FORTY YEARS LATER: WHAT HAVE WE ACCOMPLISHED?

Abstract. I examine the responses to John Caiazza's “Athens, Jerusalem, and the Arrival of Techno‐Secularism” as part of Zygon's forty‐year anniversary symposium. The responses reveal that issues of modernism and postmodernism are central to understanding the dynamic of the current science‐religion/theology dialogue and that the resistance of many of the participants to the influences of postmodernism is a sign not of its backwardness but rather of some of the weaknesses inherent in the postmodern project. This does not mean that the many insights of postmodernism should be rejected. Rather, the science‐religion/theology dialogue may be in an intellectually opportune place to construct successors to the worn label of postmodernism.     

GOD,HUMANITY AND THE COSMOS: CHALLENGING A CHALLENGING TEXTBOOK

Christopher Southgate has been the editor of the textbook God, Humanity and the Cosmos. I consider this textbook fair on science and wise in intertwining issues in theology and science with ecology, climate change, and technology. It might also be challenging for students, as it introduces them to a variety of perspectives and a rich palette of literature. I wonder whether such a book, with its strong theological, “cognitive,” orientation will remain relevant in European contexts, given shifts in society away from Christianity and changes in understanding what it is to be religious.     

(RE)Inventing Scheffler,or, Defending Objective Educational Research

Israel Scheffler's book Science and Subjectivity (1967) was prescient: His criticisms of attacks on the traditional notions of objectivity and truth that underlie modern science are still relevant nearly thirty years later, when postmodernism and some varieties of feminist epistemology are winning many adherents. Two aspects of Scheffler's book are singled out for discussion – his philosophical style, which is marked by careful, well-developed, and detailed argument (in contrast to many contemporary writers in education who have postmodernist leanings, who merely make assertions about objectivity and so forth); and the actual content of the positions for which he argues.     

Personality Psychology and Postmodernism

Interest in constructing theories of the individual person as a whole has been relatively weak since 1950. This disinterest, especially in the past 2 decades, may, it is suggested, be partly due to the growth and popularity of postmodern thought, which seems to be in conflict with the idea that behavior is controlled by real psychological properties within the individual. The aim of this article is to question some of the main postmodern assumptions that represent obstacles to a renewed interest in the nature of the individual. It is concluded that the parts of postmodernism that are inconsistent with a science of the person as a whole are all false—and that the part that is true is consistent with a science of the individual.     

Blurring boundaries and advancing interreligious understanding by engaging textual ‘others’ in a women’s interfaith book group

This article casts analytical light on how Jewish, Christian and Muslim women develop understanding of religious identities by engaging with multidimensional textual ‘others’ in the Daughters of Abraham interfaith book groups. It focuses on a group discussion of a rabbi’s memoir about her religious journey. Drawing on ethnographic material and Talal Asad’s analysis of the relationship between text and reader, I examine how narratives outside primary religious texts influence ideas about Jewish, Christian and Muslim identities. I argue that the Daughters members’ appropriation of literary voices advances their engagement with religious diversity by developing understanding of religious self and others. Moreover, members’ navigation of inter- and intra-religious relations during discussions of texts blur boundaries for inclusion into this interfaith encounter. This examination raises questions about issues of identity, power dynamics and interfaith relations. Importantly, it provides novel insight into the understudied areas of women’s interreligious encounter and shared reading practices.     

Science and Religion: Getting Ready for the Future

I explore three challenges for the current dialogue between science and religion: the challenges from hermeneutics, feminisms, and postmodernisms. Hermeneutics, defined as the practice and theory of interpretation and understanding, not only deals with questions of interpreting texts and data but also examines the role and use of language in religion and in science, but it should not stop there. Results of the post‐Kuhnian discussion are used to exemplify a wider range of hermeneutical issues, such as the ideological potential of scientific concepts, the dynamics of interdisciplinarity, and the significance of the socioeconomic situatedness of science and religion. Feminist research analyzes the consequences of the interplay of masculine, feminine, and gender typologies in religion and science. Examples from the history of science as well as current scientific conceptualizations indicate that beliefs in the inferiority of woman form part of our inherited scientific, religious, and metaphysical framework. It is argued that postmodernism in its most constructive form shares the best fruits of modernity, especially of the Enlightenment, while avoiding some of its most serious mistakes. In conclusion, reflecting on the three publics engaged in the dialogue between science and religion—academe, religious communities, and societies—I offer constructive suggestions and critical observations concerning the future of this dialogue.     

Tay-Sachs and the abortion controversy

Tay-Sachs disease is a fatal recessive genetic disorder that effects the central nervous system of Ashkenazi Jewish infants. The disease is incurable. The only method of prevention is screening for heterozygotes with subsequent amniocentesis for at-risk couples and abortion of the genetically doomed infants. Genetic screening and abortion are complex ethical issues that bridge the worlds of religion and science and challenge the dynamic halachic reasoning of the Jewish people. This work examines the debate surrounding the abortion controversy, with special emphasis on the subjective biases inherent in debates of this type.     

The myth of the Jewish origins of philosophy in the Renaissance: from Aristotle to Plato

The myth of the Jewish origins of philosophy and science is an ancient tradition dating from the Hellenistic period. It originated with pagan scholars, as part of the Greek-Hellenistic myth of the eastern origins of wisdom. Hellenistic-Jewish scholars acquired this theme from them, developed it further and transmitted it to the Church Fathers. In time, this myth achieved great popularity among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Aristotle’s prominence in medieval culture gave rise to traditions claiming that he studied with Jewish sages and was deeply impressed and influenced by Jewish books. Some of these traditions even maintain that he converted to Judaism, or was born a Jew. Although stories about the Judaized Aristotle continued to circulate, many accounts of the Jewish sources of Plato also began to appear in various forms among Christian and Jewish scholars. Stories about Plato proliferated especially following the decline of the Aristotelian-Averroist tradition, when kabbalistic-hermetic influences were first discernible in the writings of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola in the late Quattrocento.     

DOES HE PULL IT OFF? A THEISTIC GROUNDING OF NATURAL INHERENT HUMAN RIGHTS?

This paper focuses on two key issues in Nicholas Wolterstorff's Justice: Rights and Wrongs . It argues that Wolterstorff's theistic grounding of inherent rights is not successful. It also argues that Wolterstorff does not provide adequate criteria for determining what exactly these natural inherent rights are or criteria that can help us to evaluate competing and contradictory claims about these rights. However, most of Wolterstorff's book is not concerned with the theistic grounding of inherent rights. Instead, it is devoted to a detailed and rigorous articulation of the meaning and defense of a theory of justice as consisting of inherent rights and with showing why this theory of justice is superior to the alternative right order theories that Wolterstorff criticizes. The paper concludes that these accomplishments are not diminished even if Wolterstorff has failed to provide us with a satisfactory theistic grounding of his theory.     

Psychotherapy; Its Relation to Biblical and Rabbinic Judaism

Some facets of the relationship between psychotherapy and Judaism are analyzed. The issue of a framework for therapy that is congruent with Jewish biblical and rabbinic sources is examined in detail. The thesis advanced is, that the healing-helping model promulgated by psychotherapeutic theorists and practitioners is amenable to Jewish thought. Some implications of this model are explored. Attention is focused on the issues of inner conflict, self-knowledge, and complexity unique to human behavior. It is argued that these are basic premises fundamental to both depth psychology and Jewish thought. The Jewish and Christian variations of the healing model are compared and analyzed.     

非典型性:后现代医学时代一个特征--非典型肺炎流行引发的一些思考

以非典型肺炎为案例,从后现代思维的角度讨论了现代医学的一些认识论问题和非典型肺炎流行引起恐慌的认识原因;提出了超越现代医学的后现代思维策略。     

Ethics of Globalization and the AIDS Crisis from a Jewish Perspective

This essay explores what Jewish ethics has to say about globalization in relation to the AIDS crisis. Special attention is paid to the consequences in affirming current intellectual trends to transcend traditional limits in both society and thought for rethinking traditional Jewish values. The discussion proceeds from two presuppositions. The first is that there is an intimate connection between ethics, science, and politics. The second is that the history of Jewish ethics involves three distinct forms that are generally correlated but rarely identical in content and moral judgment. These three forms are law, wisdom or virtue, and covenant. The discussion considers related issues of accidental connections in time between the bubonic plague and Zionism and between AIDS and homosexuality in relation to moral–theological issues related to divine providence and distributive justice.     

The New Anti-Semitism in Europe: The Islamic Dimension of,and Jewish Belonging in,the EU

This article examines the sense of Jewish vulnerability and exclusion in Europe that has resulted from manifestations, and Jewish perceptions, of the “new anti-Semitism,” and the role of Islamic communities in Europe in propagating this form of hatred of Jews. First emerging in 2000 with the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada, and tied in with the Middle East conflict, anger at Israel is directed at Diaspora Jewish communities. This “new anti-Semitism” targets the Jewish collective with the characteristics of anti-Semitism previously aimed at individual Jews. The article focuses on the wave of anti-Semitism that erupted as a result of the 2014 Israeli–Hamas War. Based on an analysis of European Jewish communities, it considers the active part played by European Muslim communities in perpetrating the new anti-Semitism. Using an analysis of survey data, emigration statistics and newspaper opinion articles by leading European Jewish intellectuals, the article considers how the new anti-Semitism is adversely affecting Jewish–Muslim relations and the concomitant sense of “belonging” of European Jewry. The article considers what is required to overcome the new anti-Semitism propagated by Muslim communities to restore a greater sense of Jewish belonging to, and identification with, Europe.     

Know before whom you stand: Mikael Enckell’s Companions of the Unknown [Okändhetens följeslagare]

Mikael Enckell’s book is discussed as a combined self-analytic tour de force and psychoanalytic supplement to Jewish philosophy represented by Frans Rosenzweig and others. The author discusses Enckell’s views on the roots of psychoanalysis in Jewish thought, anti-Semitism, historiography, the importance of human dialogue, revelation and psychic integration, atheism, and the nature of recovery in psychoanalysis. Enckell’s views of a triad of human activities open to conflict and ambiguity – Judaism, poetry, and psychoanalysis – are supplemented by a short discussion on the role of annihilation anxiety in these areas.     

IN DEFENSE OF PUBLICS: PROJECTION,BIAS, AND CULTURAL NARRATIVES IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION DEBATES

John H. Evans's recent book Morals Not Knowledge is a timely argument to recognize broader social and cultural factors that might impact what U.S. religious publics think about the relationship between science and religion and their attitudes toward science and/or religion. While Evans's focus is primarily on what can be classed as moral issues, this response argues that there are other factors that sit within neither the older epistemic conflict model approach nor a moral conflict model approach that also merit further investigation. There is a significant need for further research that examines the social, psychological, (geo)political, and broader cultural factors shaping people's social identities in relation to science and religion debates. When undertaking such research, we need to be wary of creating a binary between scholarly and public space discourse. Social scientific research in this field should be led by public perceptions, attitudes, and views, not by concepts or frameworks that we project onto them.     

Christian Supersessionism,Zionism, and the Contemporary Scene

Postliberal theology has been a topic of considerable theological debate over the past few decades. In his 2011 book Another Reformation, Peter Ochs deploys a postliberal theological model for the purpose of developing a sophisticated understanding of the future of interreligious relations. Ochs argues that postliberal theology is a reparative theology focusing on alleviating human suffering. He argues that the Christian idea of supersessionism may be the most challenging for Christians to confront as they explore avenues for making interreligious dialogue more effective. Ochs critiques the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder's understanding of Zionism as Jewish Constantianism for being an instance of an ostensibly postliberal theology losing its way. In this essay, I offer a critique of Ochs's reading of Yoder, claiming that Yoder's view actually mirrors an important intra‐Jewish debate about the relationship between political power and piety, and retrieves an ingenious contribution of both early Judaism and early Christianity that is effaced in today's growing Constantinian approach to Christian imperialism and Jewish nationalism.     

COSMOLOGY, RELIGION, AND SOCIETY

Abstract. It is a mistake to assume that science and religion are competing accounts of the same subject matter, so that either science supersedes religion or religion anticipates science. Using the question of cosmic origins as an example, I argue that the basic task of religion is not the scientific one of establishing the most accurate acccunt of the origin of the universe. Rather, as illustrated from Jewish, Hindu, Chinese, and Buddhist thought, religion uses a variety of cosmologies to help specify the necessary terms and conditions on which human social life is possible in particular ecological niches.     

Toward a Genealogy of Culture

Using psychoanalytic theory, this paper attempts to trace the natural history of the phenomenon designated as Culture. It postulates that psychoanalysis, a product of the Hegelian philosophical revolution, is still one of the best instruments to understand Culture. It traces the origins of culture as postulated by Freud and the pioneer anthropologists and its course from early and evolved religion through humanism, science, and finally postmodernism. It emphasizes the dialectical concepts in psychoanalysis and reviews summarily those psychoanalysts that, according to the author, have had a major impact on the study of culture: Freud, Horney, and Lacan.     

Religion and the Human Rights Idea

Three recent books focus, in different ways, on the idea of human rights and its relation to religion and religious ethics. All three books discussed here address criticisms of the human rights idea and seek to establish the relationship of religion and human rights with regard to the field of policy. The present discussion begins with an overview that places these three books in the larger context of the development of the human rights idea and its historical relationship with religion. It then turns to Little's book, next to the collection of essays edited by Twiss, Simion, and Petersen, which is described internally as a Festschrift for Little, and then to Hogan's book, and in the final section it explores comparisons among the books.