Address of the Federal President to the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Karlsruhe, 2022

This is the text of the address of Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier at the opening of the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches on 31 August 2022, in Karlsruhe.     

Witnessing Together to Christ's Compassionate Love

This is the text of the address on 31 August 2022 of the moderator of the central committee of the World Council of Churches (WCC) to the WCC's 11th Assembly, which took place in Karlsruhe, Germany, from 31 August to 8 September 2022.     

Youth Testimony at the Opening Prayer of the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches

This is the text of the youth testimony at the opening prayer of the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches on 31 August 2022.     

Greeting of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches

This is the text of the greetings of His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches, meeting in Karlsruhe, Germany, from 31 August to 8 September 2022.     

Christ's Love Moves the World to Reconciliation and Unity

This is the text of a Unity Statement approved on 8 September 2022 by the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches, which met in Karlsruhe, Germany, from 31 August to 8 September 2022. Successive WCC assemblies have offered a statement to inspire the churches to reflect on why they have chosen to journey together and the significance of the call to unity.     

Homily at the Opening Prayer of the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches

This is the text of the homily at the opening prayer of the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches on 31 August 2022. The homily was based on Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, a narrative in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John. Despite wide gaps of religious belief, gender, culture, and lifestyle, Jesus took the woman seriously and spoke to her on a personal level.     

A Call to Act Together

This is the text of the message issued by the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches, meeting in Karlsruhe, Germany, from 31 August to 8 September 2022. In their message, delegates stated that all are called by Christ's love to repentance, reconciliation, and justice in the face of war, inequality, and sins against creation.     

Message of Pope Francis to the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches

This is the text of the message of greetings of His Holiness Pope Francis to the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches, meeting in Karlsruhe, Germany, from 21 August to 8 September 2022.     

Message from the Just Community of Women and Men Pre-Assembly Meeting

This is the message of the meeting on the Just Community of Women and Men held prior to the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches, which met in Karlsruhe, Germany, in August–September 2022. The pre-assembly noted the continuing and even exacerbated tragedy of gender-based violence and abuse in multiple forms, in all regions, and within and outside churches. The report acknowledges that sociocultural realities that impose themselves on religious lives distort God's vision of life in fullness, abundance, and love. In this context, patriarchy hurts and exploits women, men, and people of all genders.     

Message from the Ecumenical Youth Gathering

This is the message of the Ecumenical Youth Gathering held in advance of the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches, which met in Karlsruhe, Germany, in August–September 2022. In their message, the youth voiced a series of laments, and recognized and prayed for justice, forgiveness, and reconciliation of the wounds the church has inflicted and continues to inflict in the world, and they called on the WCC to provide a meaningful space for an equal representation of young people in all its processes.     

Message from the Indigenous Peoples Pre-Assembly Meeting

This is the message from the meeting of Indigenous Peoples held before the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches, which met in Karlsruhe, Germany, in August–September 2022. The Indigenous Peoples Pre-Assembly Meeting gathered participants from 40 different Indigenous nations who called on the WCC and its member churches to support them in their journeys to recover their God-given identities, stating in the message that “the road to reconciliation leads through restoration of justice, because without justice, we cannot stand as equals.”     

Message from the Ecumenical Disability Advocates Network Pre-Assembly Meeting

This is the message of the meeting of the Ecumenical Disability Advocates Network held before the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Karlsruhe, Germany, August–September 2022. The network recognized the God-given gifts of people with disabilities and the importance of making available those gifts for the body of Christ to function fully. It called on churches to continue to develop and encourage more people with disabilities to be involved in church leadership at local and denominational levels, and for wider representation in WCC assemblies and activities, especially for non-speaking people: people who communicate through alternative and augmentative devices and people who are neurodivergent, have learning disabilities, or have invisible disabilities.     

“And Yet It Moves”: Dream and Reality of the Ecumenical Movement

This article offers an overview of the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches, which met in Karlsruhe, Germany, in August–September 2022. It sets out the context in which the assembly took place, the main issues discussed, and perspectives for the future. The article argues that the assembly in Karlsruhe demonstrated that the ecumenical movement still is alive and can offer enormous potential in a world at the brink of a new East–West divide, facing a significant weakening of multilateral structures of cooperation, and even the threat of nuclear war. Moreover, the Karlsruhe assembly demonstrated that on subjects such as the Middle East, peace ethics, and nationalism, and in the deep commitment and spiritual life of its participants, the ecumenical movement is vital and vibrant and represents a countercultural force against rigid nationalisms.     

Chaplaincy,Cancer, Aged Care and COVID-19

Journal of Religion and Health - Four key topics are explored in this second issue of the Journal of Religion and Health for 2022. Following a condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, (1)...     

China,Gender Issues,Medical Philosophy and Measurement Scales

Journal of Religion and Health - In this fourth issue of the Journal of Religion and Health for 2022, four key themes are explored: (1) religious and spiritual issues in China, (2) gender-related...     

The decision to return to college: Role concepts,personality, attitudes,and significant others

In two studies, personality, role concepts, and attitudes distinguished wives and mothers who decided to resume college from those who did not. College women and women about to resume college had more self-actualizing, achievement-oriented, and dominant personalities (California Psychological Inventory); broader, more personalized role concepts; more liberal attitudes; better educated husbands; and fewer children than housewives. Measurements before college return and during the second year at college indicated that college exposure did not significantly affect these variables. The single exception was that after college exposure, women no longer saw society as supporting their efforts to actualize their potentials.A version of this paper was presented at the 83rd Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Chicago, August 31, 1975.     

Phenotypic plasticity and archetype: a response to common objections to the biological theory of archetype and instinct

Since Jung’s death in 1961, scholars have attempted to integrate growing biological science data into Jungian concepts such as the collective unconscious, instincts and the archetypes. This enterprise has been challenging due to persistent false dichotomies of gene and environment occasionally arising. Recent works by Roesler (2022a, 2022b) for example, have raised objections to the biological theory of archetypes, but the objections are plagued by such dichotomies. The concept of phenotypic plasticity, however, helps to both avoid this problem as well as bridge the gap between competing theories into a more integrated model with solid biological foundations.     

Science, Values and the Human Dimensions

The presented paper substantiates the principle that values are an immanent component of science and any rational cognitive activity. This principle belongs to the European cultural tradition starting from the book of Genesis of the Old Testament, the values of certainty in the antique Greek philosophy and Francis Bacon's coincidence of knowledge and power. Values in science form complicated structures inconnection with different types of knowledge including “the knowledge that”, empirical evidence, various types of generalizations or rules, methods, directions, algorithms, “the knowledge how”, “the knowledge why” or other types of knowledge. Since the assignments of different types of values are the products of a decision-making, it is useful to distinguish many types of decision-making, especially semantic decision-making, information decision-making and decision-making with distinctly pragmatic dimensions. The values assignable to scientific activities and their results also include their social recognition, respect and prestige granted to knowledge and bearers of knowledge by society and social groups or communities. Knowledge generation and the rational and justified application of the achieved and acceptable impacts are also connected with decision-making procedures, values and criteria of social acceptance. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Visual pattern matching: Effects of size ratio, complexity, and similarity in simultaneous and successive matching

An experiment on mental transformation of size, in pairwise comparison of simultaneously or successively presented figures with respect to shape, is reported. Regardless of type of presentation (simultaneous vs. successive), figural complexity, and similarity within pairs of different-shaped figures, median latencies of both same and different responses were approximately linearly increasing functions of the linear size ratio between the patterns to be compared. The slopes of the functions showed significant effects of figural complexity and similarity for simultaneous but not for successive matching. The results suggest that successive matching was done by encoding a subpattern of the first stimulus in a pair as a mental image, transforming the image to the size format of the other stimulus, and then testing for a match; in simultaneous matching the process of encoding, transformation, and comparison appeared to be executed several times for each pair of figures. The interpretation was illustrated by a random walk model, which provided a good fit to the results. Received: 31 March 1998 / Accepted: 22 August 1998