Rethinking Diakonia and Transforming Our World

This article analyzes how ecumenical diakonia contributes to a critical view of the power dimension of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). At the same time, it presents both the opportunities and the challenges the SDGs provide in rethinking diakonia and diaconal praxis. The commitment of the global community to the SDGs signifies a new context for diaconal praxis at local and international levels. In this article, power relations and the priority of the marginalized are presented as key concerns for rethinking diakonia in the current context. A model for diaconal reflection, based on perspectives from development studies and theology, is suggested as a tool for an interdisciplinary rethinking of diakonia aiming at renewed praxis in the context of the SDGs.     

In the Beginning Was the Deed

Winch's readings of Wittgenstein and Weil call for a significant rethinking of the relation between “metaphysics” and “ethics.” But there are confusions, perhaps to be found in all three of these writers, that we may slip into here. These are linked with the tendency to see idealist tendencies in Wittgenstein, and with his remark that giving grounds comes to an end, not in a kind of seeing on our part, but in our acting. The sense that we think we see in this suggestion is dependent on a distorted conception of “justification.” Getting clear about this involves coming to appreciate just how much of our nature as ethical beings is engaged when we do philosophy.     

Intercultural Therapy with Latino Immigrants and White Partners

SUMMARY

Interethnic and interracial marriages of Latinos and White Americans are on the rise and will continue to reshape the identities of individuals, couples, families, and communities. Clinicians working with these intercultural couples find no systematic training to address what is becoming a significant segment of our society. Couple therapists, however, cannot be culturally competent and effective based solely on knowledge of some dimensions of a couple's cultural backgrounds. Using clinical and theoretical ideas, the author defines clinical work with these couples as an explicit intercultural exchange. Our task as clinicians requires a rethinking of our conversations with these couples. It involves a caring therapeutic approach that is sustained on relational and systemic levels, and intercultural conversational skills inspired by clinical and other literatures that are explicitly dedicated to work with cultural difference and the “other.”     

Proleptic Sexual Love: God's Promiscuity Reflected in Christian Polyamory

Abstract

Goss acknowledges the value of pair-bonded relationships to the Christian community but wants to explore the ethical and theological space for envisioning Christians whose erotic lives fall outside monogamous relationships. He takes seriously Elizabeth Stuart's suggestion that the restoration of an eschatological paradigm for rethinking queer sexual relationships. Goss claims that Christ becomes the paradigm for multi-partnered relationships in spiritual encounters within religious communities and perhaps a means for rethinking non-monogamous relationships.     

Sexual Intimacy-Towards Equal Relationships Between Men and Women (with Treatment Assistance of a Computer Program)

SUMMARY

By rethinking sexual basic concepts we liberate sexology from mere biological and technical models. The sexual focus combined with the Object Relation Theory creates a promising therapeutic perspective for couples. Special attention will be given to male processes. Some vignettes of the computer program Sexpertise illustrate this article.     

RETHINKING THE IMAGE OF GOD

Abstract The present ecological crisis imposes a rethinking of the relation between the human being and the rest of nature. Traditional theological articulations of this relation have proven problematic where they foster separatism and anthropocentrism, which give a false report on the relation and have a negative impact on thinking and acting in relation to nature. One place to begin rethinking is through an exploration of the affirmation that the human being is “made in the image of God,”imago dei. Some ways of construing the theological meaning of this designation are more helpful than others. Science has recognized the extent to which the human being is not only dependent upon but even emergent from nature. We are made of the same “stuff” that makes up the rest of the universe. We are nature. The place of the human being is much more modest, recent, and precarious than usually acknowledged in theological reflection. New ways of interpreting our role within nature must evolve out of this new understanding. Philip Hefner has proposed that we think of the human being as created co‐creator. His is a distinctive and promising contribution. This essay responds with both affirmations and friendly questions.     

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.     

Effort and negative affect interact to predict cardiovascular responses to stress

Objective: Although traditional models posit that negative emotional responses to stress increase cardiovascular reactivity (CVR), laboratory studies have generally not found a strong emotion–CVR association. In this paper, we took a multidimensional approach to examining psychological reactions to stress in three studies.

Methods: In each study we assessed the amount of effort exerted by a participant and the negative affect (NA) felt by the participant with different self-reported measures and an effort behavioural measure.

Results: Our findings consistently demonstrated that NA was associated with CVR when effort was relatively high, but not when effort was relatively low.

Conclusion: This suggests that the weak NA–CVR correlations reported in past research may have been confounded by a third effort-related variable and that CVR is significantly associated with NA under certain circumstances. Furthermore, our findings suggest that by considering the multidimensional nature of psychological responses to stress, we may come to better understand the links between stress-related emotion and physiology.     

Evaluating complex interventions: Perspectives and issues for health behaviour change interventions

Objective: Health behaviour change interventions (HBCIs), used in health education, health promotion, patient education and psychotherapy areas, are considered complex interventions. The objective of this article is to discuss the value and limitations of using randomised clinical trials (RCTs) to asses HBCIs.

Methods: A scoping review of the literature was conducted to identify the main challenges of using RCTs for evaluating HBCIs. The issues were illustrated by case studies selected from research conducted by our multidisciplinary team.

Results: In complex interventions, effects are produced not only by the intervention, but are strongly linked to context. Issues relating to transferability of results are therefore critical, and require adjustments to the RCT model. Sampling bias, biases related to the experimental conditions and biases due to the absence of double-blindness were examined and illustrated by case studies.

Conclusion: The results underline the importance of a multidisciplinary approach. They call for adapted or alternative evaluation models that overcome the limitations of RCTs.     

Where To From Here for the Psychology of Social Change? Future Directions for Theory and Practice

For a vibrant and viable psychology of social change it is necessary to examine its place and contribution to the societal processes it seeks to understand, explain, and (potentially) affect. In this article, we first consider the impact that research and theorizing on social change (should) have and related issues of how we communicate about our work (and to whom) and dilemmas around researchers being active participants in the change process. Second, we consider emerging trends in the field and comment on meta‐theoretical and “meta‐methodological” issues in going forward, including the interaction between individual and society, having theoretical models of the person that allow us to account for such an interaction, as well as rethinking our methodology and ways of “doing” psychology to better reflect people's experiences of mobilization and participation. In line with the proposed rethinking of our theories and methods, the final section introduces a new paradigm for investigating the nexus of social change and leadership dynamics. The overall aim of the article is to reflect on key questions and dilemmas facing the field and provide some starting points for debating and shaping its future.     

Keep your eyes open: dispositional vigilance moderates the relationship between operational police stress and stress symptoms

Background: Vigilant coping is characterized by a deep processing of threat-related information. In many cases, vigilant coping increases stress symptoms, whereas avoidant coping decreases negative affect. However, vigilance may be beneficial when stress-eliciting situations involve a risk of injury or escalation as is usually the case in police operations. Design: We investigated the roles of vigilance and cognitive avoidance in police operations in a cross-sectional survey. Methods: The participants were 137 students (104?men, M_age?=?28.54, SD?=?8.04) from the Federal University of Applied Administrative Sciences; 76 of them were already police officers (work experience: M?=?12.59?years), and 61 were police officer candidates who had completed a 3- to 6-month police internship. Participants completed a paper-and-pencil survey and reported their operational stress, dispositional vigilance and cognitive avoidance in police operations, and stress symptoms. Results: We found that vigilance was negatively associated with stress symptoms and moderated the relationship between operational stress and stress symptoms. Cognitive avoidance, on the other hand, just missed the level of statistical significance in our test of whether it was positively associated with stress symptoms. Conclusions: Our findings demonstrate that vigilance may protect against the negative consequences of stress in police operations.     

Perception,Judgment and Individuation: Towards a Metaphysics of Particularity

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to develop a new theory of particularity. In so doing it redefines the concepts ‘perception’ and ‘judgment’. The redefinition occurs once perception is understood as recognition. The move to recognition entails the centrality of repetition. Recognition, it is argued, is a form of repetition. Allowing for repetition necessitates changing the way the relationship between universals and particulars is understood. This is developed via an engagement with Hume and Plato. The article concludes with the outline for a rethinking of the metaphysics of particularity.     

What Does Heidegger Mean by the Transcendence of Dasein?

Abstract

In this paper, I shall examine the evolution of Heidegger’s concept of ‘transcendence’ as it appears in Being and Time (1927), ‘On the Essence of Ground’ (1928) and related texts from the late 1920s in relation to his rethinking of subjectivity and intentionality. Heidegger defines Being as ‘transcendence’ in Being and Time and reinterprets intentionality in terms of the transcendence of Dasein. In the critical epistemological tradition of philosophy stemming from Kant, as in Husserl, transcendence and immanence are key notions (see Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 1907, and Ideas I, 1913). Indeed, ‘transcendence in immanence’ is a leitmotif of Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl discusses transcendence in some detail in Cartesian Meditations §11 in a manner that is not dissimilar to Heidegger. Heidegger is critical of Husserl’s understanding of consciousness and intentionality and Heidegger deliberately chooses to discuss transcendence as an exceptional domain for the discussion of beings in his ‘On the Essence of Ground’, his submission to Husserl’s seventieth-birthday Festschrift. Despite his championing of a new concept of transcendence in the late 1920s, Heidegger effectively abandons the term during the early 1930s. In this paper, I shall explore Heidegger’s articulation of his new ontological conception of finite transcendence and compare it with Husserl’s conception of the transcendence of the ego in order to get clearer what is at stake in Heidegger’s conceptions of subjectivity, Dasein and transcendence.     

Modern Moral Conscience

ABSTRACT

The article challenges the individualism and neutrality of modern moral conscience. It looks to the history of the concept to excavate an older tradition that takes conscience to be social and morally responsive, while arguing that dominant contemporary justifications of conscience in terms of integrity are inadequate without reintroducing these social and moral traits. This prompts a rethinking of the nature and value of conscience: first, by demonstrating that a morally-responsive conscience is neither a contradiction in terms nor a political absurdity; second, by suggesting how a morally-responsive conscience can be informed by the social world without being a mere proxy for social power or moribund tradition.     

Diasporic sublime: Sikh martyrs,Internet mediations,and the question of the unimaginable

How are the Internet and the World Wide Web productive of new forms of cultural life? I analyse how the confluence of martyrdom, terror, and computer-mediated-communications has contributed to the emergence of a Sikh diasporic cultural politics. I argue that the centrality and force of both the Internet and the figure of the martyr for many Khalistanis prompt a rethinking of the privilege scholars often accord to the “imagination” and “experience” in explaining the creation of diasporic communities. In outlining what I call the diasporic sublime, I mine the works of Walter Benjamin and Immanuel Kant to develop a more precise way for talking about community formation in terms of the inexperiencable and the unimaginable.     

Beyond Deep Incarnation: Rethinking Christology in Radical Lutheran Terms

This article takes the demise of Christendom and what Diana Butler Bass calls the end of religion as its point of departure for a “radical” rethinking of God in fully kenotic terms. It rejects any vestige of otherworldly transcendence as a temptation to escapism, inviting us instead to seek God's complete presence among us here in the world. Going beyond Niels Gregersen's understanding of the deep incarnation of the Logos and starting instead with a complete commitment to the infra‐Lutheranum, the author presents a radical Lutheran theology that embraces a total kenosis of God whose liberating and life‐giving reappearance we must find implicit among us in unexpected places, not least of which might include the embers of a dying church or the crumbling of our religious institutions.     

Coping as a building mechanism to explain the unique association of affect and goal motivation with changes in affective states

Background and objectives: In this study, we examined the mediating role of university students’ coping strategies in the unique/additive influence of affective states and goal motivation on upward changes in affect during a midterm exam period. Design: Using a short-term prospective design, key assumptions from the self-concordance model and the broaden-and-build theory were drawn upon to determine whether coping strategies are influenced by goal motivation and affective states, while also subsequently influencing short-term changes in affective states during a semester. Method: A sample of 272 students (79% females and 21% males) participated in a study in which they completed questionnaires twice during the semester. Results: Results of structural equation modeling, using a true latent change approach, have generally supported our hypotheses. Positive affective states and autonomous goal motivation prospectively predicted task-oriented coping which, in turn, was associated with increases in positive affect. Negative affective states and controlled goal motivation prospectively predicted disengagement-oriented coping which, in turn, was associated with increases in negative affect. Conclusion: Coping partially mediates the unique association of affect and goal motivation with changes in affective states of university students.     

Mediation,moderation, and context: Understanding complex relations among cognition,affect, and health behaviour

Objective: Researchers have historically treated cognition and affect as separate constructs in motivating health behaviour. We present a framework and empirical evidence for complex relations between cognition and affect in predicting health behaviour.

Main Outcome, Design and Results: First, affect and cognition can mediate each other’s relation to health behaviour. Second, affect and cognition can moderate the other’s impact. Third, context can change the interplay of affect and cognition. Fourth, affect and cognition may be indelibly fused in some psychological constructs (e.g. worry, anticipated regret and reactance). These four propositions in our framework are not mutually exclusive.

Conclusion: Examination of the types of complex relations described here can benefit theory development, empirical testing of theories and intervention design. Doing so will advance the understanding of mechanisms involved in regulation of health behaviours and the effectiveness of interventions to change health behaviours.