Jesus the Healer: A Sermon in Honor of the Memory of Donald Eric Capps (1939–2015)

The article below is a sermon preached in 2008. It was inspired by Donald Capps’s book, Jesus the Village Psychiatrist. I offer this sermon in honor of his memory as a creative contributor to the work of the Journal as well as his distinguished career as Professor of Pastoral Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Many of us have been blessed by his profound psychological and theological insights into the human psyche, his scholarly explorations of the relationship of psychology and religion, and his remarkable sense of humor. We are diminished by his absence.     

A wise and generous soul: Tribute to Dr. June Singer (1919–2004)

Using personal anecdotes and examples from the arts, the author explores attitudes that inform experiences around death. These reflections are linked to Jung's ideas about the relativization of the ego in the second half of life as well as the increasing importance of holding the opposites. The willingness to engage with life and the ability to maintain a sense of purpose exist alongside the certainty and mystery of death and the inclination to resist consciousness of death's inevitability. Paradoxically, the psyche both prepares for death and is unconcerned.     

From “The Depleted Self” to “The Will to Believe”: Excavating the Hermeneutics of Donald Capps

The concept of “reframing” lies at the heart of the pastoral psychology of Donald Capps. In previous articles I have argued that the process of reframing follows a circular hermeneutics. An excavation of Capps’ hermeneutics reveals foundations in the fields of philosophy and psychology. This article focuses on the legacy of Johann Gottfried von Herder, Friedrich Schleiermacher, William James and Paul Ricoeur. It explores the differences and commonalities between William James and Friedrich Schleiermacher’s understanding of religious experience as well as Paul Ricoeur’s understanding of narrativity and traces these strains to Capps’ pastoral psychology. As illustration of his pastoral approach to healing and wholeness the problem of “the depleted self,” so prevalent in “our narcissistic age,” encounters the healing narrative of Jesus that appeals to “the will to believe.”     

Tribute to Don S. Browning (1934–2010)

This tribute adapts words originally written to honor Don S. Browning, one of the foremost pastoral and practical theologians and ethicists of his time, on the occasion of his death on June 3, 2010. The tribute appeared in the funeral worship bulletin on June 10, 2010 at Hyde Park Union Church in Chicago and was revised for a newsletter of a major educational institution with which he had many significant relationships and responsibilities (The Disciples Divinity House of the University of Chicago Bulletin 80, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2010); used with permission). Although we embellished the tribute slightly, we did not change its main intent: It captures the remarkable depth and breath of Browning’s scholarly achievement, the mark he made on public and academic discussion, and the extent to which he is missed by his colleagues, friends, and family.     

Languages of the Jewish communities in Polish Silesia (1922–1939)

Polish Silesia, between 1922 and 1939 was the locus for a model confrontation between three distinct cultural groups of Central European Jews: Jews assimilated to German language and culture, traditional, Yiddish speaking, Orthodox Jews, and still other Jews assimilated to cultures that competed with the originally dominant German one: in the case of Upper Silesia, Polish culture. The linguistic changes these groups experienced are indicative of cultural assimilation and change. All three groups had to respond to a significant emigration of German oriented Jews in the early 1920s, the immigration of Jews assimilated to Polish culture and Yiddish speakers coming from the former Polish Kingdom and Galicia, and an increase in Polish anti-Semitic propaganda in Upper Silesia. A fourth factor was the growing distancing between these Jews and the German state and its direct cultural influences, especially after 1933. A first, and most visible, result of these factors was a rapid rise in declarations of the use of Polish language matched by a rapid fall in declared Germanophones. Initially these declarations were politically motivated: the number declaring Polish its language exceeded by far the actual number of Polish-speakers. By the late 1930s, however, the change was real. Silesian Jews had become essentially Polish speakers, and, on occasion, they had adopted other Polish cultural forms as well. Change of language is thus an important signifier of broader cultural change. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

At the root of the left–right asymmetries in spatial–numerical processing: From domestic chicks to human subjects

In this review, we discuss evidence showing that birds (Gallus gallus and Nucifraga columbiana) represent numerical magnitudes as being oriented from left to right. Subjects, trained to identify a target element (i.e. the 4th) in a series of sagittally oriented identical elements, when required to generalise on an identical series oriented spatially from left to right, correctly identified the target element “counting” from the left of the array. Moreover, chicks, when presented with sets of 5 vs. 10 or 6 vs. 9 imprinting objects, which were made to disappear one at a time behind one of two identical screens, spontaneously inspected the screen which occluded the larger set. Interestingly, chicks scored a higher percentage of correct choices when the larger of the two sets was on their right side. Similarities with the phenomenon of the spatially oriented (left to right) number line in humans are discussed. Animal models promise a fresh approach to the understanding of developmental mechanisms underlying the expression of knowledge, offering attractive arguments for doubting the uniqueness of human numerical cognition.     

Late Stylin’ in an Ill-Fitting Suit: Donald Capps’ Artistic Approach to the Hopeful Self and its Implications for Unacknowledged African American Young Men

Donald Capps stands among a number of pastoral theologians and psychologists of religion who in recent decades have examined the nature of Christian hope. His sustained research on this topic over the entire decade of the 1990s has made his a primary pastoral theological voice on the subject. This article examines how Capps, without declaring a formal method, uses an “artistic approach” to construct a Christian perspective of the hopeful self. Consideration is given to how this understanding of the hopeful self relates to African American young men who feel muted and invisible.     

At Port and at Sea: Early Muslim Presence along the Australian Coastline, 1880–1939

ABSTRACT

This article surveys contact between Muslims and Anglo-Australian settlers from 1880 to 1939 as observed and reported in English-language press by anonymous writers unfamiliar with Islam. The approach is text-based and discursive, and uses previously unresearched archival material to illustrate how Muslims were engaged with and ‘othered’ on the basis of both their races and religion. Content is organized according to state geography – Northern Territory, South Australia, Queensland, New South Wales and Western Australia – rather than chronologically, to better distinguish between Muslim experiences in distinct coastal colonies. Muslim communities clustered around major Australian ports. Ports are boundaries between regions, separated by seas and straits. Their intermediate nature facilitates encounters between persons and groups that are unfamiliar with one another and foreign to each other, who would otherwise not have ongoing contact. Australia may be geographically remote but it is nevertheless a significant theatre for historical encounters between Christians and Muslims.     

NS-Euthanasie in Österreich von 1939–1945 (Teil 2)

The end of the Third Reich in the spring of 1945 led to discontinuation of the careers of directors (some of whom were indeed able to continue their careers after 1950 at another location) of psychiatric institutions at both university hospitals and institutions (with one exception). Their successors were partly those removed as office directors in 1938–1939 or replacements from the secondary hierarchical level that had not been corrupted by Nazi party membership and were mainly long-term employees of the institutions (all of which continued to fulfill their functions), i.e., reestablishment or continuity of the time before 1938. Despite the at least temporary elimination of staff who were NSDAP members, other employees continued to work—to what extent, remains largely unexplored. Direct offenders were prosecuted, but there was no broader discussion in society or in psychiatry regarding the events that took place. As in society in general, it was about rebuilding and not about reappraisal of the events of the past.