Marriage,religion and human flourishing: how sustainable is the classic Durkheim thesis in contemporary Europe?

This paper draws on the three waves of the European Values Survey across five countries (Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Spain and Sweden) to investigate the relationship between indicators of positive psychology (conceptualised as feelings of happiness and satisfaction with life), religiosity (conceptualised as self-assigned religious affiliation and self-reported religious attendance) and marital status. The results demonstrate that religiosity is, in general, positively correlated with both indicators of positive psychology. Further, across all waves and all countries, the pattern emerges that those respondents who are married are likely to report higher levels of happiness and greater satisfaction in life. These data provide contemporary support for the classic Durkheim thesis linking the two institutions of marriage and religion with human flourishing.     

基于共济方法的研究型生物样本库伦理治理框架评析

基于共济的伦理治理框架符合研究型生物样本库的核心价值和目标、承认人们积极参与的意愿、减少研究成本和参与者伤害、加速推进研究型生物样本库的建设等,避免了基于自主权的风险治理框架的缺陷。但该框架不适用于商业型生物样本库、过分强调节约研究成本、减少伤害而忽视了研究过程中的风险预防以及缺少相应的伦理规范和外部监督。建议在选择共济框架时充分考虑大数据背景下研究中的不确定性和复杂性风险,重视对参与者个体自主权和风险的考量,探求与基于自主权的风险治理框架的互补与融合,并加强公众参与和外部监督。

     

The Sign of Unity and the Bond of Charity: On the Eucharist as a “Taskmaster” in the Context of Global Migration

What does the Eucharist—seen as the source and summit of Christian life and the “meeting‐point on which all the issues of theology converge” (Y.Brilioth) have to do with migrants and refugees? Regardless of how we celebrate the Eucharist, we all have to negotiate ways of living together within the interdependent destiny of globalization. Precisely within this global conviviality, the sacramental and mystical radicalism of unity and love that Martin Luther advocated in his eucharistic theology invites serious consideration but also equally serious contextualization.     

Solidarity in a Technocratic Age

Do free markets teach us how to construct humane social relations or do they impede us from doing so? We discuss social scientific evidence on the nature of commercialization and its consequences for moral formation. From a virtue ethics perspective, people face a need to learn and practice the good. When interactions transition into the market sphere, we argue commercialization can fundamentally alter the nature of relationships, particularly for those relations formerly based on gift, sacrifice, and obligation. While modern social scientists accurately identify problems resulting from commercialization, we argue for the importance of theological social ethics, which can offer a penetrating analysis of the habits of gift and communal responsibility. Catholic social teaching in particular outlines the set of principles and institutions which foster sacrificial gift‐giving among individuals and organizations within society, providing a bulwark against the threat commercialization poses to many social relations.     

Solidarity and the New Inequality

Economists now have the data to generate a high‐resolution picture of the economic inequalities within the very top fractions of income and wealth and between the top‐most fractions and others that have emerged since the early 1980s. I shall refer to these inequalities collectively as “the new inequality.” I argue that the moral value of solidarity can be used to raise pointed moral questions about the new inequality. In most cases, however, I shall raise such questions without answering them. For I contend that solidarity functions more usefully as part of an articulate hermeneutic of suspicion—that is, as a central element in skepticism about economic inequalities and their justifications. Seeing that it functions in this way, we can see one contribution religious ethics makes to an inquiry into the new inequality.     

Just Promise: Reformulating Justice as a Practice of the Gift

The triune God's justice is best understood as promised justice. Promised justice enables Christian practices that critique and end injustice.     

Christian Bioethics in Europe: In Defense against Reductionist Influences from the United States

Christian ideas have continued to inspire European bioethicsuntil now. The central thesis of this essay is that the open-mindednessof Roman Catholic and other Christian denominations in Europeis crucial for understanding why Christian ethics is so wellintegrated in the European culture. The essay describes firstthe institutional frameworks in which these Christian mainlyRoman Catholic ideas are developed. It analyzes further thedifference between the secular Anglo-American and European bioethicsas it has been influenced by these Christian ideas. It finallysummarizes the challenges to which Europe's Christian bioethicalidentity is presently exposed to. The essay states that theChristian inspiration of European bioethics is mainly connectedwith the ideologically moderate, tolerant, and dialogical participationof Christian bioethicists in the bioethical debate in Europe.     

Closing the Solidarity Gap? How Ethnic Diversity Alters Who We Are Willing to Support

Citizens tend to be more solidary with ethnic ingroup members than ethnic outgroup members. As a result, increasing ethnic diversity is often found to impede solidarity. Although this perspective is well established, I present an alternative argument: Under circumstances that foster intergroup contact, increasing diversity promotes, rather than impedes, intergroup solidarity. To test this argument, I combine a survey experiment fielded among Danish students with quasi-random observational data on students' classroom ethnic composition. I find that ethnic-majority adolescents are on average more willing to support ethnic-majority recipients than immigrant and ethnic-minority recipients. Yet, although increasing diversity does not moderate the majority-minority solidarity gap, increasing diversity diminishes and erases the majority-immigrant solidarity gap. As further shown, one explanation is that immigrants in particular face strong stereotypes of being lazy and that ethnic diversity reduces this specific stereotype. These findings suggest that immigration and solidarity need not be incompatible. Under certain circumstances, ethnic diversity at worst leaves intergroup solidarity unaltered and at best improves such solidarity.     

The Challenge and Urgency of Gender Inclusion in Theological Education

Twenty years after the conclusion of the Ecumenical Decade of the Churches in Solidarity with Women, this article considers the development and the need for inclusion of gender in the sphere of theological reflection and education in Latin America and the Caribbean. Rather than a historical account, it proposes an approach that works toward thinking about and developing a new form of relationship between women and men, and between them and today's society and church.     

The crisis as a constrained opportunity? Catholic organisations and territorial welfare in the Basque Country and Emilia-Romagna

Interactions between politics and religion are frequently reduced to ethical and civilisational issues which are politicised and given prominence in the media. Focusing instead on the role of religious – here Catholic – actors in the local experience of social economy and welfare provision in times of economic crisis helps instead to highlight the discrete interactions between politics and religion. In particular, the strong involvement of religious actors, beyond their traditional charity-oriented activity, also concerns more solidarity-oriented socioeconomic experiences as well as political advocacy. These articulations generate new forms of politicisation with respect to both social movements and policymakers. In this article I address these issues comparatively in a Spanish region (the Basque Autonomous Community) and an Italian region (Emilia-Romagna).     

The Sharing of Risks and the Risks of Sharing: Solidarity and Social Justice in the Welfare State

Solidarity as a social phenomenon means a sharing of feelings, interests, risks and responsibilities. The Western-European Welfare State can be seen as an organized system of solidarity, historically grown from group solidarity among workers, later between workers and employers, moving towards solidarity between larger social groups: between healthy people and the sick, between the young and the elderly, between the employed and the unemployed. This sharing of risks at a societal level however, has revealed the risks of sharing. In the postwar development of the welfare state, solidarity has been organized mainly in administrative forms, run by anonymous bureaucracies and giving way to free riders and calculative citizens. This article describes this development and provides arguments for a reorientation of the welfare state and for the re-allocation of rights, risks and responsibilities.