Luther as a reader of Dionysius the Areopagite

Dionysius the Areopagite has been an important point of orientation for the debate on how humans appropriately approach God. Among his avid readers is Martin Luther, whose understanding of Dionysius is investigated in this article. Luther is a critical reader, but his criticism is founded on a basic identification with Dionysius' central tenets. His main objection is that he finds Dionysius too theoretical. For Luther, God is incessant activity; the question of approaching God correctly therefore for Luther is an existential question. This is an aspect he does not find adequately integrated in Dionysius' apophatic dialectics. Luther also found faults with Dionysius' Christology. For Luther, the experience of not being properly related to God is a terrifying experience. This can be read as a reinterpretation of Dionysius' Mystical Theology, showing both influence (Luther knew this work almost by heart) and independence. Central aspects of Luther's thought thus present themselves as a reinterpretation of Dionysian mysticism.     

Things Are What They Do: Katherine Nelson's Functional Approach to Language and Cognition

This article attempts to summarize Katherine Nelson's theoretical and empirical contributions to the ontogenetic study of language and cognition. Nelson's approach has consistently emphasized the function of language and linguistic concepts in children's larger conceptual and social lives and, conversely, how children's emerging understanding of the function of linguistic symbols in larger conceptual and social structures makes language acquisition possible in the first place. This approach has led to an especially fruitful body of theoretical and empirical work.     

All Things Possible

Noa Bar-Haim’s thoughtful and impressively comprehensive paper deftly focuses on the complicated relationship between psychotherapy and psychopharmacologic treatments, and the dyadic and triadic dynamics inherent to the relationships that exist between psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and patients in the context of shared clinical work. I applaud Dr. Bar-Haim for bringing these important issues to bear. These are prodigious topics about which much can be said, and for which historically, in my estimation, not enough has been said. I am appreciative that this journal is open to including them in its scope by welcoming her thoughts and this discussion to its highly esteemed and well-respected pages. Given the vast range of topics that Dr. Bar-Haim admirably presents in her paper, and the extensive nature of what these issues encompass, this discussion addresses a selection of the many concepts she raises. It is my hope that my thoughts will serve to amplify some of hers, provide some additional and related perspectives, and mostly, have a generative effect that will promote further awareness of these issues and a continuing discussion about them within our field.     

Making All Things New

The relationship between the civil rights movement and the World Council of Churches was personified in the links between Martin Luther King Jr and Eugene Carson Blake, both of whom were known for heightening the spirit of prophetic Christianity through their involvements in the ecumenical movement and the mounting struggles against global poverty and the Vietnam War. As 2018 marks the 50th anniversary of the Uppsala assembly and King's assassination, this article focuses on the contributions of King and Blake to the kind of ecumenical movement that united peoples of faith in cooperative, concrete efforts to eliminate racism, poverty, and war. The central argument is that these joint efforts were still unfolding at the time of King's untimely death.     

Commentary: All Relationships Are Difficult: Research Relationships Are No Exception

This comment on the preceding set of papers seeks to evaluate them as a cohesive set, postulate some questions the authors might ask each other, and highlight themes and issues. Issues associated with relationships between researchers of different backgrounds and relationships between theories and methods from different traditions are particularly difficult.     

What Love Is Not: Lessons from Martin Luther King,Jr.

Focusing on the concept and practice of love sheds light on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s negative political theology. King was fundamentally concerned with what love is not, and it is this negation that colors his political vision. I do not take King’s political theology to be either primarily derivative of American liberal Protestantism or primarily derivative of folk African American religion, or of some syncretism of these. Rather, I take King to be participating in a tradition of negative theology that pairs the critique of idolatry with attention outward and inward, to the marginalized and to spiritual life.     

Are All Species Equal?

Species egalitarianism is the view that all species have equal moral standing. To have moral standing is, at a minimum, to command respect, to be something more than a mere thing. Is there any reason to believe that all species have moral standing in even this most minimal sense? If so — that is, if all species command respect — is there any reason to believe they all command equal respect. The article summarises critical responses to Paul Taylor’s argument for species egalitarianism, then explains why other species command our respect but also why they do not command equal respect. The intuition that we should have respect for nature is part of what motivates people to embrace species egalitarianism, but one need not be a species egalitarian to have respect for nature. The article closes by questioning whether species egalitarianism is even compatible with respect for nature.     

“人类所有的疾病都是基因病”吗

人类基因组图谱（HGP）研究大大加深了人们对疾病的理解。然而,作为人体这个复杂系统的一种非常态特征,疾病的发生不仅受遗传因素的影响,还受到身体内部其他因素以及自然环境、社会环境等外部因素的影响。所以,并不能简单地将所有的疾病都归结为基因病。     

Not All Worlds Are Stages

The stage theory is a four-dimensional account of persistence motivatedby the worm theory's inability to account for our intuitions in thecases involving coinciding objects. Like the worm theory, it claimsthat there are objects spread out in time, but unlike the worm theory,it argues that these spacetime worms are not familiar particulars liketables and chairs. Rather, familiar particulars are the instantaneoustemporal slices of worms. In order to explain our intuitions that particulars persist for more than an instant, the stage theory drawson the counterpart theory of modal possibilism, which it is supposedto parallel. In this paper I show how the stage theory presupposes thattime can be divided into instants, which I call the atomistic view oftime. I do this by laying out an alternative theory of the nature oftime, the gunky view, and show that if time is gunky the stage theorycollapses into the worm theory. The deeper problem is that the merepossibility of gunky time would cause the stage theory's parallels topossibilism to break down. I therefore conclude that the stage theoryis committed to the view that time is necessarily atomistic. Finally,in the last section I argue that the fact that the stage theory rulesout a priori the possibility of time being gunky gives us reason toreject it as an account of persistence.     

道,理之者也

入道以来,遇到的最多的问题就是"什么是道?"这个问题很难回答.难回答的原因大致有二:第一个原因是老子在<道德经>开篇就告诉了我们"道可道非常道"以及"知者不言,言者不知",也告诉了我们"不可致诘";第二个原因是因为道是一个"独立而不改"的整体,它是一个不可分割的"一".