Value Inquiry: On concepts of good and evil in ethical theories

Editorial

Value Inquiry: On concepts of good and evil in ethical theories     

Pentecostal Movements,Islam and the Contest for Public Space in Northern Nigeria

The article considers the changing relationship between independent Pentecostal and charismatic groups and radical Islamic movements in Northern Nigeria between the 1970s and the early years of the twenty-first century. All these groups, be they Christian or Muslim, represent a new dimension in religious fundamentalism in contemporary Nigeria. In spite of being internal revivalist groups within their respective religious traditions, they reflect negative attitudes toward each other. Their relationship has been marked by continuous competition for public space. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the demonization of Islamic groups was a feature of Pentecostal discourse. Through their involvement in political activities under the umbrella of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), evangelicals and Pentecostals developed a common front in the face of Muslim fundamentalism.     

Christians and Muslims in Southeast Asia: Attitudes Inherited,Transmitted, Consolidated and Challenged

ABSTRACT

Christians and Muslims have been interacting to varying degrees in Southeast Asia since the fifteenth century. The formative phase of the relationship between the two drew to some extent on attitudes inherited from other regions and other eras. Because of this, narratives of suspicion and hostility have been evident from the earliest interactions up to the present. However, towards the end of the European colonial era, more open and tolerant attitudes were expressed in various literary records, providing the foundations for greater mutual acceptance in the twentieth century.     

Geographical contributions to understanding contemporary Islam: current trends and future directions

In recent years, geographers have been giving increasing attention to religion—and Islam in particular—yet such work is rarely referred to within the broader social science literature about Islam and Muslims. This paper seeks to promote interdisciplinary dialogue, discussion and debate by highlighting the contributions that human geographers are making to understandings of contemporary Islam. In particular, I draw upon research within urban, social, cultural and feminist geographies to review current trends within geographical scholarship about Muslims individuals and communities. I then use this paper to suggest ways in which interdisciplinary research—in collaboration with human geographers—might seek to advance contemporary understandings of the social and spatial experiences of Muslim families and communities. I propose that a focus upon households, nations and intersections offer potential avenues for future research, whilst also highlighting the importance of thinking critically about the methodological issues involved in understanding contemporary Islam     

The problem of good and evil in the development of the child

Abstract

Carl Jung's decision to undertake a thorough study of Western alchemy was inspired by his reading of The Secret of the Golden Flower, a ninth-century Chinese Taoist text describing the process of meditation in alchemical terms. When he first read this book in 1928 and wrote a commentary for it, he completely ignored its alchemical aspects. He simply tried to make the text comprehensible to Western readers by explaining its basic psychological concepts and assumptions.

In the foreword to the second German edition of The Secret of the Golden Flower. June acknowledged this oversieht¹     

Facing good and evil: early brain signatures of affective biographical knowledge in face recognition

Extracting meaning from faces to understand other people's mental states and intentions, and to quickly adjust our actions accordingly, is a vital aspect of our social interactions. However, not all emotionally relevant attributes of a person are directly observable from facial features or expressions. In this study event-related brain potentials were used to investigate the effects of affective information about a person's biography that cannot be derived from the visual appearance of the face. Faces of well-known and initially unfamiliar persons with neutral expressions were associated with negative, positive or neutral biographical information. For well-known faces, early event-related brain potential (ERP) modulations induced by emotional knowledge, their scalp topographies and time course strongly resemble the effects frequently reported for emotional facial expressions even though here, access to stored semantic knowledge is required. These results demonstrate that visually opaque affective knowledge is extracted at high speed and modulates sensory processing in the visual cortex.