A Setback to the Dialogue: Response to Huston Smith

Huston Smith's book, Why Religion Matters , offers an eloquent evocation of mystical sensibility. Unfortunately, along the way, he offers a strongly negative and often inaccurate account of the scientific worldview, the claim being that the science is laying siege to the spiritual.     

Response to Brian K. Smith: Re-envisioning Hinduism

Actually the revolution is much closer than we think. The last band of free thinkers (Feuerbach and all related to him) has attacked or tackled the matter far more clearly than formerly, for if you look more closely, you will see that they actually have taken upon themselves the task of defending Christianity against contemporary Christians. The point is that established Christendom is demoralized, in the profoundest sense all respect for Christianity's existential commitments has been lost … Now Feuerbach is saying: No, wait a minute—if you are going to be allowed to go on living as you are living, then you also have to admit that you are not Christians … it is wrong of established Christendom to say that Feuerbach is attacking Christianity; it is not true, he is attacking the Christians by demonstrating that their lives do not correspond to the teachings of Christianity … What Christianity needs for certain is traitors … (JP 6523)     

The Matter of Religion and Science: Response to Huston Smith

Huston Smith's Why Religion Matters is the culminating reflections of one of the most respected religion scholars of our day. In this work, Smith sees modern society to be in the midst of a spiritual crisis. According to Smith, this crisis has been brought about by the advance of science and the inroads into what Smith calls the traditional worldview. While Smith's work is of some importance, I believe that several of its fundamental claims are mistaken. Smith often does not accurately portray the content of science and frequently conflates the actual practice of science with philosophical scientism. Smith wrongly blames science alone for the decline of religion among Western elites. His claim that all religions can be equivocally described in terms of the traditional worldview is also problematic. Despite this, Smith does have a clear conception of what the issues are in the relation between science and religion. It is my hope that these issues will continue to be taken seriously.     

CACREP Accreditation,Ethics, and the Affirmation of Both Religious and Sexual Identities: A Response to Smith and Okech

In response to Smith and Okech ( 2016 ), the authors reason that protections for sexual minorities can thrive with protections for religious liberties. The authors (a) acknowledge that the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs' accreditation process is designed to ensure that counseling programs of religious or secular institutions meet established standards to prepare counselors to work with all client groups, (b) describe the Ethical Acculturation Model (Handelsman, Gottlieb, & Knapp, 2005 ), and (c) provide an example of a theological perspective for educators to help students integrate their professional and religious identities.     

Hearing Metaphor: An Approach to Working with Family-Generated Metaphor

This article presents a step-by-step approach to working with family-generated metaphor in family therapy. Although the use of therapist-generated “therapeutic metaphors” has been widely advocated and practiced for many years now, less attention has been paid to the metaphors used by family members. We argue that the family's metaphors are a neglected linguistic resource in family therapy. Highlighting and validating these metaphors produces a therapeutic conversation in which the voices of family members are heard more clearly by the therapist, and the families' own imaginative energies are engaged in defining and pursuing the goals of therapy. Several case examples illustrate the use of this approach with children of various ages.     

Gregory Bateson: A Final Metaphor

It is no secret that Gregory Bateson was often disturbed by interpretations and translations of his ideas by pragmatically oriented therapists. In his later years Bateson and I occasionally discussed the strategy of connecting ecosystemic epistemology to clinical contexts. One of his last letters to me proposes the form of how he thought the "battle," as he called it, should be carried out. A part of this letter is shared with the reader as one of Gregory's final metaphors.     

Metaphor comprehension: A computational theory

Metaphor comprehension involves an interaction between the meaning of the topic and the vehicle terms of the metaphor. Meaning is represented by vectors in a high-dimensional semantic space. Predication modifies the topic vector by merging it with selected features of the vehicle vector. The resulting metaphor vector can be evaluated by comparing it with known landmarks in the semantic space. Thus, metaphorical predication is treated in the present model in exactly the same way as literal predication. Some experimental results concerning metaphor comprehension are simulated within this framework, such as the nonreversibility of metaphors, priming of metaphors with literal statements, and priming of literal statements with metaphors.     

Metaphor: Bridging embodiment to abstraction

Embodied cognition accounts posit that concepts are grounded in our sensory and motor systems. An important challenge for these accounts is explaining how abstract concepts, which do not directly call upon sensory or motor information, can be informed by experience. We propose that metaphor is one important vehicle guiding the development and use of abstract concepts. Metaphors allow us to draw on concrete, familiar domains to acquire and reason about abstract concepts. Additionally, repeated metaphoric use drawing on particular aspects of concrete experience can result in the development of new abstract representations. These abstractions, which are derived from embodied experience but lack much of the sensorimotor information associated with it, can then be flexibly applied to understand new situations.     

Extending Kindness: A Confucian Account

The Confucian philosopher Mengzi believes that ‘extending’ one's kindness facilitates one's moral development and that it is intimately tied to performing morally good actions. Most interpreters have taken Mengzian kindness to be an emotional state, with the extension of kindness to centrally involve feeling kindness towards more people or in a greater number of situations. I argue that kindness cannot do all the theoretical work that Mengzi wants it to do if it is interpreted as an emotion. I submit that Mengzi's notion of extending kindness is best understood as the exercise of a capacity for intelligently performing kind actions.     

Spiritual Empowerment: A Metaphor for Counseling

The metaphor of counseling as spiritual empowerment is presented, followed by an explanation of spiritual empowerment as a metaphor and spiritual empowerment as a theoretical framework for counselors. In the use of this metaphor, counselors initiate a spiritual experience with clients, and clients often experience a spiritual awakening in which they discover or rediscover their own spiritual power. Five conclusions are identified.