Nostalgia motivates pursuit of important goals by increasing meaning in life

This research focused on existential and motivational implications of the emotion of nostalgia. Nostalgia (relative to control) increased meaning in life, which, in turn, galvanised intentions to pursue one's most important goal (Experiment 1) and to pursue one's most important, but not least important, goal (Experiment 2). The basic pattern held in two cultures (British and Danish) independently of positive affect. This is the first evidence that nostalgia has specific motivational consequences (i.e., pursuit of more, but not less, important goals) and transmits these consequences via meaning in life. Also, this is the first evidence that meaning is associated with specific motivational consequences. Discussion considers the relevance of the findings for the emotion and motivation literatures.     

Sense of community and life satisfaction: investigation in three different territorial contexts

The aim of this study was to investigate relations between sense of community, life satisfaction, self-esteem, perceived social support and satisfaction with community services in three territorial communities of different sizes. Further, the relations between sense of community and socio-demographic variables (gender, age, marital status, education, children, working in one's own community, owning one's home and group participation) were also studied. The Italian version of the Sense of Community Scale, Rosenberg's Self-esteem Scale, the Satisfaction with Life Scale, the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, a scale on Satisfaction with Community Services and a questionnaire were administered to 336 subjects; selection was made in the three communities from 20–60 year-old individuals. Results confirm that sense of community and life satisfaction are higher in the town than in the larger communities; also, sense of community relates to life satisfaction only in the town and the small city. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Negotiating religion in everyday life: A critical exploration of the relationship between religion,choices and behaviour

One of the characteristics most often associated with religion is that it is a discrete source of value that shapes people's attitudes and behaviour. In some cases, these values may be negative such as submission or violence; in other cases, religion is seen to promote positive values such as charity and social justice. In recent years, the international development community has reawakened an interest in religion, and has directly embraced the assumption that religion is foundational of people's values, seeking how best to tap into the potential positive values while mitigating against the more negative values. This paper critically explores the assumptions behind this approach. It argues that there is no straightforward relationship between belonging to a religion and the values which inform one's actions and decisions. Drawing on fieldwork research from India, the paper shows that it is impossible to disentangle religion from its interaction with the social, economic and political contexts in which it is lived. The paper concludes by deriving some implications of this for the way the international development community engages with religion.     

Wittgenstein on the grounds of religious faith: A Kantian proposal

This paper argues that there is an important continuity between Wittgenstein's early remarks on religion and his later treatment of the theme as it appears in his lectures in the 1930s and in his personal diary notes at that time. This continuity pertains to 3 features. First, the early and later Wittgenstein share a critical stance on methodological naturalism, that is, the view that the method of philosophy is relevantly similar to that of the natural sciences. Importantly, religion figures as one of Wittgenstein's examples of the limits of the factual language of natural sciences. Second, both the early and the later Wittgenstein connect religion to the problem of seeing one's life as meaningful while denying the possibility of establishing any objectively understood meaning of life. Third, both evoke the idea of different types of judgments, the conditions of which are independent of each other. Although religious faith is not grounded in factual knowledge and cannot be justified by appeal to empirical evidence or conceptual argumentation, it is not groundless either. Rather, in accordance with Kant who claims that faith may have a nontheoretical justification, Wittgenstein shows that religious faith may result from a personal experience of one's life as a meaningful whole.     

Spousal Religiosity is Positively Associated with the Partner's Meaning in Life

Past research has established that personal religiosity is positively associated with a sense of meaning in life. However, it has largely overlooked how religious others influence one's own life meaning. Given that a marital partner may be the most influential other in a person's everyday life, this study aims to examine how the religiosity of one's spouse is associated with the sense of meaning in life of the self, regardless of the religiosity of the self. Moreover, this study assesses whether this association differs by gender. Analysis of data from the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study reveals that spousal religiosity is positively associated with the partner's meaning in life, net of the partner's own religious commitment. However, these observed patterns do not vary by gender. Overall, these observations highlight the importance of social contexts in which others’ religious attributes are related to one's own meaning in life.     

Together in Need: Relational Selfhood,Vulnerability to Harm,and Enriching Attachments

Connections between one's own welfare and that of others abound if we pause to look for them, although philosophical theories of selfhood have only very recently begun to incorporate these connections. This essay draws on recent work on need to argue that one of the strongest expressions of these connections is to be found in the relational needs that they can generate. While paying heed to needs that arise from the relational nature of selfhood at large, this essay pays particular attention to what I call “transpersonal needs”: needs that occur when one's experience of the needs of others gives rise to certain needs of one's own. I argue that the best criterion for defining need is vulnerability to harm, but this does not mean that having a need is something that is purely harmful. Having certain needs can also enrich one's life. Further, while every need entails a corresponding vulnerability to harm, some of these potential harms are more detrimental to one's welfare than others, with some relational needs standing among those that can result in the greatest harm if unanswered.     

EMERGENCE FROM PHYSICS TO THEOLOGY: TOWARD A PANORAMIC VIEW

Abstract. At its best, the emergence debate provides a helpful model of what religion‐science scholarship can and should involve. (At its worst it represents the faddishness and bandwagon effects to which our field is also prone.) Those involved in the debate must pay close attention to concrete theories and results in the natural sciences. They rely on the careful conceptual distinctions that philosophers of science draw concerning complexity, novelty, and organization. The resulting views about human mentality and consciousness are tested against these results and checked for their adequacy to the phenomena of human experience. Emergentist theories of nature and personhood have entailments for one's theory of religion and for theological reflection; conversely, theological accounts may constrain one's interpretation of emergent phenomena. In my response to the four symposiasts I draw out these deeper dimensions of the emergence debate.     

The sanctity of life: The role of purity in attitudes towards abortion and euthanasia

Although abortion and euthanasia are highly contested issues at the heart of the culture war, the moral foundations underlying ideological differences on these issues are mostly unknown. Given that much of the extant debate is framed around the sanctity of life, we argued that the moral foundation of purity/sanctity—a core moral belief that emphasises adherence to the “natural order”—would mediate the negative relationship between conservatism and support for abortion and euthanasia. As hypothesised, results from a nation-wide random sample of adults in New Zealand (N = 3360) revealed that purity/sanctity mediated the relationship between conservatism and opposition to both policies. These results demonstrate that, rather than being motivated by a desire to reduce harm, conservative opposition to pro-choice and end-of-life decisions is (partly) based on the view that ending a life, even if it is one's own, violates God's natural design and, thus, stains one's spiritual purity.     

Death and the Meaning of Life

Abstract

Thoughts of mortality sometimes bring on a crisis in confidence in the meaning in one's life. One expression of this collapse is the midlife crisis. In a recent article, Kieran Setiya argues that if one can value activities as opposed to accomplishments as the primary goods in one's life then one might avoid the midlife crisis. I argue that Setiya's advice, rather than safeguarding the meaning in one's life, substitutes for it something else, a kind of happiness. I use Susan Wolf's concept of meaning in order to make this case. Wolf has not written much about the importance of death, but I argue that her account of meaning shares essential features with the theories developed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. Sartre argues that death is an unqualified harm, while Heidegger argues that there is meaning in life only because we are mortal. I conclude by showing how Heidegger's theory of mortality underwrites accounts of meaning like those found in Wolf.     

Philosophical Perfectionism – Consequences and Implications for Sport

Ethical theories in sport philosophy tend to focus on interpersonal relations. Little has been said about sport as part of the good life and as experienced from within. This article tries to remedy this by discussing a theory that is fitting for sport, especially elite sport. The idea of perfection has a long tradition in Western philosophy. Aristotle maintains that the good life consists in developing specific human faculties to their fullest. The article discusses Hurka's recent version of Aristotelian perfectionism and relates it to various aspects of, and the good life in, sport. How much time should be spent on sport in relation to other activities, how much should one concentrate on one sport to reach one's best and how should one's efforts be spent over a season? Well-roundedness and concentration are central alternatives for theories of perfection. Similarly some activities are simple whereas other are complex and thIs poses problems for persons that want to maximise their achievements. Whereas Hurka thinks one has obligations to perfect oneself, the author of this article thinks perfection is an attractive choice but no obligation.     

Does affluence impoverish the experience of parenting?

Acquiring greater financial resources before having children seems like an intuitive strategy for people to enhance their well-being during parenthood. However, research suggests that affluence may activate an agentic orientation, propelling people to pursue personal goals and independence from others, creating a conflict with the communal nature of parenting. Coherence between one's goals and actions has been theorized to be essential for the experience of meaning in life. Thus, we hypothesized that affluence would be associated with a diminished sense of meaning during childcare. In Study 1, using the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), we found that socioeconomic status (SES) was negatively related to the average sense of meaning parents reported across episodes of the day when they were taking care of their children. In Study 2, a reminder of wealth produced a parallel effect; when parents were exposed to a photograph of money, they reported a lower sense of meaning in life while spending time with their kids at a children's festival. These findings contribute to our understanding of the relationship between wealth and well-being by showing that affluence can compromise a central subjective benefit of parenting—a sense of meaning in life.     

HIERARCHIES: THE CORE ARGUMENT FOR A NATURALISTIC CHRISTIAN FAITH

This article takes on a perhaps impossible task: not only to reconstruct the core argument of Arthur Peacocke's program in science and religion but also to evaluate it in two major areas where it would seem to be vulnerable, namely, more recent developments in systems biology and the philosophy of mind. If his theory of hierarchies is to be successful, it must stand up to developments in these two areas and then be able to apply the results in a productive way to Christian theological reflection. Peacocke recognized that one's model of the mind‐body relation is crucial for one's position on the God‐world relation and divine action. Of the three models that he constructed, it turns out that only the third can serve as a viable model for theology if it is to be more than purely deistic or metaphorical.     

RELIGIOUS HYPOTHESES AND THE APOPHATIC,RELATIONAL THEOLOGY OF CATHERINE KELLER

In one of its most urgent folds, Catherine Keller's Cloud of the Impossible juxtaposes negative theology with relational theology for the sake of thinking constructively about today's global climate of religious conflict and ecological upheaval. The tension between these two theological approaches reflects her desire to unsay past harmful theological speech but also to speak into the present silences about the (perhaps im)possibility of a future that is not only to be feared. Suffusing Keller's Cloud is the related (perhaps im)possibility of living out one's life in conversation with a religious tradition having accepted the nonknowing character of its wisdom. Here, I develop the notion of “hypothetical faith” as an epistemic posture that commits itself to some particular religious tradition even as it acknowledges the unverifiability of that tradition's deepest truths. Understood as operating at the opposite end of the testability spectrum from science, religion‐as‐hypothesis provides a way of saying and unsaying one's tradition at the same time.     

Religion in Domestic Violence Prevention PSAs: The Role of Religiosity in Motivating Christian Bystanders to Intervene

Domestic violence is an ongoing health issue around the world, propelling individuals and organizations to seek out new and innovative ways to mitigate its widespread reach. Focusing on the potential of religion to positively impact messaging, the current study examines how Christian symbolism might be used to encourage intervention behavior using public service announcements (PSAs). Using a between‐subjects design of Christian Americans as the respondent pool, a religious symbol versus a control ad was utilized. Levels of religiosity were also measured and factors impacting the construct assessed. Findings revealed religiosity, the importance of religion in one's life, was the underlying motivator for highly religious people to act rather than a religious cue. Within religiosity, the perceived strength of faith to one's identity held greater value than church attendance and frequency of prayer. Theoretical implications are discussed as well as insights for people working in public service messaging.     

‘You Are What You Read:’ Is selective exposure a way people tell us who they are?

Selective exposure is the tendency to gather viewpoint-congenial versus viewpoint-uncongenial information. Extant models of selective exposure suggest this tendency occurs because people anticipate reading congenial (vs. uncongenial) information will cause more favourable intrapersonal consequences. However, these models ignore the notion that people's information choices are, in part, symbolic gestures designed to convey identity-relevant beliefs to an audience through information display. Drawing from perspectives that emphasize human consumption as symbolic and a way to signal one's identity, we suggest that selective exposure pertains not only to information processing but also to conveying identity through information display. Experiment 1 showed that people characterize information display as a way to communicate their views to an audience. Experiments 2–4 showed that people are averse to displaying uncongenial versus congenial information (without processing the information), anticipate feeling more uncomfortable and more inauthentic merely displaying (without processing) uncongenial versus congenial information, and that people's intentions to engage in selective exposure in daily life are a function of their belief that selective-exposure displays convey their identity. None of these studies or findings can be generated from extant selective-exposure theories. Thus, selective-exposure theories are likely incomplete because they ignore people's beliefs and goals regarding information display.     

Coming to Terms With Invisible Disability—Beyond Empathic Resonance: Commentary on Paper by Lauren Levine

For the clinician as for any parent, having a child with cognitive disabilities heightens one's sense of vulnerability and insufficiency. One is confronted with unbearably intractable limits, which generates doubt about one's therapeutic potential. The ability to empathize with a parent's distress is crucial, but only the starting point in treating a patient whose child is disabled. What may be most constructive is the dialectic between the analyst's relative detachment (involving compassion but also a willingness to dredge up disavowed negative feeling) and the parent's attached dismay. Lacanian and existentialist theories remind us that, whether normal or handicapped, we are all existentially in a state of lack. This perspective provides a useful touchstone for analyzing the experience of disability in one's own life and that of one's patients.

In further response to Lauren Levine's paper, it is argued that it is tricky to prove (beyond showing that a training analysis promotes maturation in the broadest sense) that a given aspect of an analyst's own personal analysis resulted in the capacity to heal a particular patient. The point can be made most persuasively when the actual analytic exchange, messy and circuitous as it may be, is offered in great detail.     

What is philosophy as a way of life? Why philosophy as a way of life?

Despite a recent surge of interest in philosophy as a way of life, it is not clear what it might mean for philosophy to guide one's life, or how a “philosophical” way of life might differ from a life guided by religion, tradition, or some other source. We argue against John Cooper that spiritual exercises figure crucially in the idea of philosophy as a way of life—not just in the ancient world but also today, at least if the idea is to be viable. In order to make the case we attempt to clarify the nature of spiritual exercises, and to explore a number of fundamental questions, such as “What role does reason have in helping us to live well?” Here we distinguish between the discerning and motivational powers of reason, and argue that both elements have limitations as guides to living well.     

Religion and Mental Health: an exploration of the relationship between the ineffable and the indefinable

This article suggests that the relationship between religion and mental health is both important and complex. It reviews some studies of the relationship and suggests that religion can be good or bad for one's mental health, depending on the content of the religious message. It also presents a model of mental health and suggests that this or some similar scheme can be employed to assess the extent to which one's religious or value system promotes mental health.     

Maladjustment implications of self and group gender–role discrepancies: An ordered-discrepancy model

Deviation from personal ideals and group standards has maladaptive consequences. Using insights from self-categorization and social identity theories, an ordered-discrepancy model of maladjustment was proposed in which simultaneously deviating from both types of standards is associated with increased maladjustment for members of high status groups, except when such dual discrepancies imply that one is closer to one's ideals than is one's group. In the latter case, decreased maladjustment can be expected. For members of low status groups, discrepancies from ideals, but not from one's group, were expected to predict maladjustment. Patterns of deviations on dimensions of masculinity and femininity predicted maladjustment among men, a high status group, and women, a low status group, as hypothesized. Implications for social identity and self-categorization theories, and for gender–role research, are discussed. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.