We report the results of a dual-task study in which participants performed a tracking and typing task under various experimental conditions. An objective payoff function was used to provide explicit feedback on how participants should trade off performance between the tasks. Results show that participants’ dual-task interleaving strategy was sensitive to changes in the difficulty of the tracking task and resulted in differences in overall task performance. To test the hypothesis that people select strategies that maximize payoff, a Cognitively Bounded (...) Rational Analysis model was developed. This analysis evaluated a variety of dual-task interleaving strategies to identify the optimal strategy for maximizing payoff in each condition. The model predicts that the region of optimum performance is different between experimental conditions. The correspondence between human data and the prediction of the optimal strategy is found to be remarkably high across a number of performance measures. This suggests that participants were honing their behavior to maximize payoff. Limitations are discussed. (shrink)

Mass media ethics and the classical liberal ideal of the autonomous individual are historically linked and professionally dominant--yet the authors of this work feel this is intrinsically flawed. They show how recent research in philosophy and social science--together with a longer tradition in theological inquiry--insist that community, mutuality, and relationship are fundamental to a full concept of personhood. The authors argue that "persons-in-community" provides a more defensible grounding for journalists' professional moral decision-making in crucial areas such as truthtelling, privacy, organizational (...) culture, and balanced coverage. With numerous examples drawn from life as well as from theory, this book will interest journalists, editors, and professionals in media management as well as students and scholars of media ethics, reporting, and media law. (shrink)

Papers presented at an annual inter-disciplinary seminar held to facilitate the 60th birthday of Kalarikkal Poulose Aleaz, b. 1947, theologist from Kerala, India during 20-21 September 2007.

This volume offers an English translation of John of St. Thomas's Cursus theologicus I, question I, disputation 2. In this particular text, the Dominican master raises questions concerning the scientific status and nature of theology. At issue, here, are a number of factors: namely, Christianity's continual coming to terms with the "Third Entry" of Aristotelian thought into Western Christian intellectual culture - specifically the Aristotelian notion of 'science' and sacra doctrina's satisfaction of those requirements - the Thomistic-commentary tradition, (...) and the larger backdrop of the Iberian Peninsula's flourishing "Second Scholasticism." In this latter context, John of St. Thomas applies the theological principles of Thomas Aquinas to the Scholastic disputes preoccupying Thomist, Franciscan, and Jesuit theologians, such as Cajetan, Bañez, Luis de Molina, Vazquez, Suárez - to name only a few - in a tour de force of theological thinking throughout the entire period of Scholasticism. In the process - and not insignificantly - the status quaestionis of theology's scientific character is clearly framed and answered according to John's satisfaction. Key to John of St. Thomas's resolution of the question is his understanding of the continuity of the power of human reason with the super-intelligibility of divine revelation spelled out in terms of what he calls "virtual revelation." This text presented in this volume is a quintessential example of the deep and abiding harmony that flourished between faith and reason as well as grace and nature within the golden era of Baroque Scholasticism. (shrink)

In the course of my efforts to distinguish and relate the methods and achievements of René Girard and James Alison, I have developed the hypothesis that a particular pair of theological terms might provide a helpful conceptual tool for carrying out this task—fides quae creditur and fides qua creditur. These terms were given their classic formulation within Protestant scholasticism at the beginning of the seventeenth century, where they were used to distinguish between two dimensions of Christian faith: the “object” (...) or “content” of faith , and the kind of activity that faith is or the form that it takes within the subject .My proposal, stated most briefly, is that Alison’s use of Girard’s .. (shrink)

A Companion to Medieval Christian Humanismexplores Christian humanism in the writings of key medieval thinkers. It explores questions pertaining to human dignity, the human person's place in the cosmos, and the educational ideals involved in shaping the human person.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 146-149 [Access article in PDF] Gianluca Mori. Bayle philosophe. Paris: Champion, 1999. Pp. 416. Paper, N.P. Stefano Brogi. Teologia senza verità: Bayle contro i "rationaux." Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1998. Pp. 306. Paper, N.P. Why do professional philosophers spend so much time on Descartes and so little time on Pierre Bayle, when Bayle was clearly the better philosopher? I hope that the real (...) answer is not that Bayle wrote too much that is too hard to survey and synthesize, whereas Descartes wrote short works that are easy to teach to undergraduates. Of course, part of any answer will turn on what is meant by "the better philosopher," and [End Page 146] we will return to this issue. If the two books reviewed here get the attention they deserve, Bayle may begin to get more of the attention he deserves.Bayle is well-known for his attacks on Pierre Jurieu, but less well-known are his fights with the 'rationalist' theologian-philosophers Jean LeClerc, Jacques Bernard, and Isaac Jaquelot. They reveal that Bayle was not the automatic supporter of "Enlightenment" of later legend. Stefano Brogi explores these attacks in three of Bayle's last works, the Continuation of the Diverse Thoughts on the Comet (1705; very different from the Diverse Thoughts on the Comet of 1683), Response to Questions of a Provincial (1704-1707), and Conversations between Maxime and Thémiste (1707). Regrettably, none of these—nor any of the works of LeClerc, Bernard, and Jaquelot—have been translated. Greater attention to Descartes may derive from the excellent translations of his work, contrasted with the absence of translations of much of Bayle.Brogi begins with Bayle's reconstruction of "Pyrrho's theology." Faith, in Bayle's hands, is almost completely non-cognitive, accepting the Scripture without understanding it. Rationality, to Bayle, is a second Penelope, unraveling all that it makes. Then Brogi explores what Bayle could have meant by praising Simonides, the ancient Greek who, asked to define God, always asked for more time. He also reviews Bayle's views on euhemerism and the theory of impostorship, and cannot believe Bayle's pretended unawareness of some of the implications of his arguments.The third section, "Ethics against religion," tackles the paradox that Bayle fiercely attacked reason and the argument from consensus for the existence of God, but then invoked reason and consensus as proof of moral claims. In ethics, Bayle's skepticism evaporates. That leads to the further paradox that his rigorous moral evaluation of religion leads to atheism. The ostensible argument is that pagan religions have such immoral gods that it is better not to believe in them; the implication is that the same goes for Judeo-Christianity.It all comes together in Brogi's discussion of "Theology without morality." In his controversies with LeClerc about Origenism (universal salvation) and evil, Bayle brings out the dubious moral consequences of both Origenism and Augustinianism. There is no rational way of saving God's goodness. Then Bayle simply declares his faith in revelation. LeClerc thinks this is bad faith, but he ends up relying on blind faith. Jaquelot argues that God's glory requires the world as it is, but when Bayle asks what glory could come from human suffering, Jaquelot also takes refuge in the inscrutability of God. If anyone thinks these were insignificant controversies, remember that they provoked Leibniz's Theodicy (1710). Austin Farrar once pronounced, exignorantia, that Bayle was "hopelessly confused" ("Introduction," Routledge edition of Leibniz's Theodicy, 1951; now Open Court edition, 35), but Leibniz knew better.Gianluca Mori's book ranges far more widely than Brogi's. It is the best all-around book on Bayle's philosophy in twenty years. Mori begins with a chapter on interpretation, pointing out that everything that Leo Strauss said about encoded language can be found in Bayle. Using Bayle's own claims about such artifices to interpret his work, he explores the writer's ironies, dissimulation, self-censorship, and implied meanings. The interior thoughts of Bayle are unreachable... (shrink)

In this first full-length study of male homosexuality in Cather's short stories and novels, John P. Anders examines patterns of male friendship ranging on a continuum from the social to the sexual. He reveals how Cather's work assumes an unexpected depth and complexity by drawing on both the familiar tradition of friendship literature inspired by classical and Christian texts and a homosexual legacy that is part of, yet distinct from, established literary traditions. Anders argues that Cather's artistic achievement (...) is distinguished by her sexual aesthetics, an elusive literary style inextricably associated with homosexuality. His analysis demonstrates how a homosexual ethos and eros helped Cather develop a sensitivity to human variation and a style to accommodate it and thus became the objective correlative of her art, dramatizing the diversity of human nature as it deepens the mystery of her work. (shrink)

Is religion a positive reality in your life? If not, have you lost anything by forfeiting this dimension of your humanity? This book compares the theology of Tillich with the psychology of Jung, arguing that they were both concerned with the recovery of a valid religious sense for contemporary culture. _Paul Tillich, Carl Jung and the Recovery of Religion_ explores in detail the diminution of the human spirit through the loss of its contact with its native religious depths, a problem (...) on which both spent much of their working lives and energies. Both Tillich and Jung work with a naturalism that grounds all religion on processes native to the human being. Tillich does this in his efforts to recover that point at which divinity and humanity coincide and from which they differentiate. Jung does this by identifying the archetypal unconscious as the source of all religions now working toward a religious sentiment of more universal sympathy. This book identifies the dependence of both on German mysticism as a common ancestry and concludes with a reflection on how their joint perspective might affect religious education and the relation of religion to science and technology. Throughout the book, John Dourley looks back to the roots of both men's ideas about mediaeval theology and Christian mysticism making it ideal reading for analysts and academics in the fields of Jungian and religious studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.1 (2004) 105-107 [Access article in PDF] Richard H. Popkin. The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle. Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xxiv + 415. Cloth, $74.00. Paper, $24.95. Richard Popkin tells the story that once a long time ago when he asked a question at a conference that made reference to late-eighteenth-century skeptics like Maimon (...) and Platner, Myles Burnyeat turned to the audience and asked, "Does anyone else read these people that Popkin reads?" The answer, by the time we get to this, the fourth edition of a book that first appeared in 1960, is that lots of people are reading the people that Popkin reads. Now [End Page 105] Myles Burnyeat is quoted on the cover of this volume for graciously saying "I regard it as one of the seminal books in the history of ideas." In one of the three Festschriften that have been published in Popkin's honor, David Katz even reports that some of those who work in areas Popkin pioneered refer to themselves as "Popkinites" (James E. Force and David S. Katz, eds., Everything Connects [Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1999], ix).Popkin was also founding editor of this journal, and his name has been footnoted in numerous articles over the years, so it will not be unknown to many. But readers will want to know what is new in this latest version of the classic work. For openers, it is roughly fifty percent longer, now 18 chapters instead of the 12 chapters of the last version. The original book was subtitled "From Erasmus to Descartes" and the later California edition subtitle became "From Erasmus to Spinoza." This edition pushes the envelope in both directions: back to Savonarola and forward to Pierre Bayle.The Savonarola connection comes from the unlikely discovery that the famous monk collected manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus and was planning to have them translated as tools for use against pagan philosophy and in favor of revealed religion. This brings out one of Popkin's favorite points: that what we think of as philosophical skepticism was part and parcel of religious debate early on. Among other new findings in this edition, Popkin finds clues that Leone Ebreo (Judah Abravanel) may have helped Gianfrancesco Pico read anti-Aristotelian Hebrew texts. Jews could use this sort of skepticism against the dogmatic Christians who tried to refute them.The religious connection is fundamental throughout the text. In his new introduction, Popkin admits that "I am more in sympathy with those who used the sceptical and fideist views of the nouveaux pyrrhoniens for religious rather than secular purposes" (p. xxiii). He has developed this sympathy into research on millenarianism in volumes such as Popkin and David S. Katz, Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998) and Popkin, et al., eds., Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, 4 vols. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001).Other new materials follow the discussion of Descartes with a chapter on Henry More, Pascal, and the Quietists and another one on Hobbes's political and practical answer to skepticism. There are new chapters on Wilkins, Boyle, and Glanvill of the Royal Society, and on late seventeenth-century metaphysics. New material on Simon Foucher and Pierre-Daniel Huet is followed by the concluding chapter on Pierre Bayle as a "super sceptic."The book has never been uncontroversial. Although they could follow the skeptical undercutting of the Bible in Spinoza, many scholars could not see how the master of the geometrical method in ethics could be anything but a dogmatist in the final analysis. (Popkin has an answer.) The same doubt will now apply to the treatment of Pierre Bayle in this version. To Popkin, as we have seen, Bayle is a "super sceptic" who "carried scepticism to its ultimate extreme" (300); to Gianluca Mori (Bayle philosophe, Paris: Champion, 1999) and others, he is a dogmatic philosophical atheist as well as moral rigorist. To his credit... (shrink)

Positive public perceptions of academic quality and professional ethics are critical to the long-term legitimacy of American colleges and universities. Faculty codes of conduct are one mechanism whereby the professoriate can define acceptable practice, exercise social control, and maintain public confidence in higher education, yet the drivers of their adoption are not well understood. Building upon previous research into such organizational behavior by institutional type, this study examined the prevalence and content of publicly posted faculty codes of conduct within an (...) organizational field of institutions that share a common religious identity but differ in their institutional types and employment structures. Faculty handbooks from American member institutions of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, an international association of faith-based institutions, were gathered and analyzed. Although only 27% of CCCU member institutions in the U.S. publicly posted faculty codes of conduct, the average number of tenets present in each code was higher than suggested by previous research. Study findings also revealed that membership category, institutional type, and employment structures influence the content of faculty codes of conduct, indicating that isomorphic pressures operate within this particular organizational field. The piece concludes by commending publicly posted codes of conduct as an affirmation of the personal responsibility, fairness, and care exercised by ethical professionals in the academy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 139-147 [Access article in PDF] A Mahayana Theology of Salvation History John P. Keenan Middlebury College Salvation history is a Western theological strategy based on biblical ideas about how God acts in history to bring about the salvation/deliverance of God's people. It begins with the scriptural accounts of creation as the inception of God's plan. It moves to describe Israel's deliverance from slavery (...) in Egypt and goes on to depict the guidance the Lord Yahweh provides for his people throughout their journeys and despite their trials and reverses.Israel may be idealized in scripture as God's domain, sovereign among the nations, but in fact it was a small country sandwiched between the two superpowers of the day—Egypt and Assyria (or Babylon), and subject to the rise and fall of those empires. 1 The New Testament goes on to describe God's plan in sending his son Jesus to effect salvation and unite all people in him (Eph. 1:1-16). The passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus comprise the central drama, in which we all are invited to participate. The author of Luke/Acts gives an account of how God moves through the teachings and the life and death of Jesus to establish his Church and how that Church evolves from a small and marginal community to enter and permeate the very heart of the Empire at Rome. The story continues in postscriptural Christian history, from Constantine's vision at Milvian Bridge to the Christianization of Europe, and further to the missionary endeavors to convert all peoples to the path of the Gospel. In the twentieth century, Liberation theology is heir to these notions, insisting that conversion means not simply becoming Christian, but the furtherance of justice and peace among all peoples, even non-Christians.A Mahayana reading of this schema is not at first glance very promising. Mahayana knows nothing of God, much less of God acting in history. Nor, indeed, of history itself as a purposeful unfolding of events. Indian thought is known for its ahistoricity. No histories were produced in ancient India at all. No Herodotus, no Thucydides. The first Buddhist histories were written not in India but in Tibet, some thousand years after the birth of the Buddha Sakyamuni. Indian traditions in their focus on the eternal truth (sanatana dharma) turned away from the concrete flow of events and from any recording of their progression. [End Page 139]The task before us is challenging. To tackle it best, I will divide this essay into three parts, and thus attempt to argue for a Mahayana reading of salvation history. The first part will treat Mahayana philosophy and argue that despite its Indian lack of historical consciousness, it does possess the tools for writing history. Its teaching that all events are empty (sunyata) is coterminous with its teaching that all events arise in dependence upon a host of causes and conditions (pratitya-samutpada). In a word, emptiness itself entails a radical insight into the contingent and conventional historicity of events (dharmas). Beyond this, since all events are seen as empty of any abiding core essence, Mahayana deconstructs the very idea of an eternal world truth over and apart from the everyday world of events. It proclaims, rather, that to an awakened person, all is "worldly convention-only" (samvrti-matra). 2 This focus on the radical conventionality of events can serve, I would argue, as a needed corrective to a literalistic reading of salvation history. Looked at from this perspective, the story of the New Testament writers can perhaps become more apparent—how they are writing of God's design, purpose, and plan in order to counter the regnant patterns of Greek and Roman arrogance, and to substitute insight into the mystery of our being and of our being here.The second part of this article will address the Western doctrine of salvation history, focusing on the New Testament, particularly Pauline theology as expressed in one passage from Ephesians about how salvation is attained through Jesus as the unfolding plan of God's purpose... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Prospects for a Mahāyāna Theology of EmptinessA Continuing DebateJohn P. KeenanTwo articles in recent issues of Buddhist-Christian Studies—Lai Pan-chiu’s “A Mahāyāna Reading of Chalcedon Christology: A Chinese Response to John Keenan” 1 (2004) and Thomas Cattoi’s “What Has Chalcedon to Do with Lhasa? John Keenan’s and Lai Pan-chiu’s Reflections on Classical Christology and the Possible Shape of a Tibetan Theology of Incarnation” 2 (2008)—discuss my (...) book The Meaning of Christ: A Mahāyāna Theology (1989),3 prompting me to add my voice to the conversation.In “A Mahāyāna Reading of Chalcedon Christology: A Chinese Response to John Keenan,” Lai Pan-chiu reads from the perspective of a Chinese Christian thinker my formulation of a Christology informed by Indian Mahāyāna philosophy. He would prefer to configure a rather different Mahāyāna theology, wherein the polarity expressed in traditional Chalcedonian theology would be reinvested in a Chinese Mahāyāna dynamic, with its ability to hold in creative tension what are often seen as exclusionary opposites. Lai proposes to take as leitmotif for this project the Chinese Mahāyāna theme of Buddha Nature (C. fóxìng ) and its Indian precursor of Tathāgatagarbha (Skt. “matrix of the Buddha”) thought. Although—for reasons I will discuss below—I would not myself choose this approach in writing Christology for a western audience, I certainly would commend Lai Pan-chiu’s effort to do so for a Chinese audience and beyond.In “What Has Chalcedon to Do with Lhasa? John Keenan’s and Lai Pan-chiu’s Reflections on Classical Christology and the Possible Shape of a Tibetan Theology of Incarnation,” Thomas Cattoi contends that Lai has not gone far enough in responding to The Meaning of Christ. Cattoi himself then proceeds with a critique of Mahāyāna theology that reveals both his own unwavering commitment to traditional ontological theology and his apparent disinterest in engaging Buddhist Mahāyāna philosophy in depth. He makes little or no reference to the Mahāyāna philosophical themes that I discuss in detail in The Meaning of Christ—themes that I then employ to enunciate a Mahāyāna Christology. Moreover, the alternative “Tibetan Christology” that Cattoi proffers in this article also appears to avoid any deep or detailed engagement [End Page 3] with Mahāyāna thought. He seems satisfied to employ Tibetan Buddhist terminology simply to reaffirm what we have long affirmed in the Greek, emphasizing the embodiment of Christ as the unicum, the one and only embodiment of God, and the transformation of the very fabric of the universe effected thereby.4 His Christology functions as a description of that transformation and, to my lights, leaves scant room for any Trinitarian theology of the Spirit. He argues against the notion that any discourse can empty the ontological claims of “the Christian position.” For him, only the ontological theology of our Greek ancestors is adequate—apparently culturally privileged because providentially inspired.I will address herein some of the many, often convoluted, issues raised, for these issues are basic to Mahāyāna theology and to critiques against its viability. I choose not to detail the many instances in which Thomas Cattoi misreads, mischaracterizes, and misrepresents my work; I must only trust that those who have read The Meaning of Christ are well aware that Cattoi’s characterizations of that book reflect neither its content nor its tone.5 I shall use this space instead to further clarify the shape of a Mahāyāna theology that employs the principal themes of Mādhyamika and Yogācāra, and will discuss in a more general way Cattoi’s fundamental inattentiveness to those themes and to the manner in which they inform Mahāyāna theology.6 I shall also discuss Lai Pan-chiu’s very interesting proposal for a Chinese Mahāyāna theology.Ontology and MahĀyĀna Realms of UnderstandingMahāyāna theology is not Cattoi’s “Mādhyamika dualism.”7 Mahāyāna theology does not represent a Buddhist “position,” but rather the emptiness of all... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 139-147 [Access article in PDF] A Mahayana Theology of Salvation History John P. Keenan Middlebury College Salvation history is a Western theological strategy based on biblical ideas about how God acts in history to bring about the salvation/deliverance of God's people. It begins with the scriptural accounts of creation as the inception of God's plan. It moves to describe Israel's deliverance from slavery (...) in Egypt and goes on to depict the guidance the Lord Yahweh provides for his people throughout their journeys and despite their trials and reverses.Israel may be idealized in scripture as God's domain, sovereign among the nations, but in fact it was a small country sandwiched between the two superpowers of the day—Egypt and Assyria (or Babylon), and subject to the rise and fall of those empires. 1 The New Testament goes on to describe God's plan in sending his son Jesus to effect salvation and unite all people in him (Eph. 1:1-16). The passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus comprise the central drama, in which we all are invited to participate. The author of Luke/Acts gives an account of how God moves through the teachings and the life and death of Jesus to establish his Church and how that Church evolves from a small and marginal community to enter and permeate the very heart of the Empire at Rome. The story continues in postscriptural Christian history, from Constantine's vision at Milvian Bridge to the Christianization of Europe, and further to the missionary endeavors to convert all peoples to the path of the Gospel. In the twentieth century, Liberation theology is heir to these notions, insisting that conversion means not simply becoming Christian, but the furtherance of justice and peace among all peoples, even non-Christians.A Mahayana reading of this schema is not at first glance very promising. Mahayana knows nothing of God, much less of God acting in history. Nor, indeed, of history itself as a purposeful unfolding of events. Indian thought is known for its ahistoricity. No histories were produced in ancient India at all. No Herodotus, no Thucydides. The first Buddhist histories were written not in India but in Tibet, some thousand years after the birth of the Buddha Sakyamuni. Indian traditions in their focus on the eternal truth (sanatana dharma) turned away from the concrete flow of events and from any recording of their progression. [End Page 139]The task before us is challenging. To tackle it best, I will divide this essay into three parts, and thus attempt to argue for a Mahayana reading of salvation history. The first part will treat Mahayana philosophy and argue that despite its Indian lack of historical consciousness, it does possess the tools for writing history. Its teaching that all events are empty (sunyata) is coterminous with its teaching that all events arise in dependence upon a host of causes and conditions (pratitya-samutpada). In a word, emptiness itself entails a radical insight into the contingent and conventional historicity of events (dharmas). Beyond this, since all events are seen as empty of any abiding core essence, Mahayana deconstructs the very idea of an eternal world truth over and apart from the everyday world of events. It proclaims, rather, that to an awakened person, all is "worldly convention-only" (samvrti-matra). 2 This focus on the radical conventionality of events can serve, I would argue, as a needed corrective to a literalistic reading of salvation history. Looked at from this perspective, the story of the New Testament writers can perhaps become more apparent—how they are writing of God's design, purpose, and plan in order to counter the regnant patterns of Greek and Roman arrogance, and to substitute insight into the mystery of our being and of our being here.The second part of this article will address the Western doctrine of salvation history, focusing on the New Testament, particularly Pauline theology as expressed in one passage from Ephesians about how salvation is attained through Jesus as the unfolding plan of God's purpose... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Mahāyāna Theology of the Real Presence of Christ in the EucharistJohn P. KeenanMahāyāna theology is an approach to thinking about the Christian faith within the philosophical context of the great Mahāyāna Buddhist thinkers: philosophers of emptiness such as Nāgārjuna, Āryadeva, and Candrakīrti in the Mādhyamika tradition; and philosophers of consciousness such as Maitreya, Asaçga,Vasubandhu, Sthiramati, Paramārtha, and Hsūan-tsang in theYogācāra tradition. The advantage of employing Mahāyāna philosophy (...) in the doing of Christian theology is that this philosophical tradition developed with the dual purpose of supporting and encouraging faith and practice while eliminating absolutist claims for metaphysically fixed and unalterable ideas.Mahāyāna is deconstructive without any of the aloofness that modern French philosophers apparently feel they must adopt vis-à-vis theology and the Church. Just as Plato did for the Fathers of the early church and Aristotle did for Aquinas, Mahāyāna opens avenues of thought and questioning for contemporary theologians that will gift our cultures with the grace of new theological insight into the meaning of Christ's presence to and among human beings.And so I would like to do some theology here, demonstrating how a Mahāyāna thinker like myself might envisage the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.The Real Presence of ChristThe theology of the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist has had a long and fascinating development. For the first eight centuries, the issue did not arise with any doctrinal insistence.1 Christians were content to see Christ's presence in the performance of the Eucharistic rite as a medicine of immortality that would heal their souls and embody for them the reality of the risen Christ. It was only later, in the condemnation of the theologian Ratramnus2 and the development of the doctrine of transubstantiation, that the classical formulation took shape.3 That doctrine was expressed in philosophic terms that were then current, concepts that were accepted as clear and valid frameworks for thinking.Medieval theologians, especially the great St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth [End Page 89] century, had just rediscovered Aristotle and gloried in the subtle intricacies and vast overviews that this "new" learning provided them.4 They philosophized by seeking insight into and defining the very act of existence itself, discussing the "essences," or "substances" of things as the underlying realities that we encounter in our life and in our faith. In this view, Christ "subsists"—that is, he really exists—as the substance of the bread and wine in the Eucharist. This is the philosophic view that is stressed even today in the Roman Catholic Church. Modern Catholic theologian Bernard Cooke explains the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist as follows:Christ bespeaks in the action of the Mass the presence of his own risen body beneath the appearance of food and drink. He effects this by changing the inner reality (the "substance") of the bread and wine into his risen humanity. This is the unique change that the Church has for centuries called transubstantiation—the change of the substance of the bread into the substance of Christ's risen body. Before the transubstantiation in the Mass, the inner reality (the substance) of the bread and wine is what sustains the external appearances in existence. These appearances tell us of the presence of the inner reality of bread and wine (which itself is not visible). After the transubstantiation, the risen humanity of Christ is what sustains these external appearances in existence. Consequently, they now tell us of the presence of Christ.5The disputes about the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist hinged precisely on this issue—what is the inner reality of the sacrament? Another scholar of these arguments, Francis Clarke, writes:All the Eucharistic controversies... hinge upon one question: What is the substance of the sacrament? "If we did once agree in that, the whole controversy [concerning the sacrifice] would soon be at an end," for the answer to that question decides "whether Christ's body be there offered indeed unto the heavenly Father by the... (shrink)

This essay argues that Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), one of Russia’s most creative religious philosophers, makes an important contribution to Christian social ethics by positing “blessing” as a central moral act. Drawing on Orthodox liturgical practices of blessing, Florensky redescribes reality; it is filled with God’s energies. Especially in letters from the gulag, after his arrest in 1933 for “counter-revolutionary” activity, Florensky calls forth the sacramental mystery of the natural world around the camps and of each person to whom he (...) writes. In attending to them in their concrete particularity, he offers resistance to a totalitarian regime that would reduce them to raw, exploitable material. (shrink)

WESTERN SCHOLARS HAVE POINTED OUT BOTH THE USEFULNESS AND limitations of H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture. This essay relates Niebuhr's five types to discussions of church and culture in contemporary Russian Orthodoxy. I propose a sixth type, Christ in culture, that best illuminates the Church's current program of votserkovlenie. To its Russian representatives, "Christ in culture" enabled the Christian faith to survive communist efforts to destroy the Church, and this cultural legacy continues to define Russia's national identity today. (...) The Church's task, therefore, is not to convert Russians but rather to call them back to their historic self-understanding by means of historical commemoration, religious education, and social outreach. The essay critically evaluates this program of in-churching and the possibilities of a Christ-in-culture type for understanding distinctive features of historically Christian cultures in both East and West. (shrink)

There is a religious ethics implicit in Schleiermacher's doctrine of creation based on the universal feeling of absolute dependence "prior to" its being informed by any historical tradition. The "highest good" which fundamentally characterizes his religious ethics is found at the intersection of God and the World. The "original perfection of man" and the "original perfection of the world" come together when human life in the world is fully informed by the feeling of absolute dependence. Although Schleiermacher did not develop (...) his religious ethics to the same extent as his philosophical and Christian ethics, it should still be of interest to ethicists in many religious traditions, as it establishes contours and sets limits for the ethics of any monotheistic religious tradition. (shrink)

This essay argues that in retrieving the new martyrs and confessors, the approximately two thousand people who suffered directly for their faith under Soviet communist oppression, the Russian Orthodox Church has made publicly available symbols and narratives that bear democratizing potential. The Church's "Icon of the New Martyrs and Confessors" can be interpreted as calling for broad representation of all parts of society in Church and political life, and freedom of the Church to represent its concerns to society without state (...) interference. Although these two principles do not by themselves dictate a particular form of government, a liberal democracy may be their best guarantor. The Russian Orthodox Church therefore need not be seen as essentially antidemocratic. Its symbols and narratives of suffering can also be understood as authorizing democratic reform. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

. Recent years have witnessed the proliferation of “Christian” companies in the U.S. These firms declare their belief in, and active pursuit of, the successful merging of biblical principles with business activities. Economic success, hard work, and biblical values are seen as capable of existing together in harmony. While the number of such businesses appears to be growing, there has been a dearth of any scientific study of these companies. No empirical research has been conducted to determine whether these (...) religious values and behaviors have any significant impact on a company’s performance. The present study is designed to partially fill this gap. Specifically, it seeks to determine whether there are differences in long-term performance between self-proclaimed “Christian-based” businesses and their secular counterparts. Data were collected from 312 companies. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), followed by univariate ANOVAs, found significant differences between these two groups of firms on three of the four performance variables that were analyzed. Some explanations as well as limited generalizations and implications are developed. (shrink)

The last thirty years has witnessed an explosion of scholarly books and articles on Locke which, claims Harpham, has "recast our most basic understanding of Locke as a historical actor and political theorist, the Two Treatises as a document, and liberalism as a coherent tradition of political discourse". The seven articles in this volume attempt to assess this "new scholarship," which is described as revisionist and historicist. This volume is now probably the best introduction to the "new scholarship." The introduction (...) by Edward Harpham, "Locke's Two Treatises in Perspective," and the bibliography provide a nice summary of key ideas, books, and articles. The essence of the new perspective is best stated by Richard Ascraft [[sic]] in "The Politics of Locke's Two Treatises of Government": "Locke's thought is thus both philosophically more conservative and politically more radical than we have hitherto supposed. In short, Locke is at once closer to Aristotle and Hooker and to the levelers and Sidney than the prevailing interpretations of his political thought maintain". Ashcraft attempts to separate Locke from the philosophy of Hobbes on such issues as resistance, toleration, justice and natural law, obligation; he directs his argument against Macpherson and Strauss, whose presences haunt the borders of the new scholarship. Eldon Eisenach, in his "Religion and Locke's Two Treatises of Government," interprets Locke's philosophy as marked by a deep skepticism regarding the reach of natural reason and informed by a "deep faith in the efficacy of biblical revelation" as the source of our moral and political duties. Eisenach comes close to dissenting from the new scholarship by wondering whether "Dunn and Ashcraft" are whistling in the dark concerning the coherence of Locke's "worldview"; but he closes ranks with the assertion that the Essay lays out a path to salvation. Eisenach concludes that Locke is not antireligious and secular, but a defender of biblical Christianity. The new scholarship must emphasize all the more a "spiritualist and assertively evangelical Locke". David Resnick, in "Rationality and the Two Treatises," attempts to recover the portrait of Locke as an antitraditionalist, committed to a critical rationalism. Resnick uses Weber's theory of rationality to render a consistent account of Locke's social analysis. Yet Resnick also insists that Locke's political philosophy is not self-interested and atomistic but is rooted in a fully Christian worldview: "Locke's deeply held theological convictions about the existence, benevolence and rationality of God ground his reasoning in a metaphysically stable framework". This religious assumption provides a basis for Locke's "rationality." But a new inconsistency is opened up by this resolution--a rationalism rooted in religious faith, by a philosopher who continually urged their distinction. Karen Iversen Vaughn, in "The Economic Background to Locke's Two Treatises of Government," attempts to correct the new scholarship's neglect of the economic premises of Locke's political philosophy; this neglect is part of an overreaction to Macpherson, but Vaughn offers a moderate economic interpretation of Locke. Vaughn shows the importance of rational self-interest in economic behavior, the necessity of political society to set conditions for economic pursuit: limit on sovereign power is an example of self-interest and evidence that "economic aspects of man's behavior permeated all aspects of life". Further, "civil society requires enforceable rules to contain the self-seeking actions of all men, so that life, liberty and property can be protected". Vaughn's essay opens the back door to the "self-interested" Locke of the "old scholarship." Ronald Hamowy, in "Cato's Letters, John Locke, and the Republican Paradigm," also seeks to redress the imbalance of the new scholarship, arguing that Locke's philosophy was not displaced by the civic humanist tradition and republican virtue. He offers a detailed analysis of Cato's Letters by John Tenchard and Thomas Gordon. Like Locke, "Cato" defines political authority in terms of inalienable rights. His analysis of liberty is strikingly Lockean, and not republican. Pocock's assessment of Locke's irrelevance to Whiggism and the American founding must be rejected. In the final essay, "Locke's Two Treatises and Contemporary Thought: Freedom, Community and the Liberal Tradition," Stephen L. Newman compares contemporary American libertarian and communitarian alternatives to the liberal welfare state. Newman offers a very trenchant criticism of libertarianism as decidedly non-Lockean by dint of its utter depoliticization of all behavior and its tendency to restore the execution of natural law to the private citizen and private groups. On the other hand, communitarianism fails to provide a sufficiently specific and robust notion of the common good, and more consistent writers like Walzer and Barber fall back not upon a teleological community, but autonomy mixed with participation. Locke's distinction of politics from economics, family, and social groups still provides the most workable and realistic account of politics available in the modern world; hence Newman concludes that libertarianism and communitarianism offer "impoverished" political theories. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Frederick J. Streng Book Award:An Interview with Harold Kasimow, John Keenan, and Linda KeenanHarold Kasimow, John P. Keenan, and Linda Klepinger KeenanThe recipient of the Frederick J. Streng Book of the Year Award for 2004 is Beside Still Waters: Jews, Christians, and the Way of the Buddha, edited by Harold Kasimow, John P. Keenan, and Linda Klepinger Keenan. This book provides the reader with a combination (...) of reflection on the creatively transformative power of interreligious dialogue and documentation of that creative transformation in the lives of committed Jews and Christians in dialogue with Buddhism. The bulk of this book consists of candid, autobiographical essays by seven Jewish and Christian scholars in the form of personal testimony, which, taken as a whole, presents an extended argument for the value of interfaith dialogue in general and Buddhist-Christian-Jewish dialogue in particular. The final section of the book consists of four essays written from sociological, Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist perspectives by authors who have read the primary essays and reflect on interreligious dialogue more broadly in light of their own particular experience and research.Those who read Beside Still Waters as seekers will find themselves in the company of fellow pilgrims on the Way who offer their particular life stories filled with focused insight and theological sophistication. The strength of this collection of essays is that it robustly displays Jewish and Christian encounter with Buddhism as a new direction that contemporary Buddhist-Christian dialogue as practiced within the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies would do well to emulate.Buddhist-Christian Studies asked the editors a few questions.Buddhist-Christian Studies: Why did you write Beside Still Waters?John Keenan: Because Harold and I wanted to write a book together. Each of us is much involved in our own tradition as well as in the study and practice of Buddhism, and we wanted to show that this kind of encounter with another religious tradition does not mutate one's own identity. For this reason, we wanted contributors to speak out of their personal experience rather than to address the philosophical and doctrinal issues that are engendered by such interfaith encounters—although these issues should of course be addressed elsewhere.Harold Kasimow: Perhaps the following Hassidic tale best answers this question: "Rabbi Eizik, son of Rabbi Yekel, travels to Prague in search of treasure. He ultimately discovers, after meeting with a Christian, that the treasure is in fact buried [End Page 205] at his family's home back in Krakow. Thus it is a Christian who helps Rabbi Eizik to find the treasure in Judaism, to perceive more profoundly the depth and uniqueness of the Jewish tradition." This has been my own experience and is the reason why I was interested in writing this book together with people with whom I have a very strong karmic connection.Was it difficult to solicit and edit the contributors' essays?Linda Keenan: Not at all. With only one exception, everyone we contacted agreed to write an essay for the book. In one or two instances, we pushed for something more personal than was first submitted, and we were very pleased with the final collection.How did the three of you work together?HK: I often spoke to Linda over the phone, and John could speak to her in person, and Linda did all the work.LK: Harold and John conceived the idea and contacted potential contributors. The three of us consulted a great deal over the telephone and by e-mail. And Harold kept us on task at each stage of the book and has been its greatest promoter.JK: The above is accurate, but the book was written by the contributors.Is there anything you would have done differently if you could do it over? Any contributors you missed this time for one reason or another that you would recruit for a new edition?LK: We would not change what we did, but there are certainly many more Jews and Christians who could make excellent contributions to a new edition of the book. In fact, the most difficult thing was knowing so many people—including, among others, most of the membership of the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Frederick J. Streng Book Award:An Interview with Harold Kasimow, John Keenan, and Linda KeenanHarold Kasimow, John P. Keenan, and Linda Klepinger KeenanThe recipient of the Frederick J. Streng Book of the Year Award for 2004 is Beside Still Waters: Jews, Christians, and the Way of the Buddha, edited by Harold Kasimow, John P. Keenan, and Linda Klepinger Keenan. This book provides the reader with a combination (...) of reflection on the creatively transformative power of interreligious dialogue and documentation of that creative transformation in the lives of committed Jews and Christians in dialogue with Buddhism. The bulk of this book consists of candid, autobiographical essays by seven Jewish and Christian scholars in the form of personal testimony, which, taken as a whole, presents an extended argument for the value of interfaith dialogue in general and Buddhist-Christian-Jewish dialogue in particular. The final section of the book consists of four essays written from sociological, Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist perspectives by authors who have read the primary essays and reflect on interreligious dialogue more broadly in light of their own particular experience and research.Those who read Beside Still Waters as seekers will find themselves in the company of fellow pilgrims on the Way who offer their particular life stories filled with focused insight and theological sophistication. The strength of this collection of essays is that it robustly displays Jewish and Christian encounter with Buddhism as a new direction that contemporary Buddhist-Christian dialogue as practiced within the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies would do well to emulate.Buddhist-Christian Studies asked the editors a few questions.Buddhist-Christian Studies: Why did you write Beside Still Waters?John Keenan: Because Harold and I wanted to write a book together. Each of us is much involved in our own tradition as well as in the study and practice of Buddhism, and we wanted to show that this kind of encounter with another religious tradition does not mutate one's own identity. For this reason, we wanted contributors to speak out of their personal experience rather than to address the philosophical and doctrinal issues that are engendered by such interfaith encounters—although these issues should of course be addressed elsewhere.Harold Kasimow: Perhaps the following Hassidic tale best answers this question: "Rabbi Eizik, son of Rabbi Yekel, travels to Prague in search of treasure. He ultimately discovers, after meeting with a Christian, that the treasure is in fact buried [End Page 205] at his family's home back in Krakow. Thus it is a Christian who helps Rabbi Eizik to find the treasure in Judaism, to perceive more profoundly the depth and uniqueness of the Jewish tradition." This has been my own experience and is the reason why I was interested in writing this book together with people with whom I have a very strong karmic connection.Was it difficult to solicit and edit the contributors' essays?Linda Keenan: Not at all. With only one exception, everyone we contacted agreed to write an essay for the book. In one or two instances, we pushed for something more personal than was first submitted, and we were very pleased with the final collection.How did the three of you work together?HK: I often spoke to Linda over the phone, and John could speak to her in person, and Linda did all the work.LK: Harold and John conceived the idea and contacted potential contributors. The three of us consulted a great deal over the telephone and by e-mail. And Harold kept us on task at each stage of the book and has been its greatest promoter.JK: The above is accurate, but the book was written by the contributors.Is there anything you would have done differently if you could do it over? Any contributors you missed this time for one reason or another that you would recruit for a new edition?LK: We would not change what we did, but there are certainly many more Jews and Christians who could make excellent contributions to a new edition of the book. In fact, the most difficult thing was knowing so many people—including, among others, most of the membership of the... (shrink)

Violence is spoken of in several senses but its most basic definition, as a force exerted by one thing on another, harbors serious problems, especially when it comes to a consideration of its source or cause. We begin this article by identifying some of the aporias of violence with reference to philosophical and religious discourses and then we go on to analyze how violence problematizes concepts of law and justice in world historical contexts. We examine several traditions including Indo-European mythology, (...) as well as Hindu, Taoist, and ancient Greek philosophy, before addressing the concept of violence in modern thought, as a revision of Christianity. We conclude with some discussion of epistemological violence and its critics. (shrink)

MAX WEBER FURNISHES THE ANALOGY ON WHICH THIS ESSAY IS BASED: "This-worldly Protestant asceticism... acted powerfully against the spontaneous enjoyment of possessions; it restricted consumption, especially of luxuries. On the other hand, it had the psychological effect of freeing the acquisition of goods from the inhibitions of traditionalistic ethics. It broke the bonds of the impulse of acquisition in that it not only legalized it, but... looked upon it as directly willed by God.".