Volo ut sis: Arendt and Augustine

This article focuses on Hanna Arendt's use of love in her writings. More specifically, I contend that Arendt's use of volo ut sis (I want you to be) and labeling of this type of love as Augustinian, takes what Augustine meant by "love" too far.     

Sweet Necessities: Food, Sex, and Saint Augustine

Central to Augustine's understanding of rightly ordered sexuality is his belief that the pleasure of the act should not be separated from its good (procreation). It is useful to observe that he reasons in a similar way about eating: that the pleasure of eating should not be separated from its good (nourishment). Inadequacies in his understanding of the purpose of food and eating may be instructive when we think about inadequacies in his understanding of sex. If there is more to food than he imagines, the same may be true of sex. Correcting for such inadequacies may also help correct for the (inadvertent) way in which his understanding of the purpose of sex may seem to legitimize technologies of assisted reproduction.     

"上帝之城"与"地上之城":奥古斯丁思想中的两分倾向

文章旨在探讨奥古斯丁的“两座城”学说。首先,简要地讨论了《上帝之城》的写作背景与主要结构;其次,在宗教信仰与现世生活这两个层面上分析了《上帝之城》关于“两座城”的主要观点;再次,分三个角度探讨了“两座城”学说的历史与思想背景。虽然“两座城”的学说体现了一种以两分的形式来思考问题的倾向,但它既不同于存在论的二元论和灵与肉的二元论,又避免了对复杂的现实社会作过于绝对的两分。     

Lutheran Subjectivity and Costly Neighbor Love in Secular Sweden: Confronting the Refugee Crisis through Alethurgy

This article offers a constructive Lutheran theology that challenges the hegemony of secular Sweden, particularly in light of challenges posed by the current global refugee crisis. The author uses Guillermo Hanson's creative rethinking of Lutheran subjectivity to highlight a radical embodied vision of neighbor love. Retrieving Luther's claim that Muslims and Christians worship the same God, the article concludes with proposals for alethurgic practices that wed neighbor love to acknowledgement of a common God.     

Differentiating Islamophobia: Introducing a New Scale to Measure Islamoprejudice and Secular Islam Critique

Since 2001 there has been a steadily increasing awareness of discrimination against Muslims based on their religion. Despite the widespread use of the neologism Islamophobia to refer to this phenomenon, this term has been harshly criticized for confounding prejudiced views of Muslims with a legitimate critique of Muslim practices based on secular grounds. In the current research a scale was developed to differentiate Islamoprejudice (based on the influential Islamophobia definition of the British Runnymede Trust) and Secular Critique of Islam. Across two studies, Islamoprejudice was related to explicit and implicit prejudice, right‐wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation whereas Secular Critique was unrelated to any forms of prejudice but negatively related to religiosity and authoritarianism. The two scales were mostly independent or only moderately related. Importantly, the new Islamoprejudice scale outperformed all other scales in predicting actual opposition versus support for a heatedly debated, newly built mosque. These results demonstrate the necessity to differentiate between Islamoprejudice and Secular Critique in future research on attitudes towards Islam.     

Seeing by Feeling: Virtues,Skills, and Moral Perception

Champions of virtue ethics frequently appeal to moral perception: the notion that virtuous people can “see” what to do. According to a traditional account of virtue, the cultivation of proper feeling through imitation and habituation issues in a sensitivity to reasons to act. Thus, we learn to see what to do by coming to feel the demands of courage, kindness, and the like. But virtue ethics also claims superiority over other theories that adopt a perceptual moral epistemology, such as intuitionism – which John McDowell criticizes for illicitly “borrow[ing] the epistemological credentials” of perception. In this paper, I suggest that the most promising way for virtue ethics to use perceptual metaphors innocuously is by adopting a skill model of virtue, on which the virtues are modeled on forms of practical know-how. Yet I contend that this model is double-edged for virtue ethics. The skill model belies some central ambitions and dogmas of the traditional view, especially its most idealized claims about virtue and the virtuous. While this may be a cost that its champions are unprepared to pay, I suggest that virtue ethics would do well to embrace a more realistic moral psychology and a correspondingly less sublime conception of virtue.     

Aquinas on Natural Law and the Virtues in Biblical Context Homosexuality as a Test Case

Marriagelike homosexual relationships expose a division among ethicists following Aquinas. Those emphasizing natural law may call such relationships unnatural; those emphasizing the virtues may approve of relationships fostering love and justice. Natural law, the virtues, and homosexuality all show up in Aquinas's Commentary on Romans —untranslated and hardly cited. Romans 1:18 opens a discussion of justice. Verse 20 provides Aquinas's chief warrant for natural law. Verse 26 applies virtue and law to the vice against nature. But Aquinas's account also depends on Paul as an exemplar of virtue and on Aquinas's high regard for the Bible. Aquinas deploys natural law as a mode of biblical exegesis, not an alternative to it. In the De potentia , Aquinas considers how to proceed when nature and Scripture seem to conflict. The account does not settle, but rather makes more room for, dispute.     

Justice, instruction, and the good: The case for public education in Aristotle and Plato'sLaws

This paper develops an interpretation and analysis of the arguments for public education which open Book VIII of Aristotle'sPolitics, drawing on both the wider Aristotelian corpus and on examination of continuities with Plato'sLaws. Part III: Sections VIII-XI examine the two arguments which Aristotle adduces in support of the claim that education should be provided through a public system. The first of these arguments concerns the need to unify society through education for friendship and the sharing of a common end. Several versions of his second argument are considered, and the most promising of them is elaborated in connection with an examination of the links between instruction and legislation in theLaws. This yields what is probably the most compelling argument there is for the claim that public supervision of education is anecessary condition for a just society.     

Moral Vices as Artistic Virtues: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Eugene Onegin</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Alice</Emphasis>

Moralists hold that art criticism can and should take stock of moral considerations. Though moralists disagree over the proper scope of ethical art criticism, they are unified in their acceptance of the consistency of valence thesis: when an artwork fares poorly from the moral point of view, and this fact is art critically relevant, then it is thereby worse qua artwork. In this paper, I argue that a commitment to moralism, however strong, is unattractive because it requires that we radically revise our art critical practices in contexts where revision seems ill advised. I will consider two such cases, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Balthus’ Alice. When we further reflect on our actual art critical practices in cases like these, we find that we do not have an unfailing commitment to the consistency of valence thesis. That is, some artworks are (artistically) good because they are (morally) bad.

Questions in the Making: A Review Essay on Zen and Buddhist Ethics in the Context of Buddhist and Comparative Ethics

In reviewing four works from the 1990s—monographs by Christopher Ives and Phillip Olson on Zen Buddhist ethics, Damien Keown's treatment of Indian Buddhist ethics, and an edited collection on Buddhism and human rights—this article examines recent scholarship on Zen Buddhist ethics in light of issues of Buddhist and comparative ethics. Its highlights selected themes in the notional and real encounter of Zen Buddhism with Western thought and culture as presented in the reviewed works and identifies issues and problems for further consideration, in particular, problems of comparative and cross-cultural understanding and the articulation and redefinition of Zen Buddhist tradition.     

"...As we forgive those who trespass against us...": theological reflections on sin and guilt in the hospital environment.

In general parlance the term sin has lost its existential meaning. Originally a Jewish-Christian term within a purely religious context, referring to a wrongdoing with regard to God, sin has slowly become reduced to guilt in the course of the secularization process. Guilt refers to a wrongdoing, especially with regard to fellow human beings. It also refers to errors of judgement with what can be tragic consequences. These errors can occur whenever human beings are called upon to act, including the hospital environment. A Christian hospital has to address the issue of how to deal not only with guilt-ridden misdemeanors, but also with wrongdoing unto God, which overshadows every instance of guilt-ridden human behavior. Here, as in every parish, the Church Service is the place to acknowledge sin, confess sin, and forgive sin, beyond the boundaries of the parish itself.     

A dialogical exploration of the grey zone of health and illness: medical science,anthropology, and Plato on alcohol consumption

This paper takes a phenomenological hermeneutic orientation to explicate and explore the notion of the grey zone of health and illness and seeks to develop the concept through an examination of the case of alcohol consumption. The grey zone is an interpretive area referring to the irremediable zone of ambiguity that haunts even the most apparently resolute discourse. This idea points to an ontological indeterminacy, in the face of which decisions have to be made with regard to the health of a person (e.g., an alcoholic), a system (e.g., the health system), or a society. The fundamental character of this notion will be developed in relation to the discourse on health and the limitations of different disciplinary practices. The case of alcohol consumption will be used to tease out the grey zone embedded in the different kinds of knowledge made available through the disciplinary traditions of medical science, with its emphasis on somatic well-being, and anthropology, with its focus on communal well-being. This tension or grey zone embedded in different knowledge outcomes will be shown to have a discursive parallel with the dialogue between the Athenian, the Spartan, and the Cretan in Plato’s Laws. Making use of the dialogical approach as described by Gadamer, the Athenian’s particular resolution of the tension will be explored as a case study to demonstrate the necessarily particular analysis involved in a grey zone resolution.

Victim Blaming in Young, Middle-Aged, and Older Adults: Variations on the Severity Effect

It has been long known that people blame victims for the bad things that happen to them, and that people blame victims more when the victims experience severe difficulties than when they experience minor difficulties, even if the victims were not particularly irresponsible. Little previous research has examined victim blaming in middle-age and older adults. One hundred and forty-five adults in 3 age groups (18–34, 35–59, and 60–84) read 4 scenarios (2 accidents, 1 crime, and 1 fire) imbedded in other scenarios. The scenarios were varied so that the victim is either very irresponsible or not very irresponsible, and the outcome is mild or severe. The oldest group of participants blamed the victims more than the other groups. However, in contrast to the typical severity effect, the oldest group blamed the very irresponsible victim more when the outcome was mild than they did when the outcome was severe.