Incongruity and Provisional Safety: Thinking Through Humor

The aim of this paper is to reconceive safety as a form of relation embedded in particular ways of speaking, listening and thinking. Moving away from safety as a relation that is achieved once and for all and afterwards remains safe avoids some of the disappointments of discourses of safety that seem to promise once a risk is taken or a gap is bridged that thereafter relations among people will be easier and calmer. This bumpier version of safety suggests that humor creates the kind of instabilities in discourse that act, perhaps ironically, as an invitation to enjoy the difficulties of communicating complex and challenging ideas. Humor, then, creates a kind of safe space, not devoid of dramatic shifts or emotional response, but organized around those shifts as experiences that are moments apart from conflict. I explore the use of humor as a form of serious play in social justice classrooms, examining the strategies of indirect teaching, contradictory lessons, and jolting pleasure that more traditional pedagogical approaches are less able to create. I see in humor a complex form of address and interaction that plays on the multiple possibilities within an utterance or concept and by reminding classroom communities of those possibilities. Humor can erupt from shared moments and disjunctive understandings and can as easily be mobilized by teachers as by students. By reopening the possibilities of concepts and relations, humor shatters simplistic readings by literally playing out what might be said and what could be tried but often manages to combine a sense of safety via shared laughter with its disruptions.     

Winning Over the Audience: Trust and Humor in Stand-Up Comedy

This article advances a novel way of understanding humor and stand-up comedy. I propose that the relationship between the comedian and her audience is understood by way of trust, where the comedian requires the trust of her audience for her humor to succeed. The comedian may hold (or fail to hold) the trust of the audience in two domains. She may be trusted as to the form of the humor, such as whether she is joking. She may also be trusted as to the content of the joke. This approach has two distinct virtues. The first is that it makes sense of partial successes. These are cases where the humor neither completely succeeds nor fails because the audience does not fully trust the comedian. The second is that it explains intuitions about ethically dubious humor and why certain classes of humor, especially those dealing in racialized and gendered identities, are more readily (but not necessarily) accepted from humorists of those identities.     

Paul and Grace in Theological Perspective: A Grateful Response

This response to the above seven articles engages with some of the significant ways in which each takes forward the theological discussion of grace. While some areas of disagreement arise, the overall sense is of a conversation that is moving beyond Paul and the Gift, using its contribution to open fresh avenues for understanding between Catholic and Protestant theologians on this deeply controversial topic, and new possibilities for conversation between biblical exegesis and theology.     

SETI & METI: An Indian Perspective

Critiques consider Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) immoral for various reasons. This article is a response to SETI-METI from an Indian perspective, both classical Hindu and Roman Catholic. The article begins with a brief account of what the space programme in India looks like today. Then this article makes two claims: (1) the existence or non-existence of extraterrestrials is not a threat to the Indian mind as the Indian worldview provides sufficient tools to accommodate extraterrestrials; plus (2) Roman Catholic moral theology should reframe its ethical thinking with an inclusive cosmic paradigm to embrace the extraterrestrials.     

Humor as an Optics: Bergson and the Ethics of Humor

Although the ethics of humor is a relatively new field, it already seems to have achieved a consensus about ethics in general. In this paper, I implicitly (1) question the view of ethics that stands behind many discussions in the ethics of humor; I do this by explicitly (2) focusing on what has been a chief preoccupation in the ethics of humor: the evaluation of humor. Does the immoral content of a joke make it more or less humorous? Specifically, I analyze whether a sexist joke is more humorous because of its sexism. Contra recent trends in the ethics of humor, I answer this question affirmatively. To this end, the paper presents a detailed and novel reading of Bergson's philosophy of humor, which I argue connects most easily and significantly to the alternate view of ethics I have in mind.     

民众自由意志观及其与决定论相容性的研究

早期心理学家们主要采用量表法对自由意志观的构成及其与责任归因、惩罚态度、控制点之间的关系进行了一系列研究。近年来,学者们开始采用另一种方法考察民众的自由意志观及其形成,以及在自由意志与决定论是否相容的问题上民众持何态度。已有研究表明,自由意志问题的相关心理过程要比预先的设想更为复杂,很可能在不同条件下发挥作用的几种心理机制分别存在。今后的研究需要针对具有不同教育程度、文化背景或社会特点的人群,采取更多样的研究方法,引入更多心理变量,进一步考察该问题的内部心理机制。     

The Indicative of Grace & The Imperative of Freedom: An Invitation to the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel

Abstract :  This essay offers a comprehensive introduction to German theologian Eberhard Jüngel's theology and philosophy of religion. It traces his intellectual development, beginning with his formation studies in New Testament with Ernst Fuchs, and ends with his controversial position in matters of church unity and ecumenism. Special attention is paid to his theological anthropology, and the potential contributions his theology could make in the North American context are assessed.     

The Dildo as a Transformative Political Tool: Feminist and Queer Perspectives

Censorship in patriarchal cultures runs deep in pushing dialogues and discussions on sexuality and sexual desires underground. The forbidden nature of these conversations is tighter around women and girls. With the inadequacy of affirmative and safe spaces to talk about sexual desire and pleasure, accessibility and availability of sex toys including dildos becomes significantly difficult, more so for women and other marginalized communities. Discussions about the dildo are further mired in debates between and among feminist and queer ideologies. In this paper, I look at how the dildo could be viewed simultaneously as a tool of oppression as well as of liberation and attempt to address the question: who does the dildo oppress and who does it liberate? I explore the multiple perspectives around the dildo within feminist thought and queer theory with special attention to points of convergence and divergence between them. While some predominant feminist perspectives understand the dildo as a symbol of the phallocentric order, there are others which view it as a tool for transformative politics. Queer theory also views the dildo as a device that can alter and shift traditional hierarchical relationships and be liberating not only for women but also for several marginalized identities including people with disabilities and people living with HIV. Unwrapping some of the ways in which the dildo is perceived, understood and experienced, I suggest that the dildo needs to be interpreted in complex and multi-layered ways.     

A Comparison of Updating and Explanation as Causes of the Incongruity Effect on Person Memory

Abstract

Information that is incongruent with a prior expectancy is remembered better than congruent information. Two explanations were investigated: (a) people attempt to explain incongruent information to understand it, and (b) people use incongruent information to update their expectancies. The common assumption in these two accounts is that the additional cognitive processing stimulated by incongruent information is responsible for the incongruity effect. In this study, U.S. students were explicitly requested to engage in one or the other of these processes. Although both processes resulted in an incongruity effect, there was a positive correlation between recall of expectancy-congruent and expectancy-incongruent items in the impression-updating condition but not in the other condition; those in the impression-updating condition showed greater expectancy change.     

Stone,Ken, Practicing Safer Texts: Food,Sex and Bible in Queer Perspective

Abstract

The past twenty years have witnessed much discussion about the place of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) people in the Church, particularly through two sets of debates: on whether and under what circumstances LGBT people should be ordained, and on whether and under what circumstances LGBT people should have their marital unions blessed. The past twenty years have also witnessed the creation of various liturgical materials responsive to the needs of LGBT people, particularly for events that are crucial to an LGBT person's life and faith but for which there were no existing rites in public worship. However, by concentrating only on the occasional and extraordinary events in a person and a community's life as "queer worship" (with its double sense of both "unusual worship" and "worship for LGBT people"), we are neglecting the myriad ways in which day-to-day ordinary worship is, and is not, queer. This article therefore examines the ways in which heteronormativity and the demand for "covering" can create tacit prohibitions around worship for LGBT Christians. Arguing for the inherent queerness of Christian worship, it suggests practical ways in which LGBT people's lives can more fully integrate into a community's liturgical life, and vice versa.     

发散性思维与幽默的认知神经机制比较——基于双加工理论的视角

在双加工理论视角下对发散性思维与幽默的认知神经机制进行了系统整理。发现二者的认知加工过程具有相似性：前期都依赖于自动化加工;而后期随着认知负荷的增加,越来越依赖控制化加工。脑机制方面：控制化加工条件下,二者的神经机制重叠部分比自动化加工条件下多,其中负责控制化加工的前额皮层是二者共同的关键脑区。未来可从两类加工协同合作的角度深入揭示发散性思维与幽默的内在机制。