Jesus the Healer: A Sermon in Honor of the Memory of Donald Eric Capps (1939–2015)

The article below is a sermon preached in 2008. It was inspired by Donald Capps’s book, Jesus the Village Psychiatrist. I offer this sermon in honor of his memory as a creative contributor to the work of the Journal as well as his distinguished career as Professor of Pastoral Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Many of us have been blessed by his profound psychological and theological insights into the human psyche, his scholarly explorations of the relationship of psychology and religion, and his remarkable sense of humor. We are diminished by his absence.     

Aesthetic Interdisciplinarity in Donald Capps’ Weltanschauung

This article considers the aesthetic interdisciplinarity of the work and Weltanschauung of Donald Capps. It suggests three themes of Capps’ Weltanschauung: reframing, confusion, and empiricism. These themes converge in an image of calmness that epitomizes Capps’ aesthetic interdisciplinarity. Capps envisions a world that is heimlich (homelike), and his aesthetic therefore pursues “homemaking” in this world by virtue of enjoying a certain calmness in the process of pastoral counseling.     

Giving Counsel: Donald Capps’ Contributions to Pastoral Counseling

This article explores some of Donald Capps’ contributions to the ministry of pastoral counseling. In particular, several key attributes of pastoral counseling as a ministry of the church are identified and discussed. This is followed by identifying six features necessary for good enough pastoral counseling. A final brief section offers some musings that I wish Capps could respond to.     

Eric J. Sharpe (1933–2000)

This paper gives a general account of the developments in the Baha'i Faith over the last three decades. The period began with the Baha'i Faith as a little-known religion with a hereditary leadership of predominantly Iranian membership but with some spread to the West. At the present time the religion has been transformed into a much better-known religion led by an elected council. It has increased some 20-fold in numbers and is now world-wide in membership. The major structural changes involved as the previous hereditary leadership at the international level was converted into the leadership of an elected council are analysed. The growth and development of the religion over this period are described and some statistical information is given. The central concerns of the religion during this time are described in terms of a number of motifs: polar, legalism, millenarianism, social reformism, universalism, liberalism, and martyrdom and sacrifice. An attempt is made to analyse some of the present problems facing the Baha'i community, both in terms of the persecutions that it suffers as well as the problems presented by its successful expansion, and to describe the ways in which it copes with these.     

Der Fall Ludwig Tessnow (1872–1939)

The journeyman carpenter Ludwig Tessnow was sentenced to death for four murders by the Greifswald jury court in 1902. The death sentence was upheld during the retrial in 1906 but was later commuted to life imprisonment. According to the unanimous opinion of psychiatric experts Tessnow committed the crimes while in a state of mental incompetence caused by epileptic twilight states. The court, however, ignored this mitigating circumstance in its decision-making process. Seen from a historical perspective, the case is of forensic psychiatric interest because this criminal trial clearly shows the conflicts in competence which arose in the nineteenth century between judges and medical experts when mental competence had to be assessed. It also allows some insight into how mentally ill offenders were dealt with at the beginning of the twentieth century when the influence of public opinion was (and still is) a noteworthy element of prejudgement which was additionally consolidated by the established system of jury courts. The Tessnow case reveals by way of example the usual practice of official consignment of mentally disordered offenders to hospitals at the end of the nineteenth century until the Nazi era. New particulars of the Tessnow findings adequately verified that Tessnow had not been executed in the Greifswald prison as mistakenly believed. It could be proved that Ludwig Tessnow was admitted to the LandesheilanstaltStralsund (state mental hospital in Stralsund) where he became a victim of the Nazi euthanasia program.     

NS-Euthanasie in Österreich von 1939–1945 (Teil 2)

The end of the Third Reich in the spring of 1945 led to discontinuation of the careers of directors (some of whom were indeed able to continue their careers after 1950 at another location) of psychiatric institutions at both university hospitals and institutions (with one exception). Their successors were partly those removed as office directors in 1938–1939 or replacements from the secondary hierarchical level that had not been corrupted by Nazi party membership and were mainly long-term employees of the institutions (all of which continued to fulfill their functions), i.e., reestablishment or continuity of the time before 1938. Despite the at least temporary elimination of staff who were NSDAP members, other employees continued to work—to what extent, remains largely unexplored. Direct offenders were prosecuted, but there was no broader discussion in society or in psychiatry regarding the events that took place. As in society in general, it was about rebuilding and not about reappraisal of the events of the past.     

Languages of the Jewish communities in Polish Silesia (1922–1939)

Polish Silesia, between 1922 and 1939 was the locus for a model confrontation between three distinct cultural groups of Central European Jews: Jews assimilated to German language and culture, traditional, Yiddish speaking, Orthodox Jews, and still other Jews assimilated to cultures that competed with the originally dominant German one: in the case of Upper Silesia, Polish culture. The linguistic changes these groups experienced are indicative of cultural assimilation and change. All three groups had to respond to a significant emigration of German oriented Jews in the early 1920s, the immigration of Jews assimilated to Polish culture and Yiddish speakers coming from the former Polish Kingdom and Galicia, and an increase in Polish anti-Semitic propaganda in Upper Silesia. A fourth factor was the growing distancing between these Jews and the German state and its direct cultural influences, especially after 1933. A first, and most visible, result of these factors was a rapid rise in declarations of the use of Polish language matched by a rapid fall in declared Germanophones. Initially these declarations were politically motivated: the number declaring Polish its language exceeded by far the actual number of Polish-speakers. By the late 1930s, however, the change was real. Silesian Jews had become essentially Polish speakers, and, on occasion, they had adopted other Polish cultural forms as well. Change of language is thus an important signifier of broader cultural change. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Remembering Janet Taylor Spence (1923–2015)

Janet Taylor Spence was a history-making figure in professional psychology and in the study of gender. In the period between her birth in 1923 and her death in 2015, vast changes took place in both domains, and Janet Spence was at the center of both. This issue of Sex Roles is dedicated to her life and work, providing a perspective and an accounting of the contributions that she made to our field. The set of papers included here chronicle Janet’s career path, evaluate the impact of her work in the areas of anxiety and of gender, recount memories from her colleagues and students, and in a closing article, analyze her place in the larger historical domain of women in psychology.     

美国汉学家孟旦(Donald J.Munro)

孟旦（Donald J．Munro）：哈佛大学学士（1953）,哥伦比亚大学博士（1964）,密西根大学哲学、汉学教授,香港中文大学钱穆讲座教授、唐君毅讲座教授。求学时期,他曾师从刘毓望先生、唐君毅先生学习中国古典文献学和中国哲学。在几十年的学术生涯中,人性和人学问题一直是他关注的焦点。     

In Search of a More Reliable Truth: Mourning and Donald Capps’s Psychological Portrait of Jesus

This article is an abridged version of a chapter in my dissertation. In my dissertation, I examine the relationship between personal experience and public theory within certain strands of contemporary psychology of religion and pastoral theology. My guiding theory is Peter Homans’s “mourning religion” thesis. In this chapter, I examine the life and work of Donald Capps, who is the most prolific contemporary writer in the fields of psychology of religion and pastoral theology. I argue that Capps addressed various personal losses in a deeply personal way during his fifties, and I believe that the key moment for Capps in overcoming his melancholia occurred after his application of his melancholia theory to Jesus, because there Capps was able to integrate and to sustain in a satisfying way his various selves and, therefore, open himself up to mourn in a non-defensive way—the way of humor.