Today, the earth is an interconnected globe humming with electronic transmissions-a chattering planet nestled in the provident silence of space. The ethical question is whether this is contributing to authentic human development and helping individuals and peoples to be true to their transcendent destiny. The new media are powerful tools for education, cultural enrichment, commercial activity, political participation, intercultural dialogue and understanding. They also can serve the cause of religion. Yet the new information technology needs to be informed and (...) guided by solidarity in the service of the common good bridging the digital divide within and among nations. The value-laden message of Western secular culture to people and traditional societies in many cases ill-prepared to evaluate it leads to widespread crisis, for example, in regard to marriage and family life. This technology can be a means for solving human problems, promoting the integral development of persons, creating a world governed by justice, peace, and love. It also can help men and women in their age-old search for self-understanding. Like today's world itself, the world of media, including the Internet, has been brought by Christ, inchoately yet truly, within the boundaries of the kingdom of God and placed in service to the word of salvation. (shrink)

The Greater Cleveland community Dialogue on values and Health Care most recently took up the questions of health care rationing and of access to long-term care. The Dialogue, funded by the Cleveland Foundation, involves a Core Group of thirty community leaders representing major interest groups, joined together in an attempt to build consensus or acceptable compromise. The purpose of the dialogue is to identify moral values that can provide signposts for public policy regarding health care (...) distribution. (shrink)

The increased recognition and reported prevalence of autism spectrum disorders combined with the associated societal and clinical impact call for a broad grassroots community-based dialogue on treatment related ethical and social issues. In these Stony Brook Guidelines, which were developed during a full year of community dialogue with affected individuals, families, and professionals in the field, we identify and discuss topics of paramount concern to the ASD constituency: treatment goals and happiness, distributive justice, managing the desperate (...) hopes for a cure, sibling responsibilities, intimacy and sex, diagnostic ethics, and research ethics. The members of the dialogue core committee included doctors, ethicists, administrators, social workers, ministers, disability experts, and many family members of individuals with autism who were especially engaged in community activities on behalf of their constituency, including siblings, parents, and grandparents. Our guidelines are not based on “top-down” imposition of professional expertise, but rather on a “bottom-up” grass roots attention to the voices of affected individuals and families speaking from experience. These guidelines can inform clinical practice, but they also are meaningful for the wider social conversation emerging over the treatment of individuals with ASD. (shrink)

The project we highlight in this article stems from our philosophical work on moral disagreements that appear to be—and sometimes are—intractable. Deliberative democratic theorists tout the merits of dialogue as an effective way to bridge differences of values and opinion, ideally resulting in agreement, or perhaps more often resulting in greater mutual understanding. Could dialogue mitigate disagreements about a controversial education policy such as affirmative action? Could it foster greater understanding? We conceived of a project that would simultaneously (...) fulfill two goals that we had as philosophers, education researchers, and aspiring public intellectuals. First, it would allow us to use philosophy in research, grounding our mixed methods research in a philosophically informed framework. The tools and analytic techniques that are particular to philosophers felt uniquely suited for an empirical study concerning political theory. Second, we aimed to use philosophy in the community. We were able to put our own expertise in philosophy and race-conscious education policy to good use by purposefully creating opportunities for diverse community members in our larger metropolitan area to engage in dialogue and deliberation with each other over the issue of affirmative action. (shrink)

RésuméDans ce dialogue, deux personnages principaux, Philopolis et Éleuthérios, proposent la position communautarienne et la position contractualiste libérale comme fondements de la théorie politique. Le débat se déroule, comme tout bon débat devrait lefaire, autour d'une bouteille de Chardonnay.

This chapter investigates the computational consequences of a broadly Gricean view of language use as intentional activity. In this view, dialogue rests on coordinated reasoning about communicative intentions. The speaker produces each utterance by formulating a suitable communicative intention. The hearer understands it by recognizing the communicative intention behind it. When this coordination is successful, interlocutors succeed in considering the same intentions— that is, the same representations of utterance meaning—as the dialogue proceeds. In this paper, I emphasize that (...) these intentions can be formalized; we can provide abstract but systematic representations that spell out what a speaker is trying to do with an utterance. Such representations describe utterances simultaneously as the product of our knowledge of grammar and as actions chosen for a reason. In particular, they must characterize the speaker’s utterance in grammatical terms, provide the links to the context that the grammar requires, and so arrive at a contribution that the speaker aims to achieve. Because I have implemented this formalism, we can regard it as a possible analysis of conversational processes at the level of computational theory. Nevertheless, this analysis leaves open what the nature of the biological computation involved in inference to intentions is, and what regularities in language use support this computation. (shrink)

In communities of inquiry, dialogue is central as both the means and the outcome of collective inquiry. Indeed, features of dialogue—including formulating and asking questions, developing hypotheses and explanations, and offering and requesting reasons—are often highlighted as playing a significant role in the quality of the dialogue that unfolds. We inquire further into the quality of dialogue by arguing that dialogue should enable the expansion of epistemic openness, rather than its contraction, and that this is (...) especially important in multicultural communities of inquiry to acknowledge the cultural, perspectival, and experiential differences that exist alongside of similarities as resources for dialogue. The purpose of this article is to highlight two discourse practices that exemplify the nature of discourse as social practice and can be used in communities of inquiry. Attending to these discourse practices may enable teachers and students to reflect upon dialogue as it unfolds. First, we situate ourselves in multicultural classrooms in British Columbia, Canada. Then we articulate three principles of communities of inquiry. Next we describe and exemplify two discourse practices: heteroglossic attunement and lexical awareness. When attended to by teachers and students, 1) heteroglossic attunement enables teachers and students to begin to identify, reflect upon, and discuss the voices and perspectives that are drawn upon as participants inquire together and 2) lexical awareness enables teachers and students to begin to identify their attributions of thinking and feeling to social actors and to recognize how naming social actors positions them in an evolving set of social relations. Rather than a neutral medium of communication, social speech and dialogue is inherently value laden. Attending closely to the discourse that constitutes dialogue in a community of inquiry is a significant pedagogical tool for both teachers and students to expand epistemic openness and make visible learning as it unfolds. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Common Word between us and you Love of the Neighbour in Christianity and Islam The Neighbour Justice, Society, the Third and Fraternity Dialogue Between Neighbours and Strangers Education and the Meaning of Community Notes.

Medical ethics changed dramatically in the past 30 years because physicians and humanists actively engaged each other in discussions that sometimes led to confrontation and controversy, but usually have improved the quality of medical decision-making. Before then medical ethics had been isolated for almost two centuries from the larger philosophical, social, and religious controversies of the time. There was, however, an earlier period where leaders in medicine and in the humanities worked closely together and both fields were richer for it. (...) This volume begins with the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment when professors of medicine such as John Gregory, Edward Percival, and the American, Benjamin Rush, were close friends of philosophers like David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid. They continually exchanged views on matters of ethics with each other in print, at meetings of elite intellectual groups, and at the dinner table. Then something happened, physicians and humanists quit talking with each other. In searching for the causes of the collapse, this book identifies shifts in the social class of physicians, developments in medical science, and changes in the patterns of medical education. Only in the past three decades has the dialogue resumed as physicians turned to humanists for help just when humanists wanted their work to be relevant to real-life social problems. Again, the book asks why, finding answers in the shift from acute to chronic disease as the dominant pattern of illness, the social rights revolution of the 1960's, and the increasing dissonance between physician ethics and ethics outside medicine. The book tells the critical story of how the breakdown in communication between physicians and humanists occurred and how it was repaired when new developments in medicine together with a social revolution forced the leaders of these two fields to resume their dialogue. (shrink)

Aristotle argues that friendship is characterized by recognized, reciprocal goodwill. Friends are concerned about each other; ideally, they want the best for each other. As long as dialogue is possible, community exists, and friendship and goodwill are possible. Dialogue is a central, distinctive feature of Hans‐Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. It is rare in nineteenth‐century hermeneutics and it is all but absent in Martin Heidegger's philosophizing. Gadamer famously argues that dialogue can occur with texts and works of (...) art, even though there is a clear difference between these dialogues and dialogues with other people. In community, we share our interpretations in dialogue, moving us ever beyond our limited, individual understanding of God and creation and becoming ever more aligned with the Infinite. The true church is the community of freely associating believers working together in dialogue to come to an intuition of the Infinite. (shrink)

The self is a historical and cultural phenomenon in the sense of a dialectically evolving narrative construct about who we are, what our borders and limits and capacities are, what is pathology, and what is normality, and so on. These ontological and epistemological narratives are usually linked to grand explanatory narratives like science and religion, and are intimately linked to cosmological pictures. The “intersubject” is an emergent form of subjectivity in our time which reconstructs its borders to include the other, (...) and which understands itself as always building and being built through a combination of internal and external dialogue. The shift from monological to dialogical discourse is both a product and a producer of the intersubject, and is in turn made possible by a shift—underway for the last one hundred years or so—in the human information environment. The major educational innovation which reconstructs theory and practice for the intersubject—community of philosophical inquiry (CPI)—assumes, following field and systems theory, that any group gathered together is an interactive system. It also assumes that the fundamental forms of growth and development both of the individual and of the collective take place through a process of communal deliberative inquiry into meaning, resulting in the reconstruction of beliefs, values, and discourses on both an individual and a collective level. CPI is a process in which subject and object are both active and passive, shaping and being shaped, determining and determined, in and through their transaction. It assumes that its interlocutors are in a relation of both mutual and self-interrogation. As the phenomenon of the intersubject gains credence in human culture, philosophy is gaining power as an educational idea in the elementary and high school classroom. Communal philosophical dialogue is the discursive space where the subject’s fundamental assumptions about self, world, knowledge, belief, beauty, right action and normative ideals enter a dialectical process of confrontation, mediation, and reconstruction. (shrink)

철학자 존 하드윅(John Hardwig)은 그의 논문 “사생활, 자기 지식, 다원적 공동체: 가족의 인식론으로의 초대”에서 자기 지식을 향상시키는 문제가 우리의 가족 형태 및 라이프스타일과 밀접하게 관련되어 있다는 점에 대해 논한다. 그의 주장에 따르면, 다른 종류의 삶의 방식들–가령, 혼자 사는 삶, 부부(커플)나 룸메이트와의 삶, 핵가족 등등–에 비해서 공동체, 특히 다원적 공동체의 생활 방식이 자기 지식을 확장하고 증진시키는 데에 있어서 훨씬 더 유익하다는 것이다. 이 글에서 필자가 중점적으로 다루고자 하는 것은 하드윅이 이러한 논의를 전개하는 과정에서 가정하고 있는 자기 지식에 관한 더 근본적 전제인, (...) 자기 지식을 향상시키기 위해서는 반드시 타인과의 ‘대화’가 필수적이라는 생각이다. 그에 따르면, 대화는 자기 지식 향상에 없어서는 안 되는 본질적이고 필수적인 요소이다. 공동체가 자기 지식 향상에 도움이 될 수 있는 것도 바로 공동체에서 함께 생활하는 구성원들 간에 나눌 수 있는 서로에 대한 진지하고 깊은 대화 때문이다. 그러나 과연 그러한가? 대화 없이 나 혼자의 성찰만으로는 자기 지식을 확장하고 증진시키는 것이 불가능한가? 필자가 보기에 이러한 생각은 너무 강한 주장인 것처럼 보인다. 이 글에서는 이러한 하드윅의 입장을 뒷받침하고 있는 가정이나 이유들을 비판적으로 분석하고 검토함으로써 하드윅의 주장을 약화시키고, 타인과의 대화 없이도 자기 지식을 향상시킬 수 있는 구체적인 가능성을 제시하려고 한다. (shrink)

In this article, we describe a project in which philosophy, in combination with methods drawn from mental modeling, was used to structure dialogue among stakeholders in a region-scale climate adaptation process. The case study we discuss synthesizes the Toolbox dialogue method, a philosophically grounded approach to enhancing communication and collaboration in complex research and practice, with a mental modeling approach rooted in risk analysis, assessment, and communication to structure conversations among non-academic stakeholders who have a common interest in (...) planning for a sustainable future. We begin by describing the background of this project, including details about climate resiliency efforts in West Michigan and the Toolbox dialogue method, which was extended in this project from academic research into community organization involving the West Michigan Climate Resiliency Framework Initiative. This extension involved application of several methods, which are the focus of the Methods section. We then present and discuss preliminary results that suggest the potential for philosophical dialogue to enhance mutual understanding in complex community initiatives that focus on sustainable responses to climate change. Overall, the article supplies a detailed, instructive example of how philosophy can support policy-relevant decision-making processes at the community level. (shrink)

A consensus has emerged among many normative theorists of cultural pluralism that dialogue is the key to securing just relations among ethnic or cultural groups. However, few normative theorists have explored the conditions or incentives that enable inter-group dialogue versus those that encourage inter-group conflict. To address this problem, I use Habermas’s distinction between communicative and strategic action, since many models of inter-group dialogue implicitly rely upon communicative action, while many accounts of inter-group conflict rest upon strategic (...) action. Drawing on explanatory accounts of inter-group conflict, I outline five strategic logics of group conflict, what I call the resource, political, information, positional, and security logics. I then argue that these strategic logics cannot be overcome by three motivations commonly thought to support communicative action: moral-cognitive consistency, the normative characteristics of modernity, and publicity constraints. At this point, I turn to an empirical case, the reception of African-American concerns within the Jewish public sphere prior to the Second World War, in order to suggest that, although strategic incentives might hinder inter-group dialogue, they may also encourage it. In conclusion, I provide three recommendations for how theorists might utilize strategic incentives in order to recognize which actors, policies, or institutions can encourage inter-group dialogue. (shrink)

In this essay, I focus on the community of thinking between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. The relationship between those two thinkers is far from unambiguous: if they can be said to be thinking together, it certainly does not simply mean that they think the same thing or that they think it in the same way. I show that, because of its insistence on separation, Derrida's thinking is still a thinking of the one and the other and retains a (...) Levinasian flavour that is absent from Nancy's. Nancy's thinking insists on plurality, on the 'explosion of presence in the manifold of its partition'. It insists, in other words, on the world. If Nancy prefers the fabric of the world to the Other, it is because it only allows one to think a plurality that doesn't sacrifice the gift that each singularity is. (shrink)

Abstract The first section of the paper reviews the kind of action which unfolds in Plato's Republic, and argues that, from Book II onwards, its character shifts from a genuine dialogue (communicative action) to a more manipulative kind of intercourse (strategic action). While the former kind of action was characteristic of the educational activities of the historical Socrates, the case is made that this kind of action became largely eclipsed in Western education and superseded by the strategic concerns to (...) which Platonist conceptions of learning gave prominence. The Platonist legacy, it is pointed out, had a decisive impact on Western conceptions of learning, even beyond the Enlightenment. These conceptions were largely custodial rather than emancipatory in character. An argument is presented in thirteen steps in the second section of the paper, to establish the case that the kind of action which properly describes the experience of teaching and learning is that of a cultural courtship. A distinction is drawn between honourable and dishonourable forms of courtship, the honourable being a candidate for defence in universalist terms. The practical import of the distinction is considered. Under the title ?The Dialogue that we Aren't?, the third section reviews postmodern objections ? particularly those of Lyotard ? to the kind of argument made in the thirteen steps, and the concluding section considers Habermas? later theories in relation to my own ?universalist? argument. (shrink)

RESUMEN Desde el planteamiento de Gadamer sobre diálogo se muestra que cuando los interlocutores efectúan la conversación en armonía con el proteger el derecho de opinión y el reconocer de modo recíproco los límites de los puntos de vista arriesgados, es factible configurar comunidad de vida humana en la mutua estima y aprobar la validez de otros juicios como respuestas que ayudan con el proceso interhumano de entendimiento común. Y en este realizar el diálogo así tiene lugar una creación nueva (...) de sentido que con la participación de la pluralidad lleva a cabo simultáneamente la actualización del habitual modo de efectuar la formación de comunidad de vida. En la medida en que los interlocutores ejercen el entender sus opiniones en relación con la pregunta orientadora del diálogo y reconocen la finitud de sus puntos de vista como posibilidades entre otras, se contribuye con el establecimiento de comunidad de vida humana en un sentido completamente distinto trasformando con ello de un modo u otro las prácticas habituales de relación e integración social. En primer lugar, se explica el vínculo entre experiencia comprensible y conversación; y, en segundo lugar, se establece el modo como Gadamer describe el presupuesto hermenéutico de la pertenencia y su relación con la creación de un nuevo sentido que incumbe a la experiencia comprensible del entendimiento interhumano en la conversación. ABSTRACT From Gadamer's approach to dialogue, it is shown that when the interlocutors carry out the conversation in harmony with protecting the right of opinion and reciprocally recognizing the limits of risky points of view, it is feasible to configure a community of human life in mutual estimate and approve the validity of other judgments as answers that help with the interhuman process of common understanding. And in this realization of the dialogue thus a new creation of meaning takes place that with the participation of the plurality simultaneously carries out the updating of the usual way of carrying out the formation of a community of life. To the extent that the interlocutors understand their opinions in relation to the guiding question of the dialogue and recognize the finiteness of their points of view as possibilities among others, it contributes to the establishment of a community of human life in a completely different sense, transforming with this, in one way or another, the usual practices of relationship and social integration. First, the link between understandable experience and conversation is explained; and, secondly, the way in which Gadamer describes the hermeneutical assumption of belonging and its relationship with the creation of a new meaning that concerns the comprehensible experience of interhuman understanding in conversation is established. (shrink)

A consensus has emerged among many normative theorists of cultural pluralism that dialogue is the key to securing just relations among ethnic or cultural groups. However, few normative theorists have explored the conditions or incentives that enable inter-group dialogue versus those that encourage inter-group conflict. To address this problem, I use Habermas’s distinction between communicative and strategic action, since many models of inter-group dialogue implicitly rely upon communicative action, while many accounts of inter-group conflict rest upon strategic (...) action. Drawing on explanatory accounts of inter-group conflict, I outline five strategic logics of group conflict, what I call the resource, political, information, positional, and security logics. I then argue that these strategic logics cannot be overcome by three motivations commonly thought to support communicative action: moral-cognitive consistency, the normative characteristics of modernity, and publicity constraints. At this point, I turn to an empirical case, the reception of African-American concerns within the Jewish public sphere prior to the Second World War, in order to suggest that, although strategic incentives might hinder inter-group dialogue, they may also encourage it. In conclusion, I provide three recommendations for how theorists might utilize strategic incentives in order to recognize which actors, policies, or institutions can encourage inter-group dialogue. (shrink)

Résumé: Dans ce dialogue, deux personnages principaux, Philopolis et Éleuthérios, proposent la position communautarienne et la position contractualiste libérale comme fondements de la théorie politique. Le débat se déroule, comme tout bon débat devrait le faire, autour d’une bouteille de Chardonnay.

Hoping to expand upon public philosophy endeavors within higher education, the following captures the story behind the course Dialogue, Integration, and Action. The course has yielded a number of innovative pedagogical tools and engagement strategies likely to be of value to philosophy instructors seeking to explore a more participatory, experiential educational approach. As a transdisciplinary, community-engaged philosophy class, it engages students in the theories and practices of deliberative democracy and activism, encouraging the development of dialogic skills for their (...) personal, professional, and civic lives. By documenting the community-instructor-student collaborative design of the university course; the feminist pragmatist philosophic commitments underlying its design; the community-led and student-facilitated dialogue and the subsequent public report, as well as the impact of this work on the students, the community partner, and the instructor, the article highlights the benefits and the challenges of undergraduate philosophic engagement that emerges from and responds to place-based needs. (shrink)

Shapcott investigates the question of justice in a culturally diverse world, asking if it is possible to conceive of a universal or cosmopolitan community in which justice to difference is achieved. Justice to difference is possible, according to Shapcott, by recognising the particular manner in which different humans identify themselves. Such recognition is most successfully accomplished through acts of communication, and in particular, conversation. The accounts of understanding developed by H. G. Gadamer provide a valuable way forward in this (...) field. The philosophical hermeneutic account of conversation allows for the development of a level of cosmopolitan solidarity that is both 'thin' and universal, and which helps to provide a more just resolution of the tension between the values of community and difference. Students and scholars of international relations, international ethics and philosophy will be interested in this original study. (shrink)

El propósito de este artículo es esclarecer las múltiples funciones de la noción de koinōnía en los diálogos de Platón. Koinōnía y su ausencia caracterizan la realidad como un todo: tanto las entidades inteligibles como sensibles o se “comunican” o no se “comunican” ; por tanto, reconstruir la red de las relaciones de koinōnia equivale a poner en práctica la dialéctica. Hasta ahí todo está bien. Pero un análisis que apunte a esclarecer el papel de la koinōnía no puede dejar (...) de considerar la syngéneia. La razón de este hecho radica en la relación esencial que vincula a koinōnía y syngéneia, siendo esta última la condición de posibilidad de la primera. (shrink)

In this paper, we are interested in how a company can enhance stakeholder involvement in its information-sharing practices. We start by looking at the current information-sharing practices in a case where Europe’s second largest pulp producer Metsä-Botnia was caught in the middle of a heated debate between two countries when building a pulp mill in South America. We examine the content of the company’s press releases in terms of the degree of stakeholder involvement. On the basis of our analysis, we (...) discuss the problems and possibilities of enhancing stakeholder involvement through information sharing by introducing a discursive understanding to stakeholder dialogue. (shrink)

Dialogue theory, although it has ancient roots, was put forward in the 1970s in logic as astructure that can be useful for helping to evaluate argumentation and informal fallacies.Recently, however, it has been taken up as a broader subject of investigation in computerscience. This paper surveys both the historical and philosophical background of dialoguetheory and the latest research initiatives on dialogue theory in computer science. The main components of dialogue theory are briefly explained. Included is a classification (...) of the main types of dialogue that, it is argued, should provide the central focus for studying many important dialogue contexts in specific cases. Following these three surveys, a concluding prediction is made about the direction dialogue theory is likely to take in the next century, especially in relation to the growing field of communication studies. (shrink)

This book introduces students and practitioners to important ethical concepts through the lives of major thinkers ranging from Aristotle to Ayn Rand, John Stuart Mill to the Dalai Lama.

This paper explores an important yet overlooked aspect of Philosophy for Children : how children experience competitiveness in the Community of Philosophical Inquiry. It describes a qualitative case study conducted with 76 young people involved in CPI dialogues in formal and informal educational settings in Canada and New Zealand. Interviews and video observation revealed that participants often experienced dialogues as competitive exchanges in which ‘winning’ consisted of convincing others, while giving in to others’ opinions was associated with defeat and (...) disappointment. Participants recognised the potential dangers of competitiveness, notably the epistemic risk of excluding alternative perspectives and the social risk of damaging their relationships. Participants often successfully managed competitive dynamics by remaining engaged and open-minded. The last part of the paper discusses these findings in relation to theoretical work in P4C, notably Kennedy’s notion of the CPI as a ‘place of agon.’ Further, it argues that we should rethink the role of competitiveness in the CPI while remaining mindful of its risks, notably by considering its potential as a motivational drive and its place within a larger process of inquiry. (shrink)

As the boundaries of health care continually expand, health care ethics are continually challenged and developed. Ethics is a dynamic conversation among people who live and work together in community. As participants in discussions about health care ethics, nurses discover that individual and communities draw upon a variety of ethical concepts and traditions. This book explores three traditions: Rule Based Ethics, Virtue Ethics, and Feminist Ethics. The text presents the historical-cultural contexts from which each emerged, how each theory frames (...) primary questions of ethics, and how each approaches ethical decision making. Chapters present each ethical theory, followed by extended application of each theory to the context of nursing. A concluding chapter provides a comparative analysis of the care for the frail elderly using all three theories. (shrink)

In this article, we develop a concept of stakeholder dialogue in responsible innovation (RI) processes. The problem with most concepts of communication is that they rely on ideals of openness, alignment and harmony, even while these ideals are rarely realized in practice. Based on the work of Burke, Habermas, Deetz and Levinas, we develop a concept of stakeholder dialogue that is able to deal with fundamentally different interests and value frames of actors involved in RI processes. We distinguish (...) four main characteristics of stakeholder dialogue. Dialogical responsiveness (1) enhances self-criticism, (2) is characterized by the constitution and the destruction of the self or identity of the actors involved, (3) consists only in the actual enactment of the dialogue and (4) is primarily responsive to the grand challenges of our time. Based on our findings, we provide a novel conceptualization of the central notion of responsiveness in the RI literature. (shrink)

Almost one-third of all U.S. Americans believe that Jesus Christ will return to Earth in the next 40 years, thereby signaling the end of the world. The prevalence of this end-times theology has meant that sustainability initiatives are often met with indifference, resistance, or even hostility from a significant portion of the American population. One of the ways that the scientific community can respond to this is by making scientific discourse, particularly as related to sustainability, more palatable to end-times (...) believers. In this paper, I apply a historical–ecological framework, which emphasizes the interdisciplinary study of landscapes to understand long-term human–environment interactions, to three millennial religious groups that formed communes in nineteenth century America. The Shakers, Inspirationalists, and Mormons all blended deep beliefs in end-times theology with agricultural practices that were arguably more sustainable than those in use in the mainstream, and their ability to reconcile eschatology with sustainability provides us with potential lessons. By examining the history, doctrines, and agroecology of these nineteenth century communes, I propose communication strategies based in autonomy, institutional support, multigenerational narratives, and anthropocentricism as potential pathways for a more productive dialogue between advocates of sustainability initiatives and end-times believers in the modern United States. (shrink)

Faced by pressure to take the Oath of Supremacy, More grounded his resistance to Henry VIII in his argument that he had the consensus of the “whole corps of Christendom” on his side. In this article, I argue that More accessed that consensus through acts of the imagination. In the Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, More imaginatively evokes the community of the church through his creation of a fictional frame that encompasses multiple generations, nations, and languages and demonstrates (...) his ample vision of the church. Through his use of Psalm 91 as an organizing device for the Dialogue, More identifies the shared experience of suffering as an identifying feature of the church. Connecting himself to this community through acts of the imagination, I argue, helped More to resist Henry VIII, find comfort in his imprisonment, and prepare himself for death. (shrink)