Church Unity is Already Happening: The Path Towards Eucharistic Community

Abstract:  This article approaches the theology of the Lord's Supper from the point of view of a Reformation Protestant seeking common ground with Roman Catholic Eucharistic thought. While demonstrating continuity between these two Latin traditions on the self‐representation of Jesus Christ in the Lord's Supper, the author demonstrates the intrinsic connection among a characteristically Lutheran sense of merely passive justification, passivity in the reception of the Lord's Supper, the emphasis upon the common priesthood of the faithful, and the possibility of intercelebration. The article shows that the acceptance of any one of the elements implies the acceptance of the others.     

Towards an American Indian Indigenous Theology

An indigenous American Indian theology must respond, first of all, out of the ongoing oppression of Indian communities. This means that our indigenous theologies must be explicitly and unashamedly political. After 500 years of colonialism and conquest, we must begin, in this process, to find ways to reclaim our own indigenous identities. As we struggle theologically with the residual effects of colonialism and conquest, this means that we will struggle to maintain or reclaim our cultures and our languages. We must assure our colonizer/missionary relatives that our peoples were in touch with the Creator long before the European colonialist ancestors brought the gospel of Jesus Christ to us. From this point on, we indigenous peoples must focus on rebuilding our national (indigenous) communities and not on building churches. That should be the substance of our theological reflection today. So our theologies must necessarily deconstruct the theological discourses of the colonialist Euro‐Western churches that have missionized and continue to missionize our peoples. This has to be our starting point before we can reconstruct useful ways of organizing our lives together as indigenous communities.     

Unity,Objectivity, and the Passivity of Experience

In the section ‘Unity and Objectivity’ of The Bounds of Sense, P. F. Strawson argues for the thesis that unity of consciousness requires experience of an objective world. My aim in this essay is to evaluate this claim. In the first and second parts of the essay, I explicate Strawson's thesis, reconstruct his argument, and identify the point at which the argument fails. Strawson's discussion nevertheless raises an important question: are there ways in which we must think of our experiences if we are to self‐ascribe them? In the third part of the essay, I use Kant's remarks concerning the passivity of experience to suggest one answer to this question: in self‐ascribing experiences, we must be capable of thinking of them as passive to their objects. This can be used to provide an alternative route from unity to objectivity.     

In Defense of Experience

This article studies our philosophical understanding of experience in order to question the current political and theoretical dismissal of experiential accounts in feminist theory. The focus is on Joan Scott's critique of experience, but the philosophical issues animating the discussion go beyond Scott's work and concern the future of feminist theory and politics more generally. I ask what it means for feminist theory to redefine experience as a linguistic event the way Scott suggests. I attempt to demonstrate that the consequences that she draws from such a theoretical move are both philosophically and politically problematic. A critical study of the evidence of experience does not have to imply metaphysical or epistemological foundationalism, as Scott claims, but on the contrary, such a study is indispensable for challenging them. We must hold onto experience as an important resource for contesting sexist discourses and oppressive conceptual schemas.     

The Unity of Language

This paper identifies the founding project of traditional philosophy of language as an attempt to unify the diversity and individuality of spoken language in order to produce a transpersonal intelligibility. The supposed necessary truth that we cannot directly understand what others say which underlies such a project is exposed as a willful avoidance of the discourse of others typical of masculine styles of communication.     

The Syllogistic with Unity

We extend the language of the classical syllogisms with the sentence-forms “At most 1 p is a q” and “More than 1 p is a q”. We show that the resulting logic does not admit a finite set of syllogism-like rules whose associated derivation relation is sound and complete, even when reductio ad absurdum is allowed.     

The Unity and Commensurability of Pleasures and Pains

In this paper I seek to answer two interrelated questions about pleasures and pains: (i) The question of unity: Do all pleasures share a single quality that accounts for why these, and only these, are pleasures, and do all pains share a single quality that accounts for why these, and only these, are pains? (ii) The question of commensurability: Are all pleasures and pains rankable on a single, quantitative hedonic scale? I argue that our intuitions draw us in opposing directions: On the one hand, pleasures and pains seem unified and commensurable; on the other hand, they do not. I further argue that neither intuition can be abandoned, and examine three different paths to reconciliation. The first two are response theory and split experience theory. Both of these, I argue, are unsuccessful. A third path, however—which I label “dimensionalism” —succeeds. Dimensionalism is the theory that pleasure and pain have the ontological status as opposite sides of a hedonic dimension along which experiences vary. This view has earlier been suggested by C. D. Broad, Karl Duncker, Shelly Kagan, and John Searle, but it has not been worked out in detail. In this paper I work out the dimensionalist view in some detail, defend it, and explain how it solves the problem of the unity and commensurability of pleasures and pains.     

Positive Psychology and Indian Psychology In Need of Mutual Reinforcement

The current practices of positive psychology are woven into the behavioural fabric in the form of numerous strategies/practices without much theoretical foundation. Positive psychology moved from repair to reconstruction, from the negative side of human nature to its positive aspect. Indian psychology is relevant as it has the necessary meta-theoretical framework to sustain the goals of positive psychology. It proposes that mind may be controlled by deconstructing the ego and cultivating altruism by practicing selfless work, total absorption of the mind by devotion or meditation. When the ego is deconstructed, ignorance is removed and the person regains her inherent freedom and moves towards perfection. This position allows going beyond hedonistic pleasures to define happiness and combining material prosperity with moral sensitivity. To this end this paper brings out the points of contact between positive psychology and Indian psychology and argues for new initiatives.