como se implementaram no Novo Reino de Granada (hoje Colômbia) as “Instruções para a fábrica e decoração das igrejas” de Carlos Borromeo de 1577, documento considerado como a consolidação arquitetônica do Concilio de Trento. A análise parte da comparação dos principais preceitos contidos nas Instruções com os contratos de fabricação das igrejas celebrados pelo Visitador Luis Henríquez entre os anos 1599 (...) e 1605 no território da Província de Tunja. Dentro da empreitada religiosa e de unificação da Coroa espanhola no território americano, a doutrina dos indígenas americanos tornou-se um projeto crucial e, portanto, a fabricação das igrejas e a concentração da população. A igreja era o ponto de partida para a conformação de novos assentamentos para indígenas sob a responsabilidade de um padre, chamados “povoados de índios”. A força do projeto secular espanhol deixou suas marcas na forma destas igrejas de doutrina construídas e que, 400 anos depois, permitem realizar uma reflexão sobre a imposição do simbolismo e da hierarquia eclesiástica em Colômbia. Palavras-chave: Arquitetura religiosa. Novo Reino de Granada. Carlos Borromeo. Igrejas de doutrina.In the territorial constitution of the New World the role of the Church was crucial. In this article, we investigate the implementation in the new kingdom of Granada (the current Colombia) the “Instructions to the factory and decoration churches” by Charles Boromeo, 1577, a document considered as architectural consolidation of the Council of Trent. This analysis is grounded in the comparison between the Borromeo's Instructions and the numerous contracts assigned by Luis Henriquez in the period of 1559 and 1605, in the territory of the province of Tunja. The indoctrination process of the indigenous American people became the main project in the religious enterprise and unification of Spanish Crown through the construction of sturdy churches and concentration of this population around them. The church was the start point for urban conformation of new indigenous settlements named “povoados de índios”, upon the responsibility of a priest. The force of Spain’s secular project left its mark in the shape of such “churches of doctrine” constructed across the territory in the XVII century, which allow today a reflection about the symbolic imposition of a new ecclesial hierarchy in Colombia during this period. Keywords : Religious architecture. New Kingdom of Granada. Charles Borromeo. Churches of Doctrine. (shrink)

Tempo barroco: as Visitas Pastorais dos Comissários das Ordens Terceiras no século XVIII em Minas Gerais. (Baroque Time: pastoral visits of the comissioners of the third orders in Minas Gerais, Brazil, during the eighteenth century.). O presente artigo tem por objetivo analisar o aparato que marcava a entrada dos comissários das ordens terceiras em suas visitas às vilas, analisando também o modo como aconteciam essas visitas pastorais. As visitações dos comissários das Ordens Terceiras de Nossa Senhora do Carmo e de (...) São Francisco eram ocasiões que mobilizavam os irmãos destas congregações tanto no tocante aos assuntos espirituais quanto à esfera temporal. No aspecto material, as visitas demandavam grandes despesas com a realização de solenidades e hospedagem dos comissários. A visitação tinha por objetivo central assegurar a manutenção do sentido de ordem e de hierarquia que fundava as fraternidades de irmãos terceiros. Deste modo os padres visitadores deviam inspecionar e nortear a vida administrativa destas congregações e a vida particular dos terceiros seculares para verificar a sua conformação aos preceitos da moral e da fé cristã e às regras das ordens terceiras, instruir e disciplinar aqueles irmãos que houvessem cometido algum delito, coibir práticas e comportamentos desviantes. A pompa barroca das diversas cerimônias que aconteciam durante o tempo da visita concorria para suscitar o sentido de ordem e hierarquia entre os irmãos terceiros. Palavras-chave: Ordens Terceiras; Visita Pastoral; Festa; Catolicismo; Barroco.This article aims to examine the apparatus that marked the entrance of the Third Orders’ Commissioners on their visits to the villages, also analyzing how these pastoral visits took place. The Visitations of those Commissioners of the Third Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and San Francisco happened to be special occasions for the brothers of these congregations to be both materially and spiritually revived. In the material aspect, such visits demanded great costs to cover the ceremonies and the Commissioners expenses. The main purpose of the Visitation was to ensure the maintenance of a sense of order and hierarchy that originally was on the foundation of the fraternity. Thus, the Visitors should inspect and guide the administrative life of these congregations and also to help the Fathers to conform their lives to the precepts of morality and Christian faith and to the rules of the Third Order. Such visits also had the purpose to educate and to discipline those brothers who had committed some delict, and to curb practices and deviant behaviors. The pomp of the Baroque ceremonies that took place during the time of those mentioned visits finally aimed to raise the sense of order and hierarchy among all the members of Third Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and San Francisco. Key words : Third Order; Pastoral Visit; Party; Catholicism; Baroque. (shrink)

S.O.S. Songs of the Sea is the perfect mix of music, creativity, and fun for music teachers, classroom teachers, child care providers ... and kids! Students will enjoy learning about the sea and its creatures through the engaging songs and activities. Classroom curriculum, music, crafts, and snacks are integrated, overlapped and joined to immerse students in a joyful, creative learning experience.

The author's primary aim is to help readers discover what is distinctive in Confucius & to learn what he can teach us.

“What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?” This apparently simple question opens into the massive, provocative, and complex A Secular Age, where Charles Taylor positions secularism as a defining feature of the modern world, not the mere absence of religion, and casts light on the experience of transcendence that scientistic explanations of the world tend to neglect. -/- In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, a prominent and varied group of (...) scholars chart the conversations in which A Secular Age intervenes and address wider questions of secularism and secularity. The distinguished contributors include Robert Bellah, José Casanova, Nilüfer Göle, William E. Connolly, Wendy Brown, Simon During, Colin Jager, Jon Butler, Jonathan Sheehan, Akeel Bilgrami, John Milbank, and Saba Mahmood. -/- Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age is edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun. (shrink)

For the past two decades, philosophers of religion have paid close attention to the debates on public reason taking place within the context of political philosophy. Some thinkers claim that religious arguments should play a very limited role in political discourse, as this would amount to a politically sanctioned imposition of religious beliefs on people with different religious or non-religious worldviews. Others claim that excluding religious reasons would lead to an unfair exclusion of religious citizens from democratic processes. Underlying these (...) positions is a highly problematic idea of what it means to be a religious citizen. On the one hand, religious citizens are conceptualized as highly self-reflective theologians. Others instead imagine religious citizens to be wholly incapable of such self-reflection and of distinguishing between public and non-public spheres. In my article I attempt to criticize these underlying assumptions and point towards a more nuanced conception of the religious citizen. (shrink)

"A book from the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith, and Ethics." Includes bibliographical references (p. [141]-195) and index.

Our contemporary nihilism -- Homer's polytheism -- From Aeschylus to Augustine : monotheism on the rise -- From Dante to Kant : the attractions and dangers of autonomy -- Fanaticism, polytheism, and Melville's "evil art" -- David Foster Wallace's nihilism -- Conclusion : lives worth living in a secular age.

Uncovering the historical roots of naturalistic, secular contemporary ethics, in this volume Michael Gill shows how the British moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries completed a Copernican revolution in moral philosophy. They effected a shift from thinking of morality as independent of human nature to thinking of it as part of human nature itself. He also shows how the British Moralists - sometimes inadvertently, sometimes by design - disengaged ethical thinking, first from distinctly Christian ideas and then from (...) theistic commitments altogether. Examining in detail the arguments of Whichcote, Cudworth, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson against Calvinist conceptions of original sin and egoistic conceptions of human motivation, Gill also demonstrates how Hume combined the ideas of earlier British moralists with his own insights to produce an account of morality and human nature that undermined some of his predecessors' most deeply held philosophical goals. (shrink)

In his recent writings on religion and secularization, Habermas has challenged reason to clarify its relation to religious experience and to engage religions in a constructive dialogue. Given the global challenges facing humanity, nothing is more dangerous than the refusal to communicate that we encounter today in different forms of religious and ideological fundamentalism. Habermas argues that in order to engage in this dialogue, two conditions must be met: religion must accept the authority of secular reason as the fallible (...) results of the sciences and the universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality; and conversely, secular reason must not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith. This argument was developed in part as a reaction to the conception of the relation between faith and reason formulated by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2006 Regensburg address. In 2007 Habermas conducted a debate, under the title ‘An Awareness of What Is Missing', with philosophers from the Jesuit School for Philosophy in Munich. This volume includes Habermas's essay, the contributions of his interlocutors and Habermas's reply to them. It will be indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand one of the most urgent and intractable issues of our time. (shrink)

Some twenty-five centuries after the Buddha started teaching, his message continues to inspire people across the globe, including those living in predominantly secular societies. But what does it mean to adapt religious practices to secular contexts? Stephen Batchelor, an internationally known author and teacher, is committed to a secularized version of the Buddha's teachings. The time has come, he feels, to articulate a coherent ethical, contemplative, and philosophical vision of Buddhism for our age. _After Buddhism, _the culmination of (...) four decades of study and practice in the Tibetan, Zen, and Theravada traditions, is his attempt to set the record straight about who the Buddha was and what he was trying to teach. Combining critical readings of the earliest canonical texts with narrative accounts of five of the Buddha’s inner circle, Batchelor depicts the Buddha as a pragmatic ethicist rather than a dogmatic metaphysician. He envisions Buddhism as a constantly evolving culture of awakening, its long survival due to its capacity to reinvent itself and interact creatively with each society it encounters. This original and provocative book presents a new framework for understanding the remarkable spread of Buddhism in today’s globalized world. It also reminds us of what was so startling about the Buddha’s vision of human flourishing. (shrink)

This essay seeks to scrutinize Kierkegaard’s critical philosophical theology. The intent is to demonstrate how his religious thought, especially on God’s relation to the world and to the human being, can contribute to generating a cogent response to the challenges presented by our accelerating secular world. Apart from the narrative on the Dane’s passionate reflections, I employ two other narratives to facilitate this inquiry into Kierkegaard. The first of these facilitating narratives comes from highlighting the work on the concept (...) of resonance by the social theorist Hartmut Rosa. Rosa’s rich analysis of our contemporary situation provides a persuasive case for the accelerating pace of our secular world, the complex dynamics of alienation that are at play within it, and the need for social transformation that creates space for increasing resonance within personal and social relationships and structures. The second facilitating narrative centers on the notion of dancing in God, which I believe holds promise for effectively communicating moving, bodily, rhythmic, passionate, and responsive thoughts and actions concerning God’s engagement in our contemporary world. I hope to show that these three complementary discourses together provide a provocative religious discourse and vision that can prove helpful in addressing many of the challenges of our time. (shrink)

This volume offer a manifold approach to a less evident and until now much neglected undercurrent in the work of Hannah Arendt., namely her ambiguous relation to the Judeo-Christian relligious heritage. Arendt's dissertation was dedicated to the concept of love in the works of Augustine, where she set her tone and developmed her frame for approaching theological matters. Her understanding of secularity might provide a model for the reconciliation of secularization and the persistence of religious belief in the contemporary world. (...) Thought Hannah Arendt wad certainly and outspokenly a secular thinker, her work also harbors ways of understanding secularization as the possibility of a new, maybe even messianic, attitude towards finite life and earthly reality. She famously depicts this attitude as "faith in and hope for the world". --Book cover. (shrink)

While this is not the first study of reception histories of Indian and European ideas across East-West boundaries, Thomas J. Green's distinctive contribution is to show–via a microscopic focus on two thinkers whose intellectual trajectories cannot be fully understood within the history of any single nation–how the macroscopic processes of modernity and secularisation in the long nineteenth-century must be seen as transnational phenomena. The argument is centred on the German scholar of comparative religion, Friedrich Max Müller and the Bengali advocate (...) for Hindu socio-religious reform, Swami Vivekananda. Green masterfully brings to light the surprising convergences between these two figures... (shrink)

_A positive assessment of secularism and the possibilities it offers for a genuinely meaningful life without religion_ Although there is no shortage of recent books arguing against religion, few offer a positive alternative—how anyone might live a fulfilling life without the support of religious beliefs. This enlightening book fills the gap. Philip Kitcher constructs an original and persuasive secular perspective, one that answers human needs, recognizes the objectivity of values, and provides for the universal desire for meaningfulness. Kitcher thoughtfully (...) and sensitively considers how secularism can respond to the worries and challenges that all people confront, including the issue of mortality. He investigates how secular lives compare with those of people who adopt religious doctrines as literal truth, as well as those who embrace less literalistic versions of religion. Whereas religious belief has been important in past times, Kitcher concludes that evolution away from religion is now essential. He envisions the successors to religious life, where the senses of identity and community traditionally fostered by religion will instead draw on a broader range of cultural items—those provided by poets, filmmakers, musicians, artists, scientists, and others. With clarity and deep insight, Kitcher reveals the power of secular humanism to encourage fulfilling human lives built on ethical truth. (shrink)

Ananda Abeysekara contends that democracy, along with its cherished secular norms, is founded on the idea of a promise deferred to the future. Rooted in democracy's messianic promise is the belief that religious—political identity-such as Buddhist, Hindu, Sinhalese, Christian, Muslim, or Tamil—can be critiqued, neutralized, improved, and changed, even while remaining inseparable from the genocide of the past. This facile belief, he argues, is precisely what distracts us from challenging the violence inherent in postcolonial political sovereignty. At the same (...) time, we cannot simply dismiss the democratic concept, since it permeates so deeply through our modernist, capitalist, and humanist selves. In _The Politics of Postsecular Religion_, Abeysekara invites us to reconsider our ethical-political legacies, to look at them not as _problems_, but as _aporias_, in the Derridean sense-that is, as contradictions or impasses incapable of resolution. Disciplinary theorizing in religion and politics, he argues, is unable to identify the aporias of our postcolonial modernity. The aporetic legacies, which are like specters that cannot be wished away, demand a new kind of thinking. It is this thinking that Abeysekara calls mourning and un-inheriting. Un-inheriting is a way of meditating on history that both avoids the simple binary of remembering and forgetting and provides an original perspective on heritage, memory, and time. Abeysekara situates aporias in the settings and cultures of the United States, France, England, Sri Lanka, India, and Tibet. In presenting concrete examples of religion in public life, he questions the task of refashioning the aporetic premises of liberalism and secularism. Through close readings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, Butler, and Agamben, as well as Foucault, Asad, Chakrabarty, Balibar, and Zizek, he offers readers a way to think about the futures of postsecular politics that is both dynamic and creative. (shrink)

This paper explores the adult mindfulness landscape, secular and Buddhist, in order to inform an approach to the teaching of mindfulness in secondary schools. The Introduction explains the background to the project and the significant overlap between secular and Buddhist practices. I explain what mindfulness is and highlight a number of important practical differences between the teaching of mindfulness in the adult world and in schools. ‘Balancing Calm and Insight’ looks at mindfulness through a lens infrequently explored in (...) the therapeutic literature, and suggests that a slight shift in the centre of gravity towards Calm might be appropriate. ‘Defining Objectives’ considers how difficult it is to clearly articulate the objective of mindfulness in schools given a new context in which it functions as neither clinical application nor spiritual practice. A range of alternatives is considered. ‘Building a Scaffolding’ explains the importance of context in both Buddhist and secular practice. To succeed, mindfulness should be nested within a broader framework of understanding, or what Kabat-Zinn calls a ‘scaffolding’. I suggest that perhaps the best ‘scaffolding’ for mindfulness in schools is its sense of possibility. ‘Ethics and Community’ describes how ethics are more important in secular mindfulness than they at first appear. The shape ethics might take in a school context is considered, then an assessment of the role of the teacher and what equivalent there might be for what Buddhists call sa?gha, or Community. (shrink)

This article challenges the widely-held belief, within and outside academia, that premodern Muslims did not make a distinction between the religious and secular. I explore the issue by examining several usages of the dīn – dunyā binary across diverse genres of medieval Islamic writings and assessing to what extent it accords with or diverges from the categories of the religious and secular as commonly used in the modern Western world. I situate my particular counter-claim vis-à-vis the argument against (...) the relevance of the religious–secular distinction to Islam made by Shahab Ahmed in his, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. My findings show that contrary to Ahmed and the broader consensus, premodern Muslims did in fact view the world in terms of distinct spheres of religion and non-religion and that this distinction was used to understand phenomena as diverse and significant as politics and prophethood. Nevertheless, the two categories interacted in a way distinct from the common understanding of the two in the modern world insofar as, under the medieval Islamic conception, it was religion that regulated the secular. My article will make sense of these similarities and differences in an effort to present an indigenous account of the religious–secular dialectic in medieval Islam, one that problematizes the current standard account which holds that these categories were invented within the modern West. (shrink)

I examine issues in the philosophy of religion at the intersection of what possibilities there are and what a God, as classically conceived in the theistic philosophical tradition, would be able to do. The discussion is centered around arguing for an incompatibility between theism and two principles about possibility and ability, and exploring what theists should say about these incompatibilities. -/- I argue that theism entails that certain kinds and amounts of evil are impossible. This puts theism in conflict with (...) popular principles of modal recombination. However, theists have plausible explanations for the violations of recombination that they posit, and can suitably amend these principles without giving up their usefulness in accounting for what possibilities there are. -/- I also argue that despite the impossibility of these evils, God is able to bring these evils about. This puts theism in conflict with the principle that no one is able to do the impossible. However, theists can give a plausible account of why God is unique in being able to do the impossible, and have distinctive resources to address the arguments in favor of the idea that no one is able to do the impossible. And by denying this principle, theists are able to resolve several otherwise difficult puzzles, including reconciling conflicts between the divine attributes. (shrink)

The gap between Christian and secular bioethics appears to be widening, and inevitably so. In this essay, I identify four areas in which the differences between Christian and secular bioethics are significant, and in light of which secular bioethics, by its inability to attend to key concerns of Christian thought, will inevitably continue to marginalize the latter. How Christian bioethicists should view this marginalization will be the subject of the final section of this paper.

This paper critically explores key aspects of the gulf between traditional Christian bioethics and the secular moral reflections that dominate contemporary bioethics. For example, in contrast to traditional Christian morality, the established secular bioethics judges extramarital sex acts among consenting persons, whether of the same or different sexes, as at least morally permissible, affirms sexual freedom for children to develop their own sexual identity, and holds the easy availability of abortion and infanticide as central to the liberty interests (...) of women. Secular bioethics seeks to separate children from the authority of their parents, placing children themselves as in authority to make their own judgments about appropriate lifestyle choices, including sexual behaviors. As I argue, however, absent God, there exists no standpoint outside of our own cultural sociohistorically conditioned understanding from which to communicate any deeper perspective of reality or the bioethics that such a perspective would secure. Consequently, rather than discerning moral truth, secular bioethics merely affirms its own particular cultural sociohistorically conditioned ideological perspective. It is a social and political worldview bereft of definitive moral foundation, independent moral authority, or unambiguous content. (shrink)

Spirituality is a growing research theme, especially in relation to health issues. The term is often poorly defined and one’s understanding is often so broad that it becomes a mere frame word devoid of meaning. In this study, we asked 514 adult Danes about their understanding of the word ‘spirituality’. Factor analysis of the answers resulted in six different understandings of spirituality: positive dimensions in human life and well-being; New Age ideology; an integrated part of established religious life; a vague (...) striving, opposed to religion; selfishness; and ordinary inspiration in human activities. It is concluded that a common understanding of the term spirituality does not exist, at least in a modern secular setting. Suggestion for future research is that the term spirituality is not used without an indication, notions or keywords of what is meant by the term in a specific context. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to identify how modern Russia can build good relationships between multiple Russian religions and the state. At present there are many obstacles standing in the way of achieving this goal. The article includes a great many statistics, and discusses political, social, and religious views of the issue.The working Russian Constitution provides major legal provisions for democratic relationships between religions and the state. The law “On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations” (1997) clarified constitutional provisions. (...) It should not forgotten that Russia is a secular state claiming to respect all religions. No doubt the supremacy of Orthodoxy in Russia after 1721 and the extreme atheism that arose in the Soviet Union after 1917 influenced people’s minds greatly. While the countries in Western Europe were moving from religiosity to secularism, Russia was developing the other way around. But while respecting all religions, Russia should not forget to be mindful of extremism. Religious associations themselves are likewise uneasy about the danger presented by certain mystic, neo-pagan, and destructive sects. The author argues that the best compromise between religions and the modern Russian state canonly be achieved on the basis of equality and freedom. (shrink)