You don't always have to learn the hard way. On the spur of the moment, the morning after the birth of one of his grandchildren, Rob Parsons wrote the baby a letter. And then Rob began to think about how he hoped he'd have the chance to talk with all his grandchildren as they grew. He imagined them coming into his study, settling into one of the two comfy armchairs in front of the fire and opening up about the (...) challenges they were facing. Perhaps it would be when they were beginning their first job, buying their first house, getting married or starting a family. Or perhaps they'd talk long into the night, when their hearts were broken or friends had betrayed them. Perhaps he would have the chance to help them rebuild the dream that somebody had trodden on. 'Come on in, take a seat - tell me what's been going on...' Rob knew he wouldn't have all the answers. But maybe he could help - just a little. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wisdom's Flowering Cherry:William Johnston's Charismatic ZenLucien Miller Click for larger view View full resolutionIn 1976, when I was about to leave Taiwan after a sabbatical in Taiwan, I happened upon a tattered poster on a telephone pole: [End Page 133]CHRISTIAN-ZEN RETREAT DIRECTOR: WILLIAM JOHNSTON, S.J. ST. BENEDICT'S CONVENT, TAMSUI, TAIWANSunday-FridayI knew that Father Johnston was the well-known Irish Jesuit theologian at Sophia University in Tokyo, widely honored for (...) his studies of mysticism and his major contributions to the development of Buddhist-Christian encounter. I was totally intrigued. Instantly, I decided to attend the retreat.1day oneI was late when I arrived at Saint Benedict's chapel, where the retreat was underway, announcing my presence with a mighty thud of its door to a full gathering of retreatants sitting silently in the pews. Suddenly, here I was, the sole layman among a group of Catholic priests and sisters, most of them American-born, who were serving as missionaries in Taiwan. I looked and felt like a misfit, especially since Father Johnston had to wait to begin the retreat because of me. The chapel setting was Far Eastern in its simplicity and decor. Square in shape, it had a low altar in its center, about a foot and a half high. A plain, muted oil lamp hung to one side, softly gleaming in the semidarkness of late afternoon. Tatami mats and cushions were placed on the spacious floor around the front and two sides of the altar, so that after today's introduction, participants could sit on cushions according to zazen form and face the altar.As I dashed into a pew and looked up, I experienced a Catholic's shock. To my utter surprise, Father Johnston appeared in black Japanese yukata robes, instead of a priest's black suit. He bowed deeply before the altar, where he placed the Eucharist in a ciborium in plain view instead of in the tabernacle where it belonged. Turning to face us, he sat zazen style with his legs crossed on a Zen cushion with the ciborium behind his back. There was no "In the Name of the Father" or "let us pray." We simply maintained a long silence. In imitation of Japanese monks, many of the religious women and men retreatants were wearing robes, while the priests among them had on cassocks. Everyone but me had dressed appropriately for a Zen sesshin. I guessed many were fellow neophytes like me, as we all awkwardly sat zazen with legs crossed as best we could. We would quickly discover together that, for the uninitiated Westerner, zazen would initially prove a painful affair.Father Johnston was partly bald with longish hair at the temples, bushy white eyebrows, and wore a gray-brown beard and radiant smile. While born in Ireland and definitely Irish, you could tell by his clothing, carriage, and bearing that he had been profoundly touched by Japanese culture and language through his long years in Japan. Nonetheless, you readily knew by his sparkling blue eyes amidst his ruddy complexion that the Irish remained in the Japanese.I had brought my Zen sitting cushion all the way from my home in Pelham, MA, to Taiwan, and had practiced daily morning zazen in our Japanese-styled residence while teaching and researching at Tunghai University near Taichung. But feeling late and a bit shy about being up front with esteemed Father Johnston and among the clergy and [End Page 134] religious, I placed my cushion at the back of the chapel, sat down, and crossed my legs. Father Johnston noticed that I was off by myself, and came over. "Good," he laughed, complimenting my sitting posture. "But pretty hard to sit on a marble floor!"He explained to the participants that the schedule he set would be followed beginning the next morning, and that it was entirely voluntary. You could practice crosslegged zazen on your cushion and mat on the chapel floor or sit in the pews. The general atmosphere would be both disciplined, Zen-style, and relaxed. "Please keep silence at all times," he requested. Morning zazen was very early—from... (shrink)

Yoga 365 presents a year's worth of daily readings that invite yoga lovers of every skill level to bring the inspiration they experience on their mats into their everyday lives. Each entry explores a mind-body theme such as balance, strength, and resilience in a short, illuminating paragraph that can be enjoyed in the morning or at bedtime, incorporated into a yoga session, or read on the go. Featuring a serenely beautiful hardcover and a spacious, color-washed interior, the package is (...) as calming in the hand as the readings are to the eye. Yogis will find it to be a motivating tool for personal growth and a lighthearted, gift-worthy way to share the joys of their practice with others. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fulfilling Mitzvot through the Practice of Lovingkindness and WisdomDavid J. GilnerSince it has been more than forty years since I last wrote a paper in comparative religion, I have chosen not to attempt a scholarly paper. Rather, after a biographical sketch, I will discuss examples of Jewish texts that underpin my choice to pursue a path that includes practices drawn from the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, and explain how (...) I plan to teach these practices within traditional Jewish settings.I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in a Jewish family that identified with the Conservative movement. When I turned five, I was sent to a modern Orthodox yeshiva. For three and a half hours each morning, first five, then six days a week, I studied a comprehensive Jewish curriculum—taught in modern Hebrew—which included Bible, commentaries, Talmud, history, grammar, and the laws and customs of Ashkenazic Jewry. At fourteen, I left the yeshiva to attend a nondenominational Christian prep school. This seemingly radical change in schools and religious traditions occasioned no significant intellectual conflicts or spiritual anxieties. By fourteen, I sensed that religion was something people were born into; it was one of the cards life dealt you at birth.My sophomore year at Emory University saw the beginning of my interest in Buddhism. I began to practice Sōtō Zen sitting (zazen), and, in my readings, stumbled upon the koan Mu, which occupied my attention in and out of meditation for several years. I became a religion major and was particularly interested in modern Japanese religions. However, my advisor discouraged me from pursuing this interest in graduate school and suggested I build further on my strong traditional Jewish education, which is how I came to Hebrew Union College in 1972 to pursue a PhD in biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies.It was at that time that I began to practice Transcendental Meditation, and, subsequently, the TM Sidhis program, a practice that took, on average, three hours per day, and four and a half hours on days when I did group practice. Not finding a job teaching Bible led me to library school, after which I returned to Hebrew Union College in 1977 to work as a librarian. I became involved in interfaith community outreach, and lectured, led Bible study groups, and conducted Passover seders at local [End Page 27] churches, toward the goal of enhancing interfaith dialogue and understanding in the community. At this time I was fortunate to become friends with Paul Knitter, then a professor at Xavier University.In 1997, after twenty-five years of dedicated twice-daily practice, it became clear to me that I was "attached" to my TM meditation program and that this attachment was hindering my growth. I put my TM Sidhis practice aside and went back to zazen. Soon, I became associated with the Dzogchen organization led by Lama Surya Das, and trekchö became my basic practice. As a member of the online "three-year mandala program," I received a cassette-based education in various Tibetan meditation practices, which included my first experiences with visualization, as part of Tara and Machigma practices.In 2001, I learned of many unfilled requests sent to Hebrew Union College by small congregations asking for students to lead High Holidays services, so I volunteered. For the past ten years, I have served as the High Holidays rabbi at Congregation Tikkun Olam in Woodstock, Illinois. The phrase tikkun olam, often translated as "repairing the world," has become popularized in Jewish culture over the past two decades.In 2003, a friend sent me a teaching tape by Lama John Makransky on loving-kindness practice. My immediate gut reaction was that everything else I had done for thirty-five years was preparation for this teaching. I attended several courses in which Lama Makransky taught practices to cultivate innate lovingkindness and wisdom, and in 2007 I was privileged to attend the week-long course in which he taught his then forthcoming book Awakening through Love: Unveiling Your Deepest Goodness. Since then, I have attended other courses taught by Makransky under the aegis of the Foundation for Active Compassion. Within the realm of Ati Yoga, I think it... (shrink)

In Knowing the Score, philosopher David Papineau explores what philosophy can teach us about sports, and what sports can teach us about philosophy. Beginning with various sporting questions and challenges, Papineau digs into modern philosophy's most perplexing questions. For instance, he discusses drafting techniques in cycling to shed new light on questions of altruism, and examines cricket family "dynasties" to help broaden the debate over nature v. nurture. When Papineau began writing this book, he thought he could illuminate sports by (...) viewing it through a philosophical lens. But the more he wrote, the more he realized that it was the other way around - the study of sports clarifies, challenges, and sometimes confuses crucial issues in philosophy. Why do sports competitors choke? How can Roger Federer select which shot to play in 400 milliseconds? Why do fans think God will favor their team over their rivals? Why does motor racing, but not football, run in families? How can it be moral to deceive the umpire by framing a pitch? From all of these questions, and many more, philosophy has a great deal to learn. An entertaining and and erudite book that ranges far and wide through the sporting world, Knowing the Score is perfect reading for armchair philosophers and Monday morning quarterbacks alike. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Oldest and Most Respected Uniform in the World1Zelig R. Weinstein“And all the peoples of the earth shall see that the name of the LORD is called upon thee; and they shall be afraid of thee.”(Deuteronomy 28:10)Rabbi Eliezer the Great says that this verse alludes to the Tefillin Shel Rosh, the small leather box containing Biblical verses that are worn by Jewish men on their head. During Talmudic times (...) and for centuries after, devout Jewish men would wear Tefillin the entire day. This practice is now only rarely seen. Since the 1960s, there has been a resurgence of public display of one’s adherence to traditional Jewish practices. It is increasingly common to see Jewish men wearing a yarmulke at work and in public spheres. There are perhaps thousands of Jewish doctors who don’t hesitate to wear their yarmulke in their places of practice–hospital, clinic, private practice.In the 1980s I joined the staff of the Department of Radiology at the Bethesda Naval Hospital as the Director of Neuroradiology and Interventional Radiology. As the hospital’s Neuroradiologist I presented the radiological findings for the cases presented at the bimonthly “brain cutting” sessions. These sessions were well attended by staff, residents and medical students from the Departments of Neurosurgery, Neurology, Neuropathology and Radiology. I was the only traditional Orthodox Jew at the hospital, clearly recognizable as such by the yarmulke I always wore (very unusual in the early 1980s). My yarmulke would provoke occasional good–natured kidding particularly from the neurosurgery staff and residents. [End Page 212]During one of these sessions, kidding about my yarmulke from a small group of residents was reaching a crescendo. The kidding came to a sudden halt when the Chief Resident of Neuro-surgery, a born and bred Louisianan, demanded everyone’s attention. When it quieted down he very sternly ordered everyone to carefully look at their uniforms. Everyone seemed perplexed but all followed suit. Almost a half–minute passed before the Chief Resident, with his thick Southern drawl, spoke. “Our [naval] uniforms are, at most, a couple of hundred years old.” He then pointed toward my yarmulke and said: “Dr. Weinstein’s uniform is thousands of years old and a lot more respected than our uniforms.”This was my initiation into the alluring, usually positive and unexpected fascination and respect that my obvious religiosity had on my patients, their families and my many colleagues during the almost seven years I spent at Bethesda.The story I will tell is very poignant. It involved the family of one of the most senior Chief Petty Officers of the United States Navy.Late one Sunday evening, I received a call from the Chief Resident, Dr. Steve Henning, informing me that the family matriarch had been admitted to Bethesda with relatively acute onset of significant neurological findings. The emergent workup confirmed the presence of a large mass, a meningioma, of the frontal lobe region with significant surrounding edema and mass effect. Neurosurgery requested embolization of the feeding vessels prior to surgery. The interventional procedure and possible serious complications were fully explained to the patient, her husband and her two daughters. Consent was signed and early Monday morning the patient was brought to Special Procedures to have the tumor embolized.Prior to the procedure I introduced myself to the patient’s family and spoke to them about the procedure. The patient’s husband and two daughters, one of whom was an active duty Navy nurse the other a minister of a fundamentalist church in the South, were very attentive and expressed concern about the procedure and its outcome. I tried to reassure them and told them I would speak to them during and after the procedure.All went well. Medically, the patient did well during and after the procedure. She was discharged from our care to neurosurgery. The patient and her family thanked us.After the patient left the Special Procedures area the Chief Technologist, Al, approached me and very cryptically asked if I was aware of what happened when the Chief Resident, Dr. Henning, spoke with the patient and family the night before. I was puzzled and replied, no. He... (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas died a few days before he would have been ninety years old, on December 25, 1995, very early on a Monday morning, in the Paris clinic of Beaujon, where he had been admitted the previous day with serious heart complications.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Life in LimboM. ChiuWhen my son was 7 years old, he began complaining of headaches. They were frequent, but never seemed severe. “I have a headache!” was always followed by “Can I watch TV?” I didn’t believe the pain was real until it woke him up in the middle of the night. I knew then that something must be wrong. I approached our pediatrician, who said it sounded like (...) migraines, but we should order an MRI to rule anything out. The appointment was scheduled several months in advance, and I always had the urge to cancel it. I was pretty sure my son just wanted to watch TV. The pediatrician told me I might as well do the MRI. He told me that if we skipped it and something was wrong, I would never be able to live with the regret. We kept the Monday morning appointment, and went to the MRI expecting reassurance that nothing was wrong. Instead, we got a phone call later that day. They needed to see us on immediately, but wouldn’t tell me why. Of course, I knew something was wrong. “Is it a tumor?” I asked. “This isn’t something we can discuss on the phone” was the answer I got. An appointment was scheduled for Wednesday. Two days might be “immediately” to medical professionals, but to a parent who just heard that her child had an abnormal MRI, it was an eternity. I planned my son’s funeral in those two days.Our meeting with the Neurologist began with reviewing the MRI. “See this spot here? It shouldn’t be there”. A tumor. 1 ½ × 1 ½ × 2 ½ cm tumor, in the right thalamus. Small, they said. Looks like a Low Grade Glioma they said. The kind of tumor you want to have, if you have to have a brain tumor. A biopsy was scheduled for two weeks later. The [End Page E2] biopsy confirmed it was a Juvenile Pilocytic Astrocytoma (JPA). The neurosurgeon was confident she could remove all of the tumor. We were at one of the best Children’s Hospitals in the world. We were in good hands.A few days before the surgery, a friend who is a medical doctor suggested we get a second opinion. “It couldn’t hurt, it could help”, my husband said. Fortunately, he just sold a start–up company, and was planning to take a few months off from work before starting his next venture. He had time to research, talk to friends in the medical field and make phone calls.Our second opinion from another leading hospital reviewed the MRI’s with us. The neurosurgeon asked, “Did they say tumor? One?” Yes, they did. “See this here?” he said, pointing to a second spot on the MRI. He said it was possibly a second tumor, or more likely, an extension of the first. It was in inoperable location. Surgery wasn’t an option. Chemo would be our best choice. Why would we cut into our son’s brain to remove part of the tumor when he would need to do chemo anyway? Why not try chemo first?I would like to say that we do not fault our original neuro–oncology team for missing this second abnormality. It is hard to notice an ant in the room when there is an elephant staring at you. People make mistakes, and tumors don’t always look the same. That’s what second opinions are for. That is why doctors should encourage patients to get second opinions.We scheduled the surgery for port implantation, and got busy educating ourselves about chemo regimes. It was going to be a long journey. 18 months of transfusions with a pretty low success rate and a high rate of secondary complications. Unsure if we were doing the right thing, we got a third opinion. I am so grateful that my husband was between jobs and had time to devote to finding the best possible treatment for our son. We were financially stable and had great insurance. What do people do when they don’t have this luxury?By now, several months had passed since our first MRI. Our... (shrink)

In three articles published in Blackwood's Magazine , one Wilson, under the nom de guerre of Christopher North, propounded the view that Shakespeare's Othello operates on a double time scheme. The represented time in Cyprus is some thirty-three hours, lasting from about 4 p.m. on Saturday till the early hours of Monday morning. If we take this time scheme at face value, there has been no opportunity for Desdemona and Cassio to commit adultery: Iago's insinuations and Othello's suspicions (...) are manifestly absurd. However, another time scheme is in operation as well. By its clock, the protagonists have been in Cyprus for more than a week. For example, we find Bianca, a local courtesan, complaining that it has been ‘seven days and nights, / Eight score eight hours’ since she last saw Cassio, who by the first time scheme had arrived in Cyprus only the day before. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas died a few days before he would have been ninety years old, on December 25, 1995, very early on a Monday morning, in the Paris clinic of Beaujon, where he had been admitted the previous day with serious heart complications.

I want this morning to reflect with you on the Cross of Jesus. In first Corinthians, the Apostle Paul makes a remarkable claim about the Cross. He writes: I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. 1 Cor 2:1-2 Why did the Apostle Paul, in coming to the (...) Corinthians, focus so exclusively on the Cross? Why has the Cross played such a preeminent role in Christian theology? Even in the iconography of the Church, the Cross is absolutely central. Why is that? In the Cross, the eternal Son of God enters fully into the human condition, takes on himself the totality of human sin and 1 pain, and once and for all extinguishes the power of evil over our lives. To accomplish so great a redemption, the Lord Jesus paid the ultimate cost. Truly, there is no greater suffering than what Christ experienced on the Cross. But do we really believe that? Consider a diary entry by Anna Williams, a scientist active in the early part of the twentieth century. The Cross gave her no comfort. As she saw it, Jesus knew that his anguish would be momentary and that in exchange he would save the world. As she wrote in her diary, “This knowledge... if we were sure, oh! what would we not be willing to undergo.” [[See John Barry, The Great Influenza, p. 273]] How should we respond to Anna Williams? Does it help to note that the cross was the ultimate instrument of torture in the ancient world? Was Anna Williams therefore taking the sufferings of our Lord too lightly? As a cosseted ivory-tower intellectual, what did she know about suffering anyway? Didn’t Christ on the Cross suffer more than she ever did in her bourgeois little world? Instead of whining about the Cross not being enough, shouldn’t 2 she have gratefully accepted the redemption that could be hers only through the Cross? But this response misses the point. (shrink)

We wake each morning to news on the glaring statistics of people infected by COVID-19 and others reportedly dying from complications thereto; the numbers are not receding in at least a number of countries across the world. It is hard to imagine a moment such as this that most of us have lived through in our life-time; but it is a reality and public challenge that we can neither ignore nor look away from. In what follows I will explore (...) perspectives on death from the Hindu tradition and the kinds of response—and solace or wisdom—afforded by the tradition to the angst and fears evoked by this pandemic situation. In concluding the discussion, I shall offer tentative reflections on how the Hindu perspective may be universalized, such as might invite conversations with therapists and care workers who may be seeking alternative resources to help expand the therapeutic space in more beneficent ways during the Covid-19 pandemic and its after-effects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Power of PersuasionG. Bennett HumphreyA long white coat, the title of doctor, a practiced professional persona and an appointment to the staff of a prestigious university medical center allows the physician to be a persuader of clinical decisions affecting patient management. When this power of persuasion is used to encourage patient compliance with a therapeutic regimen that might be curative for a fatal disease, there is justification for (...) trying to influence the patient to make choices resulting in a positive outcome. But when a physician is asking permission to enter the patient into a research protocol where the primary goal of the study is the hope of advancing knowledge, then much thought needs to be given to the potential abuse of this power of persuasion.In the 1960s, I found myself having to think about recruiting children into research protocols. I had just finished two years of residency in internal medicine and wanted to pursue a career in academic medicine. My primary interest was in laboratory research. To strengthen my training in research, I had competed for a position as clinical fellow in a western university. The fellowship program was designed to expose young physicians to both clinical and laboratory research. The first year was spent on one of the clinical research wards and the second year in a research laboratory. The program was open to residents from surgery, medicine and pediatrics but because there was a shortage of pediatricians in the program, I was required to work on the children’s leukemia ward for one year.The learning curve was steep during the first few months. Naturally, the faculty in pediatrics and the medical literature gave me a technical education in the use of protocols for therapeutic treatment of leukemia. For example, the first protocol used was designated as Phase III, and the goal was to try to cure the patient. A remission could be achieved in over 90 percent of children but the disease recurred. The median duration of these remissions in the mid–1960s was one year. A relapse was followed by progressive disease and death in a matter of weeks, but a new drug of unknown efficacy could be administered. This was a Phase II protocol, and while there was a chance of prolonging life for a month or so, the primary goal was the identification of drugs anti–leukemic activity.The pediatric leukemia ward experience for me as a fellow was unusual. There was more to learn than the treatment of leukemia. To my surprise, the children and their mothers gave me insight into the care of pediatric patients. Each month, the patients were admitted for five days of intravenous chemotherapy. The first day was traumatic with venipunctures, bone marrow aspirations and the establishment of an IV for the daily infusion of drugs. The remaining four days were for social rounds: listening to the children who liked to talk; talking with the ones who liked to listen; putting puzzles together with some toddlers; responding to a request to listen to the heart of a much loved teddy bear; exchanging jokes and riddles; stories about school, the family dog, or a favorite friend; enjoying the banter of the adolescents; and not invading the privacy of a few who didn’t like me, the ward or the therapy. These children were sharing their childhood with me and it took couple of months for me to recognize I was bonding with these little patients. I observed and listened to the mothers caring for their children and stood in awe of the resources that they brought to bear on having children with a fatal disease. A feeling of mutual respect and trust developed between these mothers and me. For an internist, these experiences were profound and very different from my experience treating adults.A professor, an internationally known researcher in the field of leukemia, was in charge of the ward. Formal rounds were conducted on Tuesday mornings when the result of the bone marrow aspirates and the toxicity of the chemotherapy were reviewed. The day–to–day responsibility for [End Page 101] treatment and informing the mothers on the remission status on Mondays was my responsibility... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 201-202 [Access article in PDF] Conference on Pure Land Buddhism in Dialogue with Christian Theology James Fredericks Loyola Marymount University As Charlie Parker devotees will attest, improvisation at its most thrilling, if not its most ingenious, is often the result of careful planning. Cannot something similar be said of interreligious dialogue? All our planning and study are best put to use when they suddenly become (...) mere prologue to an encounter that has forced us off the well-trodden path. A dialogue meeting at Loyola Marymount University, September 9-14, 2001, began with much planning and became highly improvisational on September 11th.The roots of this conference go back to discussions between Dennis Hirota and myself in Kyoto in 1998-1999. The two of us are interested in contributing to the future development of Shin Buddhism by placing it in dialogue with Christian theology. The focus here is on Christian theology as one aspect of Christianity's response to the modern world. We are both interested in investigating various theological methods as Christian responses to modernity, and the contributions these methods have made to the reform and renewal of Christian institutions. The ulterior purpose of these investigations is to think in new ways about how a Buddhist "theology" might contribute to the institutional reform and religious renewal of Shin Buddhism.A first dialogue meeting was held at Chikushi Jogakuen University (Dazaifu, Japan) in June of 2000. Participants included faculty from Chikushi Jogakuen, Charlie Hallisey (then of Harvard University), Peter McCormick (International Academy for Philosophy, Liechtenstein), and me (Loyola Marymount University). A second meeting was held at Loyola Marymount in September 2001. For one week, beginning September 6th, meetings were held at the Shin Buddhist temple and a neighboring Roman Catholic parish in the Little Tokyo district of Los Angeles, followed by an academic conference at Loyola Marymount starting on Monday, September 10th. These meetings brought together faculty from Chikushi Jogakuen and Loyola Marymount, Shin Buddhist specialists from the Eastern Buddhist Society in Tokyo, ministers from the Los Angeles Nishi and Higashi Honganji Temples, Charlie Hallisey (Wisconsin), and John Ross Carter (Colgate University). The visiting Buddhists had a chance to meet with the Buddhist-Catholic dialogue group in Los Angeles. Papers were presented on a number of subjects, including (1) Christian theology's [End Page 201] contribution to institutional reform and religious renewal in recent Roman Catholic history and its implications for Shin Buddhism in both the United States and Japan; (2) theological method and moral theology in relation to end of life issues from both a Shin and Christian perspective; (3) truth and history in interreligious understanding; (4) Shin Buddhism, Christianity and religious responses to social discrimination; and (5) Christian theology as a stimulus to the development of a Shin Buddhist theology.On the morning of September 11th, dialogue as formal academic presentations ended and dialogue as spontaneous improvisation began. With U.S. air transportation closed down by the federal government, prospects for return flights to Japan were indefinitely postponed. A planned outing to watch Ichiro Suzuki (of the Seattle Mariners) play the Angels had to be canceled (Anaheim stadium was also closed). Instead, Christians and Buddhists, Americans and Japanese suddenly were brought together in ways they could not have predicted and began to improvise. The campus ministry of Loyola Marymount organized an impromptu mass for the entire university on the evening of September 11th. The Buddhist visitors were given a place of honor at the liturgy and publicly welcomed as guests of the Catholic community. The psalm response for the mass was a musical setting of the words, "Shepherd me oh Lord, beyond my wants, beyond my fears, from death into life." In the days that followed, this text became the basis for very affecting conversations among the Buddhists and the Christians in response to the terrorist attacks. From the Shin perspective, Buddhists were able to bring a depth of meaning to these words even as they were interested in what the psalm might mean to Christians.Like improvisation in jazz, interreligious dialogue is sometimes at its... (shrink)

Based on the assumption that “philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process,” Georg Hegel compared it with the ancient symbol of wisdom: the owl of Minerva. This analogy is well known and has not caused many debates. Much less known is the comparison of philosophy with another bird, the rooster, proposed by Henry Thoreau. The main purpose of the article is to show that the latter analogy also has a (...) deep meaning and can serve as a good addition to Hegel’s one. Both comparisons can co-exist as the symbols of two different ways of philosophizing. The comparison of philosophy with the owl is an accurate symbol of Hegel’s type of philosophizing: impersonal, academic, strictly theoretical, and quite conservative. At the same time, the comparison with the rooster is more in line with the type of philosophizing that Thoreau practiced: deeply personalized, extraacademic, practical, and future-oriented. It has been shown that Thoreau’s “morning-rooster” philosophy became the basis for many innovative ideas and practices, the relevance of which only grows over the time: the fight against racism, civil disobedience, wildlife conservation, animal protection, vegetarianism, and even downshifting. To clarify the specifics of this type of philosophizing, the author recontextualizes the famous episode from Plato’s “Phaedo”, in which Socrates not only sacrifices his own life by drinking a poisonous beverage but also asks to sacrifice a rooster. It has been shown that, to a certain level, Thoreau was like Socrates; however, his philosophy does not require such sacrifices. Thoreau’s philosophy is like the crowing of a cheerful rooster, which wakes up and notices the first rays of a new dawn, even in the twilight of the end of history.Manuscript received 10.08.2020. (shrink)

The conference was originally to have run from Monday the 5th through midday on Saturday the 10th of October and to have included some twenty-three or more papers. But several of the announced participants did not appear. Among these was Shlomo Avineri, who was to have been special guest of honor and opening speaker, but who was prevented from participating, it was announced, by an imminent strike at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In actuality there were sixteen papers and (...) twenty-three participants in all. Because of the reduced number of papers it was decided on the 5th that we would meet formally beginning the next day and continue through Thursday the 8th, with Friday the 9th free and a possible general discussion on the morning of the 10th. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

In the beginning was an aborted word. The first example of a woman’s literary criticism in Western tradition, or more accurately the first miscarriage of a woman’s criticism, occurs early in the Odyssey. High in her room above the hall of suitors, Penelope can hear a famous minstrel sing that most painful of stories, the Greek homecoming from Troy—significantly, the matter of the Odyssey itself. That is no song for a woman. She comes down the stairs to protest. “Phêmios, other (...) spells you know, high deeds of gods and heroes, as the poets tell them; let these men hear some other, while they sit silent and drink their wine. But sing no more this bitter tale that wears my heart away. It opens in me again the wound of longing For one incomparable, ever in my mind— His fame all Hellas knows, and midland Argos.”It seems a reasonable request. But her words meet an immediate brutal rebuff from an unexpected source: her own son Telemachus. “Mother, why do you grudge our own dear minstrel Joy of song, wherever his thought may lead? Poets are not to blame, but Zeuswho gives what fate he pleases to adventurous men.Here is no reason for reproof: to singthe news of the Danaans! Men like besta song that rings like morning on the ear.But you must nerve yourself and try to listen.Odysseus was not the only one at Troynever to know the day of his homecoming.Others, how many others, lost their lives!”9Men like to hear the news; women must learn not to take songs so personally! And Penelope gives in. Marveling at the wisdom of her son, she goes back to her room and cries herself to sleep.Telemachus’ words do not seem very much to the point. Penelope had not asked Phêmios to stop singing, after all, or to sing something fit for women; she only asked him to choose some other adventure. And to reproach her for not considering that others besides Odysseus had failed to come home seems irrelevant as well as cruel. The fact that others feel pain is hardly a reason for her not to feel it. Penelope cannot bear even to name her husband, but Telemachus seems to take pleasure in saying “Odysseus.” By proclaiming his own indifference to pain, he argues just like a man. And that, of course, is the point. The scene has been contrived exactly to show his new maturity. He proves himself no longer a boy in the time-honored fashion, by rejecting any tenderness of heart and by putting down a woman. Henceforth he will be equal to the suitors. Lawrence Lipking is Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University and director of the program in comparative literature and theory. He is the author of The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England and The Life of the Poet, which won the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa in 1982. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “The Marginal Glass” and “Arguing with Shelly” . The present essay was originally given as a lecture at the School of Criticism and Theory in the summer of 1982. It is part of a book, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition, which is to appear in 1984. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Operating Through HatredAndrew G. Shuman“You’re not cutting my ***ing neck. The cancer is in my ***ing mouth.”While many patient encounters are memorable, Mr. K’s introduction to the head and [End Page 20] neck surgical oncology clinic is indelibly imprinted into the minds of all of the clinicians present on that certain autumn morning. This was, quite simply, a man who resonated hate. He was rude and disruptive. He (...) insisted on an expedited workup “without any waiting.” He questioned the ethnicity and nationality of his care providers. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that he did not appreciate my Jewish heritage—the swastika tattooed on his bicep underscored the point. He bragged about his recent incarceration for armed robbery. While my colleagues and I were tempted to simply refuse to assume his care, Mr. K had a bad problem—his recurrent tongue cancer required a major operation in order to offer him any hope for cure.Mr. K initially received an abbreviated course of radiation at an outside institution, which was limited by his non–compliance. While one might debate the wisdom of this decision in retrospect—in general, surgery is preferred for his type of tumor—the die was already cast. A heroic attempt at surgical salvage was now his only curative option. He previously sought care elsewhere... only to be fired by this original surgeon when Mr. K physically threatened him in the outpatient office during preoperative consultation. [It was the doctor’s fault for insulting him in the first place, Mr. K maintained... and no charges were filed.] We were, indeed, his last resort. Other than his recurrent cancer, Mr. K was robust; he was in his sixth decade, physically fit, and on the whole, fairly healthy. In the classic surgical lexicon, he was a reasonable surgical candidate. But was it reasonable to operate on such a person?I remember thinking, at the time, about our obligation to care for such an individual. Of course, being a medical professional carries with it many obligations, including a judicious assumption of personal risk. And, working in a tertiary care center begets the responsibility to assist referring clinicians in the management of difficult cases. Although professional obligations certainly have their limits, defining their bounds is decidedly more difficult. Paramount is creating an atmosphere of mutual trust and acceptance. Naturally, this was easier said than done in regard to Mr. K.Perhaps against our better judgment, we agreed to operate under the condition that he abide by strict behavioral ground rules, on our terms. We agreed upon the extent of the necessary operation (which indeed involved cutting his ***ing neck, much to his chagrin and reluctant acceptance). Mr. K promised to follow instructions for postoperative care. He assured us that he would not swear or yell (again). And, in the presence of hospital security, who reinforced our institutional policies regarding patient behavior, he guaranteed that he would not be verbally or physically violent or inappropriate, and would not make disparaging comments to other patients or staff. It seemed, at least, that we had an understanding.Needless to say, these rules were broken shortly after he awoke from surgery. I vividly remember being summoned from the OR when he threatened to murder his impressionable and terrified nurse a few days later, who would not acquiesce to his unreasonable demands. From that point onward, hospital security was deployed to his room regularly, and anything resembling a potential weapon was safeguarded. Any semblance of a mutual doctor–patient bond was shattered. At this point, everyone’s goal was simply to get Mr. K home.My visceral reactions to his behavior, while intense, were not unexpected, and fell in line with those of the entire team of clinicians caring for him. His antics brought his healthcare team together in collective unity (and condemnation). However, my surgical colleagues and I also felt somewhat guilty and responsible. While surgeons can choose to assume some degree of inherent personal danger in caring for a violent and angry patient, we also put the safety and soundness of the entire perioperative team in jeopardy, without necessarily seeking their input. But once we had decided to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reclaiming the Integration of Body and MindDeborah SpragueThe week before New Year’s Day has often spurred me to evaluate my personal path. I courted my own permission to apply to graduate school, charting scenarios, figuring options, but still I held back. Browsing the Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School website, I found a unique course offering: Deepening the Heart of Wisdom: Buddhist Christian Contemplative Practice and Dialogue. I knew (...) I had to take it! Class was going to start in a week and as yet I hadn’t even applied to the school’s graduate program. In a flurry I requested transcripts, garnered recommendations, and considered childcare options. My desire to engage this particular dialogue grew through my Christian practice of Centering Prayer1 and my Episcopal parish’s contemplative interfaith Vital Conversations program.These vital conversations began with an intentional time of silence in which we prepared the “eye of the heart” to perceive the conversation at a deeper level. Our rector invited a guest from a different faith tradition each month.2 He engaged the guest in questions and dialogue regarding his or her spiritual practices and personal story. Then, the guest received questions from the group. After hearing a Buddhist guest and visiting the local Zen center, I knew my own spiritual formation would be broadened and deepened by taking the two-week, intensive format course. Because actual spiritual practice from both traditions comprised a significant portion of the class, I surmised this course would foster a more complete, integrated form of understanding the two traditions.This essay will explore the contemplative pedagogy of this course, wherein the instructors hoped “students [would] walk away with a visceral understanding of these traditions as full-body disciplines for transforming the mind and heart.”3 First, I will give a brief description of the class participants and discuss the types of spiritual practices we encountered from each tradition. Then, I will share my experiences related to those practices and how the structure of the course supported an integrated epistemology. Finally, I will consider the phenomenon of Christian interest in Buddhist practices and what that implies about popular Christianity and its potential to become a fuller version of itself. [End Page 101]The student population of this class was largely Christian, with some Unitarian Universalists, a pagan, and an agnostic as well. That said, the spectrum of Christians reflected mainline denominations as well as some persons with roots in Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. As might be expected from a varied group, the Christologies of participants varied from creedal to acreedal. This group came together to participate in a variety of Christian and Zen Buddhist spiritual practices.The class engaged the following practices according to Sōtō Zen: zazen, contemplative walking as a group, and, near the end of the course, Rev. Dr. Hickey led us in a portion of the Sōtō-shū morning service. Every class began with at least fifteen minutes of zazen, which gradually increased as the class progressed. Daily practice of the same meditation technique allowed us to enter that particular practice in a sustained way.In contrast to our Zen practice, we experienced a different type of Christian spiritual practice with each class session. This approach acquainted students with a variety of traditions but did not allow experiential depth in any one particular mode. The students and instructors took part in Taizé chanting,4 chanting of the Psalms from the Daily Office, lectio divina,5 praying with icons,6 the Jesus Prayer,7 the Rosary,8 and two guided reflections: an Ignatian9 meditation on a gospel text, and a meditation developed by Christian contemplative Anthony De Mello. I wondered how our experience of the class would have changed had the Christian practice focused on one or two types, in a sustained, daily manner. Perhaps the rationale for surveying a wide variety of practices reflected the need for Western Christians to gain familiarity with their own contemplative traditions.I consider Christianity’s analog to zazen to be Centering Prayer, because it is also based in no-thought. However, Centering Prayer was not included in our experience of spiritual practices. If we conceive of two... (shrink)

John Cassian, an Egyptian monk in the early fifth century offers splendid wisdom and counsel regarding many spiritual disciplines. This reflection describes a personal experience of journeying with Cassian's prayer. In the most frequently quoted excerpt from his Conferences, Cassian raises up a prayer formula using Psalm 70:1 as a verse to facilitate unceasing prayer of the heart: “O God, come to my assistance; Lord, make haste to help me. “ In an unexpected and surprising way, this verse from (...) Psalm 70 comes to appear in the Liturgy of the Hours, as a preamble verse to Morning, Daytime, and Evening Prayer. Over the centuries, this simple verse from the Psalms has carried an entire prayer tradition, rooted in the spirituality of the desert. Cassian's elucidation of this verse reminds us how a formative reading of Scripture is integrally bound to the soul's progress in prayer. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Annual Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies:San Francisco, California, USA, 19-22 November 2011Sandra Costen Kunz, SBCS SecretaryThe SBCS is one of thirty-two scholarly societies formally recognized by the American Academy of Religion as "Related Scholarly Organizations." The pattern for many years has been for the SBCS to hold its annual meeting in conjunction with the annual meeting of the AAR. On the Friday before the AAR's annual (...) meeting begins, the board meets in the morning and early afternoon, followed by an AAR-advertised session late that afternoon and then a field trip that evening. On Saturday, another paper session or panel is followed by the Society's annual members' meeting.Friday afternoon's 4:00-6:30 session, titled "Constructing Buddhist Identities in the West," was standing room only. The four papers presented at that panel are included in this volume.On Saturday morning, then SBCS president Miriam Levering presided at a well-attended session from 9:00 to 11:30. The topic was "Christian Readings of Buddhist Texts." Catherine Cornille (Boston College), editor of the Christian Commentaries on Non-Christian Sacred Texts series, gave the first presentation, titled "Reading the Religious Other." She discussed the origin and nature of the series and gave examples of the methodologies used in various volumes they had published. Francis X. Clooney (Harvard University) presented "Reading Inter-religiously as a Theologically Necessary Act." Insisting that "reading well has a lot of common factors whether or not a text is from one's own or another tradition," he noted that "saying you read both the same doesn't mean you put them on same doctrinal level.... We defer the apologetics not just to be polite, but because there are many other things to do first." Leo Lefebure (Georgetown University) spoke about "Reading the Dhammapada" in light of his work with Peter Feldmeier in writing The Path of Wisdom: A Christian Commentary on the Dhammapada, published within the Christian Commentaries on Non-Christian Sacred Texts series. The volume was the winner of this year's Frederick J. Streng Book Award, which was presented by Amos Yong (Regent University). Lefebure pointed out that biblical wisdom literature and the Dhammapada both insist [End Page 129] that how we view the world largely shapes our happiness or unhappiness, and that both describe "decidedly unskillful and skillful ways to live."Between the Saturday morning session and the members' meeting that followed, Karen Enriquez presented the graduate student award to Kyeongil Jung, a student of Paul Knitter's at Columbia University-Union Theological Seminary. He gave a brief synopsis of his award-winning paper, "A Buddhist-Christian Story of Peace and Justice," also included in this volume. [End Page 130]Copyright © 2012 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:2005 International Lotus Sutra ConferenceLeo D. LefebureIn May 2005 Rissho Kosei-kai sponsored its annual conference on the Lotus Sutra for the first time in China, at the new conference center of Beijing Normal University. Chinese Buddhist scholars Zhang Fenglei and Wei Dedong of Renmin University participated, offering discussions of "Earthly Orientation of Tiantai Buddhist Doctrine" and "Zhanran's Doctrine about the Nature of Insentient Beings and Its Ecological Implications," respectively. (...) While the main focus of the discussions at the conference was on Buddhist interpretations of the Lotus Sutra in the T'ien T'ai and Tendai traditions, the organizers invited two Christian theologians, Ruben Habito and Leo Lefebure, to participate, thereby adding an interreligious dimension. An illness in his family prevented Habito from attending, but the paper he had prepared, "Ultimate Reality and Religious Praxis: The Lotus Sutra, T'ien T'ai, and Nichiren," was presented and discussed. On the morning of the first full day, Lefebure presented the paper "Wisdom, Compassion, and Charity: The Lotus Sutra and Augustine." In it he compared the rhetorical strategies of the Lotus Sutra and Augustine. The Lotus Sutra and Augustine articulate a dilemma of communication: the Sutra notes that only another Buddha can understand the wisdom of Shakyamuni Buddha, and Augustine warns that no human understanding is adequate to comprehend the mystery of God. According to the Lotus Sutra, the resolution of this difficulty comes through the use of upaya or, more specifically, upaya-kausalya, variously translated as "expedient" or "skillful" or "appropriate" means, including similes and parables. The wisdom of the Buddha that cannot be captured conceptually through pondering or analysis may nonetheless be conveyed in nonliteral form through concrete narratives, and the Lotus Sutra presents a number of celebrated examples. These narratives promise to transform human existence decisively, freeing humans from attachments and awakening them to wisdom (prajna) and compassion (karuna). Through [End Page 195] wisdom and compassion the Buddha establishes skillful means in order heal the suffering of human beings and to lead them into these virtues.During the same time that Kumarajiva and his companions were translating the Lotus Sutra into Chinese, Augustine of Hippo proclaimed that the gospel of Jesus Christ offered humans the possibility of victory over ignorance, sin, and death and supreme bliss in union with God in heaven. But he also insisted that God is strictly incomprehensible and the divine reality cannot be captured in any concept or image. Pondering and analysis cannot grasp the meaning of God, and so Augustine warned his congregation, "If you have comprehended, what you have comprehended is not God." Despite the inadequacy of all human thought and language to comprehend God, Augustine trusted that God has used finite signs, like the narratives of the Bible, to communicate the saving knowledge of God's love. Signs point to realities; even though the signs posited by God never express the divine reality adequately and literally, they can nonetheless reorient human life away from untrammeled, self-destructive desire (cupiditas) and toward the self-giving love that Augustine calls charity (caritas). The wisdom and charity of God are the origin and content of the salvific signs, whose goal is to lead humans into the wisdom and charity of God.Other papers explored the journey of the Lotus Sutra on the Silk Road (Mariko Walter), Mind/Nature in Zhanran and Zhili (Brook Ziporyn), relative and absolute subtlety in Zhiyi and Jizang (Kanno Hiroshi), interpretations of the theory of Buddha-nature (Linda Penkower and Sandra Wawrytko), later Japanese Tendai interpretations (Paul Groner and Jacqueline Stone), and the making of vows in the Lotus Sutra (Shinozaki Michio). While Lefebure's paper was the only explicitly Buddhist-Christian discussion, comparisons between the traditions ran throughout many of the conversations.On the morning of the last day of the conference, Lefebure responded to Shinozaki's paper and to many of the themes that had been circulating throughout the week. He agreed strongly with Shinozaki's insistence that "how we read the sutra, where we read it, when we read it, and for whom we read it are quite important." There is no view from nowhere or from everywhere. Our contemporary horizon increasingly includes the situation... (shrink)

So I present myself this morning not as an expert with wisdom to impart, but as a neophyte reflecting on his own practice with a view toward getting clearer on the vision of philosophical historiography that underlies it and thereby, perhaps, improving that practice. The paper will fall into two tenuously connected parts. The first part contains a general reflection on method that I wrote a few years back which has since been published in Czech but has not (...) had any circulation in the Anglophone world. I venture to repeat these observations here because I haven’t thought better of them in the meantime, though many of you, I feel sure, will think that I should have. The second part takes up a case study. Having just finished a book on Anselm, I wanted to talk about the current state of historiographical method in Anselm scholarship and see what lessons, if any, can be derived from what I’ve found in my journeys through the secondary literature. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 129-135. Introduction Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Successions of words are so agreeable. It is about this. —Gertrude Stein Nachoem Wijnberg (1961) is a Dutch poet and novelist. He also a professor of cultural entrepreneurship and management at the Business School of the University of Amsterdam. Since 1989, he has published thirteen volumes of poetry and four novels, which, in my opinion mark a high point in Dutch contemporary literature. His novels even more than his poetry are (...) criticized for being inaccessible, which I generally take to be a compliment. It would be like saying that Fernando Pessoa is inaccessible, which he is not. Neither is Wijnberg. When we think of the combination economist-poet we are immediately reminded of the American poet Wallace Stevens, who, as the story goes, had two stacks of paper on his desk, one for contracts, one for poems. We also know that Stevens wrote on the economy and that questions of economy and insurance surface at multiple points in his poems. The following text is a very preliminary attempt to point at the intersections between poems, novels, business, and poetry in Wijnberg’s work. On the back cover of his novel De opvolging ( The Succession , 2005), Wijnberg states the following: “[This is] a novel for whomever is interested in the workings of a company as much as in the workings of a poem.” Wijnberg thus claims that the way in which a company “works” may be similar to the way in which a poem “works.” The question is the obvious one, what does this similarity consist in? De opvolging tells the story of company in which bosses and company doctors, secretaries, children, clowns, and beggars have tons of meetings, recite poems, perform plays, tell jokes, and succeed each other, climbing up and down in the company’s hierarchy. De opvolging is a novel in which the career of people follows the career of words. It resonates with Gertrude Stein's sentences, "Grammar. What is it. Who was it" (1975, 50). The words in Wijnberg's poems are like he characters in his novel. And if we keep in mind this allegorical reading of De opvolging , which is obviously only one of the possible readings, we may be able to understand some aspects of Wijnberg’s poetry. A repetition is already a pun. Look, that word is trying it again, as if it is afraid that by not doing it it would give up the hope that it will ever be able to do something. A pun is the opposite of the first word coming to the mind of someone who shouts it when he suddenly discovers something. (104) The repetition, the succession of the same word, is already a pun, a joke. The succession of the father by the son after the revolution is a joke. "Look he's trying it again!" The essence of a joke is a repetition. Archimedes’ “Eureka!” is its opposite. Poems can easily become jokes, depending on the way the words follow and repeat each other. In De opvolging , the careers of the bosses, good and bad secretaries, and company doctors easily become jokes, as they are “afraid that by not doing it [they] would give up the hope that [they] will ever be able to do something.” Not only the repetition, but also the distance and difference between the words in a poem, their cause and effect relations can be read as company relations. This becomes clear when we, for example, read the first lines of the poem “Cause, sign” from Het leven van ( The Life Of , 2009). A sign lets know what is going to happen, a cause lets it happen. If the sign also lets happen there is no reason to isolate it, because then I would isolate some- thing only because it’s different for me. If I didn’t have to write this myself, but would have secretaries to whom I could dictate it, I would be able to say more about it. (49) Upon reading the first two lines we can already conclude that any word may be cause or sign or both. If a sign is also a cause there is no reason to discriminate it, yet to the poet they are still different. This difference only becomes expressible the moment he would have a secretary. Just like in De opvolging , the secretary introduces a distance; not in a company but in a poem. Hence the difference between “good” and “bad” secretaries in a company, where the good secretary of one boss may be the bad secretary of another one. The more we can say about the bosses of the company, or signifiers of the poem, the greater the distance we introduce between them and us. We should take serious the relation between Wijnberg’s novels and poems. Although they operate on different scales, they explain and converse with each other. Another example may be the novel Politiek en liefde ( Politics and Love , 2002), which deals with the relation, precisely, between politics and love. In the novel, Nicolai, a lieutenant in the Dutch army, is sent to Africa on a military mission. Upon leaving a receives a letter from his father. Dear son, Don’t do anything stupid before your father has advised you to do so. Your mother asked me to write a wise letter. I have been looking for wisdom for half a day and haven’t found much. If you borrow a small amount from a bank you become the bank’s slave, but if you borrow a couple of millions and spend them as quickly as possible the bank becomes your slave. What I want to say is that you have to return from Africa in good health, and before you know it the world will be your slave [....] Signed with a kiss from your father. (88) The line, “If you borrow a small amount from a bank you become the bank’s slave, but if you borrow a couple of millions and spend them as quickly as possible the bank becomes your slave,” returns as the title of poem in Het leven van: “If I borrow enough money the bank becomes my slave” (12-3), which elaborates this theme. So both in the way that these poems are structured and in their subject matter, they refer to the structures of our economy, to the ever-continuing line of CEOs succeeding each other like words, to the distance between them introduced by bureaucracy, and giving and receiving as economical and poetical acts. Poem and economy map onto each other, as in another episode from De opvolging : Edward reads two of the beggar’s poems about presents. Of a holiday nothing remains, except for memories, and if some of them are bad I’d rather forget them all; if I get a present I’d rather get something that’s useful to me for a long time. If I may choose, I choose what I can use longest, long enough to partially forget that this was the present, because it feels bad when nothing is left of it. […] Giving away becomes destruction in the stock destruction economy [ voorraadvernie -tigings-economie ], that is a gift economy [ geschenkeneconomie ], encountering for the first time an economy in which there’s selling and buying on markets. Instead of destroying supplies someone can also quickly say that they aren’t worth anything anymore; if someone wants to take them I’d gladly give him something extra. In a stock destruction economy he is someone who each day wants to work more hours than his colleagues. If around a company there is a gift economy in which someone’s rank is determined and made visible by the gifts someone can give someone else, a company will be more often character- ized by an invisible or unclear system of ranks. (152) Two poems about gifts present two different economical models, described by Wijnberg with the terms “stock destruction economy” and “gift economy.” Here we immediately recall the opposition introduced by George Bataille’s work on the concept of expenditure in The Accursed Share , where a “general economy” would surpass the stock destruction economy based on scarcity (capitalism) and become a gift economy (potlatch) and an egalitarian (communist) society. These claims are made both on the level of the poems and in their discursive explanation. They follow each other and on each other. I would like to finish this introduction to Wijnberg’s writing with a translation from his novel De joden ( The Jews , 1999), which develops the story of Hitler abdicating as chancellor of the Third Reich, appointing philosopher Martin Heidegger as his successor. In a conversation with two Russian actor-spies, sent by Stalin to figure out the situation, philosopher Walter Benjamin describes the abdication scene. Maimon: You were there when Hitler resigned? Benjamin: In the room we’re right now. The desk and the chairs are new. After his resignation Hitler would like to take his furniture to his new house. Martin naturally agrees. It is a sunny day. Martin is very nervous and complains about the heat. Martin is wearing his best dark blue suit, not his professor’s robe. Hitler is wearing his uniform. We enter the room and Hitler gets up and embraces Martin. Martin is not very good at embracing. Hitler shakes his hand. Hitler’s cap is on the desk. The cap has a metal lining. Hitler has strong neck muscles. Hitler says: A man is unclean. He takes a bath. Does he make the bath water unclean? I say: a man is unclean. He steps into a river. A little further a man steps into the river; does he become unclean? Hitler nods. I say: a man is standing in music. Another man hears the music but also sees the first man moving on the beat of the music in a way that he is certain that the music would excite different feelings in him if he wouldn’t to see the first man. Hitler says: a man is clean, listens to music, is suddenly touched and he doesn’t know by what. The conversation ends in the way you know it ends. Hitler picks up his cap from the desk and puts it on Martin’s head. (73-4) Aware of the never ending debate on the question of Heidegger’s involvement in the Nazi regime, Wijnberg has the audacity to present the arguments of complicity in the religious terminology of cleanliness and uncleanliness, while at the same time recalling overtones of Hitler’s supposed love for Wagner, suggesting a relation between Benjamin and Hitler, and so on. The space of this introduction is to small to treat a novel like De joden , a reading of which together with passages from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political , Jacques Derrida's Of Spirit , Christopher Fynsk's Heidegger: Thought and Historicity , and Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book would be extremely elucidating and potentially open new avenues in thinking Heidegger's emphasis on poetry after the fall of the Nazi empire. But at this point we will have to curb our curiosity and follow the poet himself. The themes of the relation between business and poetry, but also Chinese landscape painting, love, Indian and Japanese poetry, and Western philosophy are analyzed and assimilated in Wijnberg’s work without ever losing the clarity of expression. It may be that, according to Alain Badiou, the “Age of the Poets” is over, but its end (Paul Celan) has exactly brought a new balance between philosophy and poetry, and it is this playful, but nonetheless serious balance that makes one hope that one day Wijnberg’s complete oeuvre might become available to readers across the planet. Tiranë, Albania February 15, 2011 English translations (all of them translated by David Colmer, who is preparing an English collection of Wijnberg’s poems entitled Advanced Payment ): Poetry International Words Without Borders Green Integer Review from Het leven van ( The Life of ) THE LIFE OF KANT, OF HEGEL As if every day he takes a decision that is as good as when he’d been able to think about it all his life. The life of Kant, of Hegel, the days of the life of, select three or four of them. Tell what he has discovered during those days as if he were the last one who knew so little. Give me something that I can cancel against then I can prepare myself for it. The reward is that I may continue with what I’m doing, it doesn’t matter how long it takes. This has nothing to do with everything remaining the same if I say that I no longer want anything else. I wouldn’t be able to say in which one and the other occur in a way that I if I knew something to cancel that one against it wouldn’t be possible now. The stars above my head and being able to say what belongs to what if I’ve let them in. FOLLOWING MY HEART WITHOUT BREAKING THE RULES Observing the rules without observing the rules by going where the rules no longer apply. I could also observe the rules there by applying them to what at great distance may resemble what the rules are about. But why would I do that, not to confuse someone who is seeing me from a great distance? Behind this morning the morning prepares itself when the rules are everything I have. IF I BORROW ENOUGH MONEY THE BANK BECOMES MY SLAVE A bank lends me money, if I don’t pay it back they tell my boss that he has to pay them my salary. But they have to leave me enough to eat and sleep and an umbrella when it’s raining. They can also empty my house, the furniture isn’t worth a lot, but every little helps. Each morning I leave for work, if I don’t start early they’ll soon get someone else, no bank will lend me money when the sun is shining. My boss has given me a cat to raise as a dog. Of course I know that it won’t work out, but I’ve asked for a week—maybe the cat gets lucky, maybe I get lucky. My hands around a cup of coffee, before I leave for work, warm-empty, cold-empty, as if hidden in the mist over a lawn. What I make when there’s no work left for me, I’m ashamed to say how little it is. Once I’m outside I check it, if they watch out of the window they can see me doing it. Suppose it is so much that I’d stay counting for hours, it’s getting dark and I’m still there. They stay watching for a while once they’ve finished their work, but have to go home, I get that, sure, I could also go home and continue counting there. If it’s too little running back immediately won’t help, because nobody’s there anymore, and if I come back tomorrow I may have spent what’s missing tonight. Going somewhere where it’s warm enough to walk around without clothes during daytime, it helps me to know that something’s more there than here. For someone like me there’s work anywhere, it shouldn’t take a week to find work for me there. Three times work and a home close to work, I may choose one and try for a week whether I want to stay there. If at the end of the week I don’t want to stay I’m back on the next day, then it was a week’s holiday. RULES If that’s against a rule, it’s yet another one that I cannot observe, or only so briefly that I cannot re- member it later. Anyways the rules are only there to help me remember what I need in order to do better what I do. In that respect there’s no difference between the rules that I find in a book and the rules that I think of early in the morning. I know that because I’ve made a rule just now nothing has yet to observe it. CAUSE, SIGN A sign lets know what is going to happen, a cause lets it happen. If the sign also lets happen there is no reason to isolate it, because then I would isolate something only because it’s different for me. If I didn’t have to write this down myself, but would have secretaries to whom I could dictate it, I could to say more about it. If something is taken away from me I consider how it would be if the opposite had been taken from me. That is what causes or signifies what is farthest away from what is caused or signified by what has been taken away from me. note: For the translations of “The life of Kant, of Hegel” and “If I borrow enough money the bank becomes my slave” I was able to consult David Colmer’s wonderful translations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (2000) 1-17 [Access article in PDF] The Influence of Folk Meteorology in the Anaximander Fragment Cameron Shelley * Introduction No scholars doubt that the pre-Socratic philosophers, especially the Milesians, were concerned with meteorology. Their works abound with accounts of wind, rain, thunder, lightning, meteorites, waterspouts, whirlwinds, and so on. Through examination of the fragments of the pre-Socratics, we can trace this interest (...) in meteorology from each philosopher to his predecessors right back to Anaxi-mander. 1 Thales might at first seem to be the most obvious candidate as the man who introduced meteorology into philosophy, but Kirk et al. argue persuasively that Thales was more interested in near-eastern mythology. 2 Thus, we must take Anaximander, Thales's protégé, to be the philosopher who made meteorology a topic of philosophical interest.This situation leaves us with an obvious question: where did Anaximander come by his interest and ideas about meteorology if not from Thales? Modern scholarship unanimously points to the Greek mythological tradition of Anaxi-mander's time as recorded primarily by Homer and Hesiod. Gilbert confidently asserts that any inquiry into the origin of Greek meteorology must begin with the stories recorded by these poets, and modern scholars generally echo this opinion. 3 Kahn notes that in classical Athens the Milesian-style, non-mythological accounts of meteorology were treated as direct challenges to the Olympic religion, [End Page 1] as demonstrated by Aristophanes in The Clouds. 4 But to conclude on this basis that Anaximander himself saw his project as the construction of theories by the removal of deities from myths is to mistake the result for the cause. Kirk et al. simply point to Kahn's account and speculate that Anaximander was influenced by Greek legends about Phaethon and Deucalion. 5 None of these scholars consider alternative possible sources of Anaximander's meteorological ideas, so that support for mythology as the source derives largely from the lack of a rival. But there is an alternative, namely, folk meteorology.Folk meteorology may be described as the body of folk wisdom concerning the nature and prediction of weather patterns. It typically comes in the form of pithy statements or jingles such as "Red sky at night, shepherd's delight; red sky in morning, shepherd's warning." 6 Folk meteorology has been almost completely neglected even by folklore scholars, so it is not surprising that it has escaped the attention of philosophers and classical scholars as well. However, an examination of folk beliefs about meteorology reveals significant similarities with some of the philosophical beliefs attributed to Anaximander, most notably, and surprisingly, regarding the concept of justice (dikê) implicit in Anaximander's famous fragment.The purpose of this paper is to construct and defend a case for the influence of folk meteorology on Anaximander, particularly on the concept of justice in the Anaximander fragment. The case begins on familiar ground, with the fragment itself and arguments against attempts to trace influences on it to non-meteorological sources, and continues with some evidence of the universality of folk meteorology across cultures and the character of balance as a folk-meteorological concept, which is then applied to the Anaximander fragment as a means of explicating what Anaximander meant there by justice. The suitability of balance for this purpose is taken as evidence that Anaximander was influenced by folk meteorology. Thus, this inquiry identifies a plausible origin of one of Anaximander's central philosophical ideas, an origin which has so far remained completely unexplored by scholars of ancient Greek philosophy. The Fragment of Anaximander Anaximander is famous among Greek scholars for the central role he gave to the concept of justice (dikê) in his natural philosophy. The one fragment of his writings, quoted by Simplicius in his Commentary on Aristotle's Physics (24.18-21), records Anaximander's view on the effect of justice in the physical world: [End Page 2] The things that are perish into the things out of which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution... (shrink)

Fifteen years ago, Robert Fulghum published a simple credo–a credo that became the phenomenal #1 New York Times bestseller All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten . Now, seven million copies later, Fulghum returns to the book that was embraced around the world. He has written a new preface and twenty-five essays, which add even more potency to a common, though no less relevant, piece of wisdom: that the most basic aspects of life bear its most (...) important opportunities. Here Fulghum engages us with musings on life, death, love, pain, joy, sorrow, and the best chicken-fried steak in the continental U.S.A. The little seed in the Styrofoam cup offers a reminder about our own mortality and the delicate nature of life . . . a spider who catches (and loses) a full-grown woman in its web one fine morning teaches us about surviving catastrophe . . . the love story of Jean-Francois Pilatre and his hot air balloon reminds us to be brave and unafraid to “fly” . . . life lessons hidden in the laundry pile . . . magical qualities found in a box of crayons . . . hide-and-seek vs. sardines–and how these games relate to the nature of God. All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten is brimming with the very stuff of life and the significance found in the smallest details. In the years that have passed since the first publication of this book that touched so many with its simple, profound wisdom, Robert Fulghum has had some time to ponder, to reevaluate, and to reconsider. And here are those fresh thoughts on classic topics, right alongside the wonderful new essays. Perhaps in today’s chaotic, more challenging world, these essays on life will resonate even deeper–as readers discover how universal insights can be found in ordinary events. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fitness, Fatness, and Aesthetic Judgments of the Female Body:What the AMA Decision to Medicalize Obesity means for other Non–Normal Female BodiesSara R. Jordan“I’ll be happy to refer you to our dietician to get you on a program to help you get your weight under control before it becomes a problem”.As my new physician spun around out of the examination room door, my head spun faster. I had heard the (...) phrase “get your weight under control” twice that morning, but the contexts in which the phrase was uttered could not have been more different.At 7:30 a.m., my fitness trainer was imploring me to get my weights under control as I struggled under a bar, laden with slightly less than my body weight, to do a final set of front squats. At 11:15 a.m., my new general practitioner was imploring me to get my weight under control, by which he meant to learn how to reduce my body mass index (BMI) to match the chart prominently displayed on his office wall. The exhortation to get my weight under control meant such radically different things in these two contexts that it was difficult to comprehend the meaning of the phrase.I am 5’4” and 158 pounds. This gives me a BMI of 27.3, which means that I am considered overweight; right in the middle of the category of overweight. Or, according to the definition of the BMI found on the calculator pinned to the National Heart Lung and Blood Institutes (NHLBI) webpage, I am over fat. If the BMI is, “a measure of body fat based on height and weight that applies to adult men and women” then I carry a health–threatening percentage of body fat. If my fitness trainer, with his 12 point skin–fold caliper test is correct, my body fat percentage of 17% is within the limits expected of female (non–endurance) athletes. In terms of health, then, I am a paradox: according to one standard, I am healthy and fit, according to another, I am unhealthy and fat.As this new physician picked apart my weight, suggesting I should lose between 15 and 20 pounds to bring myself to “full health”, I found myself quite annoyed. He was a small, rail thin, man with greying hair, tired eyes, unpressed khakis, and a beaten pair of black–ish grey “Crocs” on his feet. He looked disheveled and as if he had not seen the inside of a weights room in his life. As I listened to him address my history, current vitals, and how being overweight in my 30s could lead to being [End Page 101] “fat and 40”, I looked him over and made a snap judgment of “I could bench (press) you [right out this window]”. While I was angry with his delivery, I tried to remind myself that he was an overworked physician in a multi–lingual office, trying to operate under a new paradigm in healthcare policy, practice, and diagnostic categories. Specifically, prompted by the medicalization of the condition of obesity by the American Medical Association, my physician was reflecting the professional wisdom that I suffer from a condition needing preventive treatment. He was trying to be a good practitioner to recommend preventive treatment, but to me, he was being a terrible physician.The AMA Declares Obesity a DiseaseThe declaration by the American Medical Association in 2013 that the condition of being obese is one that requires medical treatment is one that I, on the face of it, support. By inviting the medicalization of the condition, the AMA opens the door for individuals who wage a deeply personal battle with their weight to find support in their physicians’ offices and from their insurance companies. Yet, the blunt tools that are used to assess these conditions raise my ire, emotionally and intellectually.Intellectually, the use of the BMI calculator for snap diagnosis of all individuals makes easy sense. It is an easily comprehended tool and, for a normally distributed population, such a simple tool is an excellent choice. But, it stands to treat outliers like me poorly. Outliers, such as particularly fit... (shrink)

External reality is not moved by our personal dramas; even when our world is collapsing, the world continues its normal course, as if nothing had happened. Of course we know that the most poignant human suffering will not stop the sun from shining or the world from turning. Yet there are moments when the disharmony between objective reality and our own emotional state is painful and even surprising. It seems as if the world is provocatively uninterested in what is most (...) dear to us.The awareness of this rift is evoked in the first sentence of Borges’ well-known story translated into Dutch under the title De Aleph, "On the harrowing morning in February when Beatriz Viterbo died... I saw that the iron poster boards in the Plaza Constitución were being pasted over with some type of advertising for light cigarettes; this struck me, for I understood that the restless, enormous universe was already withdrawing from her, and that this was the first change in an endless series".What is the theoretical relevance of this experience, often roused by poetry and prose, but seldom discussed by philosophers? Is Borges referring to a purely subjective experience from which no conclusion can be drawn, or does he speak of an experience containing an important theoretical insight? Regardless, our ability to undergo this experience is evidently independent of our favourite philosophical concepts. Even someone who adheres to a theory that accepts a meaningful reality can experience this rift when he observes the sun shining triumphantly on a day of mourning. Similarly, someone having no metaphysical belief in a meaningful reality can remain immune to the type of rift Borges describes.Yet it cannot be denied that this rift experience is strengthened and legitimized by an important development in knowledge. The science has evoked a world view that strictly separates objective facts from subjective values. The reality presented by science, is not an inspired relationship or meaningful construction where humanity finds its place and from which it derives its dignity. Laws discovered by science say nothing of good or evil and contain no message on the meaning of life. Science is a source of trustworthy information not elevating, inspiring or comforting concepts. From a scientific viewpoint, knowledge of objective reality has nothing to do with insights people use to orient their lives.This separation of knowledge and wisdom contrasts sharply with a traditional view where knowledge of the most fundamental characteristics of reality also offers an insight in the meaning of human life. Nietzsche described this contrast as follows: while people have always tended to believe that what concerns them most also lies at the heart of reality, they must now realize that their moral, religious or aesthetic values merely form a superficial world of appearances; what elicits wonder or strong emotion is only a blossom on a reality that, in its deeper roots, is not at all beautiful or moving.The disenchantment brought on by science creates a breach or rift. Everything we experience as mysterious, enchanted or moving, appears also to exist as a reality coldly and neutrally described by science. Science demystified the rainbow that once appeared as a mysterious, divine phenomenon: what had always seemed wondrous can apparently be explained by the same natural laws that regulate the most banal or prosaic phenomena. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bonaventure's Inception Address as Regent Master at Paris:Omnium ArtifexRandall B. SmithInception as Master and the Principium in AulaAfter nineteen years of study at the University of Paris—six in the study of Arts (1235–1241), two lecturing in the Arts (1241–1243), five as auditor theologiae (1243–1248), two as a baccalarius biblicus and as a lector biblicus for the Franciscans (1248–1251), two as a baccalarius sententiarius (1251–1253), and one as a baccalarius (...) formatus (1253–1254)—Bonaventure of Bagnoregio was incepted as magister regens (regent master) around Easter (12 April) in 1254 to replace William of Middleton in the Franciscan chair at the University of Paris.1At that time, the inception ceremonies for an incoming regent master consisted of several parts. On the appointed day, the candidate would be officially received by the chancellor of the university in the ceremonial hall, the aula, of the bishop before the assembled faculty and students of the university. The previous evening would have been spent responding to bachelors and masters in a complex series of "disputed questions."2 But on the morning of the next day, the presiding master would have stood and placed on Bonaventure's head a biretta and said aloud: "I place on you the magisterial biretta in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen." After birettas had been distributed to the other masters to place on their own heads, the gathered company sat down to hear the new master deliver his inaugural lecture, the principium in aula.According to University regulations, the principium address was to be a praise of sacred Scripture, and although it was one of the high [End Page 211] points in the inception ceremony, the inception address was supposed to be delivered "briefly" (breve) and "quickly terminated" (celeriter terminato).3 When Friar Thomas Aquinas incepted in 1256, two years after Bonaventure, his principium address was completed in about ten minutes. Brother Bonaventure's principium, a translation of which follows this introduction, would require about forty minutes or more to read out loud. But then, as Aquinas himself might have said, "briefly" can be said in several ways.4 A study of earlier principium addresses by other masters shows, moreover, that the length of these addresses varied from master to master.5The Principium in Aula and the Sermo Modernus StyleThe earliest records we have of masters who incepted at Paris reveal that their inception principia addresses were always delivered in the contemporary style of preaching, the so-called "sermo modernus" or "modern sermon" style. There is no need for our present purposes to trace the development of the sermo modernus style, other than to say that its origins lie in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, and that it had become highly developed, with numerous preaching manuals and reference materials to help preachers master its forms, by the time Thomas and Bonaventure were incepted as masters at Paris, in 1256 and 1254 respectively.6 [End Page 212]In brief, three things were especially characteristic of these thirteenth century sermo modernus style sermons: (1) the thema, a biblical verse, usually from the day's readings that the preacher would use to lend structure and order to the entire sermon; (2) the divisio of the thema, and (3) the dilatatio of each of the parts created by this opening divisio.7The thema verse served as a structuring device which provided an outline of the topics to be covered in the sermon. When the sermon was preached, the thema verse also served as a mnemonic device to help the listeners identify their place within the progress of the whole and then recall the contents of the sermon after it was finished. To recall the contents of the sermon, one merely had to bring to mind the opening thema verse, and each word would suggest the topics the preacher had associated with it.8So, for example, in the principium address Bonaventure delivered at his inception as master, Bonaventure took as his opening thema a verse from Wisdom 7:1, Omnium artifex docuit me sapientia ("The maker of all things... (shrink)

Descartes died in Stockholm on 11 February 1650 from pneumonia contracted during the freezing cold mornings spent in his philosophical colloquia with Queen Christina. According to Chanut, who stayed with him until the very end, his death was "sweet and very much like his life". These words have always been held to be of fundamental importance in the different accounts of the philosopher's death, especially in Adrien Baillet's Vie de Monsieur Descartes. The literature that flourished around Descartes' death has always (...) presented this ‘trespassing' as the final declaration of his philosophy, inspired by those principles he had theorized in his works as a philosophy of life and that he would play out even in the crowning moment as an ethic of wisdom which has to be lived out in the first person, and for the last time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:2005 International Lotus Sutra ConferenceLeo D. LefebureIn May 2005 Rissho Kosei-kai sponsored its annual conference on the Lotus Sutra for the first time in China, at the new conference center of Beijing Normal University. Chinese Buddhist scholars Zhang Fenglei and Wei Dedong of Renmin University participated, offering discussions of "Earthly Orientation of Tiantai Buddhist Doctrine" and "Zhanran's Doctrine about the Nature of Insentient Beings and Its Ecological Implications," respectively. (...) While the main focus of the discussions at the conference was on Buddhist interpretations of the Lotus Sutra in the T'ien T'ai and Tendai traditions, the organizers invited two Christian theologians, Ruben Habito and Leo Lefebure, to participate, thereby adding an interreligious dimension. An illness in his family prevented Habito from attending, but the paper he had prepared, "Ultimate Reality and Religious Praxis: The Lotus Sutra, T'ien T'ai, and Nichiren," was presented and discussed. On the morning of the first full day, Lefebure presented the paper "Wisdom, Compassion, and Charity: The Lotus Sutra and Augustine." In it he compared the rhetorical strategies of the Lotus Sutra and Augustine. The Lotus Sutra and Augustine articulate a dilemma of communication: the Sutra notes that only another Buddha can understand the wisdom of Shakyamuni Buddha, and Augustine warns that no human understanding is adequate to comprehend the mystery of God. According to the Lotus Sutra, the resolution of this difficulty comes through the use of upaya or, more specifically, upaya-kausalya, variously translated as "expedient" or "skillful" or "appropriate" means, including similes and parables. The wisdom of the Buddha that cannot be captured conceptually through pondering or analysis may nonetheless be conveyed in nonliteral form through concrete narratives, and the Lotus Sutra presents a number of celebrated examples. These narratives promise to transform human existence decisively, freeing humans from attachments and awakening them to wisdom (prajna) and compassion (karuna). Through [End Page 195] wisdom and compassion the Buddha establishes skillful means in order heal the suffering of human beings and to lead them into these virtues.During the same time that Kumarajiva and his companions were translating the Lotus Sutra into Chinese, Augustine of Hippo proclaimed that the gospel of Jesus Christ offered humans the possibility of victory over ignorance, sin, and death and supreme bliss in union with God in heaven. But he also insisted that God is strictly incomprehensible and the divine reality cannot be captured in any concept or image. Pondering and analysis cannot grasp the meaning of God, and so Augustine warned his congregation, "If you have comprehended, what you have comprehended is not God." Despite the inadequacy of all human thought and language to comprehend God, Augustine trusted that God has used finite signs, like the narratives of the Bible, to communicate the saving knowledge of God's love. Signs point to realities; even though the signs posited by God never express the divine reality adequately and literally, they can nonetheless reorient human life away from untrammeled, self-destructive desire (cupiditas) and toward the self-giving love that Augustine calls charity (caritas). The wisdom and charity of God are the origin and content of the salvific signs, whose goal is to lead humans into the wisdom and charity of God.Other papers explored the journey of the Lotus Sutra on the Silk Road (Mariko Walter), Mind/Nature in Zhanran and Zhili (Brook Ziporyn), relative and absolute subtlety in Zhiyi and Jizang (Kanno Hiroshi), interpretations of the theory of Buddha-nature (Linda Penkower and Sandra Wawrytko), later Japanese Tendai interpretations (Paul Groner and Jacqueline Stone), and the making of vows in the Lotus Sutra (Shinozaki Michio). While Lefebure's paper was the only explicitly Buddhist-Christian discussion, comparisons between the traditions ran throughout many of the conversations.On the morning of the last day of the conference, Lefebure responded to Shinozaki's paper and to many of the themes that had been circulating throughout the week. He agreed strongly with Shinozaki's insistence that "how we read the sutra, where we read it, when we read it, and for whom we read it are quite important." There is no view from nowhere or from everywhere. Our contemporary horizon increasingly includes the situation... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:For the Love of All Creatures: The Story of Grace in Genesis by William GreenwayRyan JuskusFor the Love of All Creatures: The Story of Grace in Genesis William Greenway GRAND RAPIDS, MI: EERDMANS, 2015. 178 PP. $18.00The morning I started reading William Greenway's For the Love of All Creatures, my toddler stumbled into my bedroom holding an injured cockroach. After my startled response caused him to drop (...) it, I trapped and threw the cockroach outside. Had no children been present, I probably would have killed it. Later, I read Greenway's injunction to "love the cockroach," for "we reflect the image of God when we are wholly and without qualification seized by love for the cockroach and for every creature" (102). Did I love that injured cockroach, I wondered; was I seized in a "transcendent moment," my love "absolute and unqualified" (102)? Unpreoccupied by such quotidian dilemmas, Greenway instead proposes a spirituality of grace, of awakening to having been seized by love for all creatures. The moral and spiritual genius of "the primeval history" of Genesis 1–11, he argues, is its holding together the "knowing, insightful idealism" of the seven-day Creation narrative with the "hyperrealism" of the Flood narrative (140). Together they proclaim the "decisive, life-affirming asymmetry" that gracious love is more primordial and ultimate than evil (144). Greenway's book joins a growing body of literature reclaiming biblical texts from overly anthropocentric readings. Asserting the priority of moral sensibility to ethical reasoning, Greenway does not help me know whether I loved that cockroach—beyond mourning that in a fallen world, we "choose the lesser of two evils" (103)—but his Creation spirituality contributes a distinctive approach to animal ethics.Greenway contrasts his creature-loving reading with both materialist and anthropocentric interpretations, against which he argues that the redactors skillfully wove together the Genesis 1–11 narratives to bear a "spiritual truth" that awakens readers to love for all creatures (4). Contrasting this spiritual wisdom to two other influential Creation narratives—the Babylonian Enuma Elish and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, the latter carried to completion by Charles Darwin—Greenway draws out the interconnections between politics, cosmology, anthropology, God, and evil that each narrative renders.A provocative but carefully developed reading of the Flood as the "birth of the God of grace" and an interpretation of the seven-day Creation through the lens of exiled, suffering Israel, follow (67). The latter, Greenway argues, cultivates a life-affirming spirituality with an "infinite sensitivity to every other [End Page 205] being" (105). The both/and character of the primeval history's spirituality is summed up in Greenway's oft-repeated phrases "seized by love for all creatures" (i.e., idealism) yet "with eyes wide open to injustice and suffering" (i.e., realism). For a criterion to evaluate Creation narratives, Greenway distinguishes between a "logic of domination" and a "logic of dominion." He concludes that whereas the Hobbesian-Darwinian narrative recognizes fallenness and the Enuma Elish promotes realism, both fail to testify to the asymmetry between good and evil that Greenway thinks essential to a creature-loving spirituality of dominion. Gracious love is the most primordial and ultimate reality. The ethic of daily life, lived along the continuum between domination and dominion, is to "maximize dominion" (121).Regardless of whether one accepts Greenway's premises regarding authority, epistemology, and biblical interpretation, his argument is insightful and thought provoking. Engaging the oppressed communities highlighted by feminist, womanist, and postcolonial thinkers would have complicated his story of "the modern West" and his assessments of sacrifice, hierarchy, sin, and imago Dei. Also, a number of ambiguities—such as claiming to value multiple religious traditions while arguing for the superiority of Genesis—beg for further clarity. However, Greenway's contribution to a life-affirming spirituality in harmony with biblical testimony is laudatory. He may not help me know how to love a cockroach, but he successfully accounts for why such an ethical dilemma coheres with a Genesis-cultivated spirituality. The book would have wide appeal in undergraduate, seminary, or ecclesial contexts. [End Page 206]Ryan JuskusDuke UniversityCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Gasking, D. A. T. The philosophy of John Wisdom.--Thomson, J. J. Moore's technique revisited.--Yalden-Thomson, D. C. The Virginia lectures.--Dilman, I. Paradoxes and discoveries.--Ayers, M. R. Reason and psycholinguistics.--Roberts, G. W. Incorrigibility, behaviourism and predictionism.--Hinton, J. M. "This is visual sensation."--Gunderson, K. The texture of mentality.--Newell, R. W. John Wisdom and the problem of other minds.--Lyon, A. The relevance of Wisdom's work for the philosophy of science.--Morris, H. Shared guilt.--Bambrough, R. Literature and philosophy.--Chronological list of published writings of (...) John Wisdom, 1928-1972 (p. [293]-300). (shrink)

A recession is a significant decline in economic activities. The effects of economic recession include general economic decline, drop in the stock market and increase in unemployment. While some have argued that bilateral relationship among nations is an ethical response to problem of economic recession but it does not solve the problem. The paper suggests genetic gender determination. Genetic gender determination is an agent-based ethics. It involves the scientific manipulation of the fetus of a woman to determine the gender of (...) her offspring. Ethical issues linked to genetic gender determination, unbalance sex ratio, manipulation of genome, and possible spread of infectious or communicable diseases. The paper concludes that the genetic gender determination would help to cushion the effects of economic recession. (shrink)

Ethics is a branch of philosophy that analyzes right or wrong of an action. Ethics studies all aspect of human activities; which water pollution is one. Water pollution is the emission of waste or chemicals into water bodies at a quantity that is harmful to man and the aquatic organisms. The Effects of water pollution include mass extinction species, decrease in the biodiversity, and scarcity of fresh water. The question to ask is “how can water pollution be ameliorated if not (...) totally eradicated?” Using the method of philosophical analysis, the paper suggests that the implementation of deep ecological principles by policy makers would be abatements and environmental consciousness for the common good of the society. (shrink)

The interest in program- and colleges of education- level evaluation and alignment of student learning outcomes to course content has been increasing over the past several decades. Curriculum mapping establishes the links between content and expected student learning outcomes. Curriculum map is an overview of what is taking place in the classroom; and it includes evaluation tools and activities. Social Studies Department, Federal Capital Territory College of Education Zuba, Abuja, recently completed an accreditation exercise by National Commission for Colleges of (...) Education Abuja, Nigeria. The audit reported that there was no match between the student learning outcomes and Social Studies curricula. The purpose of this paper was to align the Nigeria Certificate in Education minimum standards with student learning outcomes to determine gaps and redundancies. The paper also looked at how virtual education enhances curriculum mapping during COVID-19 pandemic. Minimum standards learning outcomes were modified from existing learning outcomes to better align with college learning outcomes and the Social Studies Core and Elective Competencies. All NCE Social Studies courses were mapped to the Social Studies Core and Elective Competencies and assessed to determine the gaps and redundancies. The study used the documentary research method. The purposeful sampling strategy was used to select the research site. Potential gaps were defined as coverage for each competency in about ≤20% of the courses and potential redundancies was considered as coverage of ≥80% of the courses. The mapping exercise revealed gaps; and no redundancies in course content. The findings of the mapping exercises should be used to improve the content provided to NCE Social Studies students at FCT College of Education Zuba, with the overall objective of enhancing the quality of the education provided to those students and helping them to be better students that are prepared for a successful career in Social Studies. (shrink)

Using in-depth interviews with women in the Puerto Rican community of Chicago, this article explores how migration emerged as a strategy for families across class backgrounds and how gender relations within the family mediate the migration of married working-class and middle-class Puerto Rican women. The women who followed their husbands to Chicago participated in another form of labor migration, since some wives joined their husbands in the paid economy and those who did not contributed with the reproductive work that supported (...) their husbands and families. This article also explores how Puerto Rican women confront the basic duality of reproductive and productive work. (shrink)

The official Afrikaans Bible translations, published in 1933/1953, 1983 and 2020, influenced Reformed theology, sociopolitical perceptions and the role of the church in society. These issues bled through in the translations via the hermeneutical scope of the different eras. This study focuses on the influence of the hermeneutic foundations of the translators on the content, style and linguistic choices in these translations. The differences between the translations are quite obvious to the reader and a reflection of the fact that different (...) translation strategies were followed. There were vastly different sociopolitical and religious contexts prevailing during the different translation projects. Not only did the sociohistorical setting in South Africa undergo dramatic changes, but internationally there were historic events, such as the two World Wars, the rise and fall of communism, globalisation and the rapid development of technology and the Internet. No official hermeneutic strategies were documented or self-reflectively employed by the translators of the Afrikaans Bibles and therefore this study will approach the hermeneutics of the translations from a descriptive point of view. Sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts together with developments in theological reflection will provide the background for understanding the prevailing hermeneutics of the translations.Contribution: A new Afrikaans Bible was released in 2020, and a need arose to put the Afrikaans translations in applicable hermeneutical contexts. This discussion provides insights into the hermeneutical backgrounds of the three official Afrikaans translations. This contributes to the knowledge base of Afrikaans Bible translations and provides new insights into the hermeneutics of these translations. (shrink)