‘THE METAPHYSICS OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS: RADICAL ORTHODOXY AND THEOSIS’

Western theology struggles with the rise of secularism and postmodernism. The Radical Orthodoxy sensibility asserts that the ancient principles of methexis (participation) and theosis (deification) presents an alternative metaphysical narrative to the narrative of secularism and the onto‐theological tradition. This article addresses the problems of the onto‐theological metaphysical tradition in Western theology by analyzing Radical Orthodoxy's rediscovery of the philosophical and theological principles of participation and theosis as articulated in the patristic tradition and in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Using historical and analytical methods, this article will survey the biblical and patristic literature on theosis, as well as John Milbank's understanding of methexis and theosis in Thomas Aquinas. The result of this study will be to offer theosis, rooted in participation in God, as not only a soteriological model to reclaim for the West, but also a core metaphysical principle for Christian ethics that contravenes both onto‐theology and the materialistic reduction of ontology in secularism.     

THE “DEATH OF THE EGO” IN EAST‐MEETS‐WEST SPIRITUALITY: DIVERSE VIEWS FROM PROMINENT AUTHORS

Eastern religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, have traditionally held to the view that in order for an individual to fully benefit from their practice it was important to lessen or eliminate one's individual desires. Such practice was sometimes referred to as the “death of the ego” in order to emphasize its importance. However, the relatively recent popularity of East‐meets‐West spirituality in Western consumer cultures tends to emphasize the acceptance and transformation of one's ego rather than its death. This essay discusses sociological changes that have shaped and contributed to the popularity of East‐meets‐West spirituality in Western culture that in turn have brought about a modification of the principle of ego death. The views of six Western authors and practitioners of East‐meets‐West spirituality on the importance of the principle of ego death are compared and contrasted. Theories related to the management of self‐identity in consumer society can partly explain the modification of traditional Eastern religious practices, such as ego death, in order that they become relevant and appealing to a society that increasingly reifies the concept of the self. The implication is that the excision of the concept of ego death from the practice of East‐meets‐West spirituality may affect its efficacy.     

THE POLITICAL NATURE OF DOCTRINE: A CRITIQUE OF LINDBECK IN LIGHT OF RECENT SCHOLARSHIP

This article argues that the power of religion to shape experience presupposes the mobilization of religious identity through social opposition. This thesis is developed through a critique of George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine. The article first examines Lindbeck's thesis that religion shapes experience in light of Talal Asad's critique of Geertz's concept of religion. It argues that in order to understand how ‘religion’ shapes experience we must look outside the immanent sphere of cultural‐religious meaning that Lindbeck, following Geertz, identifies with ‘religion’. Religious authority ultimately derives from the recognition of a social group. Next, looking at the nature of doctrine in light of Kathryn Tanner's thesis that Christian identity is essentially relational, it argues that church doctrines function to mobilize group identity through social opposition. In this respect they resemble the mobilizing slogans of political discourse more than, as Lindbeck's theory proposes, the grammatical rules governing Wittgensteinian language games.     

THE PARADOXICAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MORALITY AND MORAL WORTH

Abstract: If the social environment were arranged so that most people in the West could, with relatively little effort, be morally good to a reasonable degree, would this be a good thing? I claim that it is not entirely obvious that we should say yes. This is no idle question: mainstream Western social morality today seems to be approaching the prospect for a morality that is not taxing. This question has substantial theoretical interest because exploring it will help us understand the paradoxical relationship between morality and moral worth.     

WOMB TRANSPLANTATION AND THE INTERPLAY OF ISLAM AND THE WEST

In Saudi Arabia in 2000 the world's first human uterus transplant was attempted with some success. In 2011 the second successful human uterus transplant took place in Turkey. Doctors in the United Kingdom have recently announced that uterus transplants will be carried out in the UK if doctors can raise enough funds to complete their research. As scientists continue to make progress in this domain this is anticipated to be the next breakthrough in the arena of assisted reproductive technologies. The procedure is designed to restore fertility in women unable to gestate due to an abnormal, damaged, or absent uterus. At present, the only other option for such women to achieve genetic motherhood is via surrogacy, which in Islam is widely regarded as haram or forbidden. This article examines the benefits of this technology so as to facilitate discourse between Islam and the West. It argues for Islamic scholars to consider these advances so as to ensure Muslims living as minorities in Western countries, such as the United Kingdom, are able to utilize such technology (if indeed regarded as permissible) should the government move to enact legislation to permit this procedure.     

THE DEVIL IN TECHNOLOGIES: RUSSIAN ORTHODOX NEOCONSERVATISM VERSUS SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS

One of the interesting aspects of Russian self‐definition in opposition to the West is its attitude toward Western science. Russian distrust of scientific and technological progress in the West is an important force shaping contemporary Russian identity. This article touches on these issues in four parts. The first section characterizes two main conservative circles that are active in today's disputes over the significance of scientific development for Russian identity. The second demonstrates certain Russian contemporary concerns related to scientific and technological progress, which will enable us to explain the position of the Russian Orthodox Church. The third section presents the political, religious, and identity context for the suspicion toward science expressed by Russian conservatives. The final section, on the other hand, discusses the way in which Russian Orthodox neoconservatism uses Orthodox anthropology to raise suspicion toward scientific and technological achievements.     

THE POPULAR APPEAL OF APOCALYPTIC AI

The belief that computers will soon become transcendently intelligent and that human beings will “upload” their minds into machines has become ubiquitous in public discussions of robotics and artificial intelligence in Western cultures. Such beliefs are the result of pervasive Judaeo‐Christian apocalyptic beliefs, and they have rapidly spread through modern pop and technological culture, including such varied and influential sources as Rolling Stone, the IEEE Spectrum, and official United States government reports. They have gained sufficient credibility to enable the construction of Singularity University in California. While different approaches are possible (and, indeed, are common in Japan and possibly elsewhere), this particular vision of artificial intelligence and robotics has gained ground in the West through the influence of figures such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil. Because pop‐science books help frame public discussion of new sciences and technologies for individuals, corporations, and governments alike, the integration of religious and technoscientific claims made by their authors should be clear and open for public and scientific debate. As we move forward into an increasingly robotic future, we should do so aware of the ways in which a group's religious environment can help set the tone for public acceptance and use of robotic technologies.     

BEYOND THE BONDAGE OF BOUNDARIES

This narrative seeks to describe a route towards the roots of personal and cultural identity through shared journeys of loss and grief. It attempts to find lived spaces for spiritual growth and reconciliation through the complexity of shared experiences and through the search for ways of transcending the boundaries of cultural identity and culturally prescribed ways of grieving. The complex interplay of these juxtaposing themes and interconnecting tensions and paradoxes provides opportunities for new ways of being and the possibility of transcendence of barriers such as gender, ethnicity, culture, language difference, and social class. This is achieved in consideration of context and environment and through the metaphor of ''pushing out the boundaries of lived experience beyond common understanding.''     

THE RIGHTS OF MUSLIM WOMEN: A Comment on Irene Oh's The Rights of God

This review of Irene Oh's The Rights of God focuses on women's rights in Islamic theory and practice. Oh suggests that religious establishments, and the texts they disseminate, often press believers to recognize and reject social problems, such as racial and gender discrimination. Islamic scholars and texts have played a more ambiguous role in efforts to recognize women's rights within Muslim states. Modernist intellectuals have used Islamic texts to support the advancement of women's rights, but members of the more conservative religious establishment have typically curbed or rejected these efforts. Muslim women themselves have established various responses to the question of Islam's compatibility with women's rights. While some embrace the value and compatibility of both, others reject the propriety of either Western conceptions of rights, or the Islamic tradition, as harmful for women. Muslim reformers and feminists have much to learn from comparative studies with other faith communities that have undergone similar struggles and transformations.     

THE NEW AGE OF KABBALAH

In recent years, a remarkable revival of interest in Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism has taken place in Israel, the United States and other, mostly Western, countries. This revival, which includes a resurgence of kabbalistic and hasidic doctrines and practices and an integration of kabbalistic themes in various cultural fields, coincides with the emergence of the New Age and other related spiritual and new religious movements in the Western world in the last decades of the twentieth century. New Age themes appear in various contemporary kabbalistic and Neo‐hasidic movements, and there are significant similarities between these movements, the New Age and other recent spiritual and religious revival movements. This article will examine the contemporary revival of Kabbalah and investigate the relationship between contemporary Kabbalah and New Age phenomena. It will demonstrate that central characteristics of the new spiritual culture appear not only in contemporary Kabbalah and Neo‐hasidic groups that explicitly use New Age themes, but also among kabbalistic and hasidic movements that are perceived as presenting more traditional forms of Jewish mysticism. The shared characteristic of contemporary Kabbalah and New Age, it will be argued, are not dependent only on the direct impact of the New Age movements on contemporary Kabbalah, but rather on the postmodern context and nature of both these phenomena. The emergence and constructions of contemporary Kabbalah, the New Age and other related new spiritual movements, which can be described as “postmodern spiritualities”, is dependent on the global economic and social changes in the late twentieth century. This article will claim that these new cultural formations reflect the cultural logic of late global capitalism and respond to the new social conditions in the postmodern era.     

The Church in the Postcommunist World

Abstract

The collapse of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe is evidence only of the triumph of Western‐style consumerism. The Church's influence on society, both in East and West, is very limited. This situation is the result of historical factors which may be traced back to the early Middle Ages. Historical materialism is the offspring of the medieval Western version of Christianity which, under rationalistic and moralistic pressure, transformed God into a dead authoritarian concept. A brief analysis of the terms ratio and logos is offered in illustration of the different mindsets of the Eastern and Western Churches. The metaphysical revolution which brought in the modern world was a rebellion against the Western understanding of God. Historically, Orthodoxy has lacked the confidence to advance its own view but it can contribute an understanding of the Church based on the notions of personhood and relation that offers the most fruitful way forward.     

Seeking double personality: Nakamura Kokyō's work in abnormal psychology in early 20th-century Japan

This paper examines Nakamura Kokyō's study of a woman with a split personality who lived in his home as a maid from 1917 until her death in 1940. She was his indispensable muse and assistant in his efforts to promote abnormal psychology and psychotherapy. This paper first explores the central position of multiple personality in Nakamura's theory of the subconscious, which was largely based on the model of dissociation. It then examines how it became a central issue in Nakamura's disputes with religions including the element of spirit possession, which invoked Western psychical research to modernize their doctrines. While both were concerned with the subconscious and alterations in personality, Nakamura's psychological view was distinguished from those spiritual understandings by his emphasis on individual memories, particularly those that were traumatic, and hysteria. The remaining sections of the paper will examine Nakamura's views on memory and hysteria, which conflicted with both the academic mainstream and the established cultural beliefs. This conflict may partly explain the limited success of Nakamura's academic and social campaigns.     

Action and Variation in Perception

In her paper, ‘Action and Self‐location in Perception’, Susanna Schellenberg argues that perceptual experience of an object's intrinsic spatial properties, such as its size and shape, requires a capacity to act. More specifically, Schellenberg argues that, to have a perceptual experience of an object's intrinsic spatial properties, a subject needs to have a certain practical conception of space, or a spatial know‐how. That, in turn, requires self‐locating representations, which locate the subject, relative to the perceptual object, as a perceiver and an agent, viz., someone who has a capacity for actions. She also makes two objections, viz., the unification objection and the sentient statue objection, to Alva Noë's sensorimotor view, a different account of how perceptual experience depends on actions. I will argue that her objections jointly render problematic not only Noë's but also her own view.     

VIOLENCE,MEMORY, AND THE DYNAMICS OF TRANSNATIONAL YOUTH FORMATIONS

This editorial introduces and contextualizes five scholarly papers on ‘Violence, Memory, and the Dynamics of Transnational Youth Formations.’ The topic of this special issue is conceptually organized around theories of postcolonial and diasporic citizenship and probes the extent to which these theories have shaped the discursive field of ‘youth formations’. We outline how an emerging scholarly field on youth cultures, youth activism and youth political organizations has responded to the new challenges of globalization and transnational mobilization. As experiences and memories of violence give shape to these mobilizations as well as the social imaginations characterizing youth movements, this special issue takes an interest in drawing connections between different youth formations. In establishing such a comparative lens, we contribute to ongoing discussions in Sikh Studies on youth issues in relation to violence, discrimination and transnational mobilization.     

Triangulating consumers' perceptions of payment systems by using social representations theory: A multi‐method approach

Social systems play a pivotal role in shaping customers' views, the adoption process and subsequent product diffusion for novel products. Perceptions of Austrian consumers regarding payment systems were assessed in a cross‐sectional analysis applying social representations theory. Social representations help to unravel the sources of individuals' attitudinal or perceptual similarities and differences, which often stem from inter‐group differences. In short, they are useful for the investigation of ‘deeper structure’ aspects of consumer behaviour, as has been shown in previous studies. This may be seen as a further step forward for marketing research, which operates largely on social phenomena. This study addresses the shortage of non‐cognitive‐based research in marketing by offering a methodological approach that uses triangulation on the basis of associative answers from social groups. A four‐step analytic design revealed that consumer groups transpose the abstract concept of payment systems into tangible objects and processes in a similar way; however, their social background impacted which value was attached to established as well as new means of payment. Cash is still seen as the prototypical form of payment; newer forms, such as credit cards or ATM cards, appear already in the periphery of representations, urgently needing well‐concerted marketing efforts to become recognized as substitutes for cash. From a managerial view, the research employs social phenomena as a basis for segmenting natural rather than nominal groups in order to better serve consumers' needs in an increasingly connected social reality. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

COMMENTARY: THE IMPACT OF PSYCHOLOGY ON THIRD WORLD DEVELOPMENT

Parts of the basic conceptual framework of Western psychology have been imported, sometimes blindly, into the design of many Third World countries' education, industry, law and health services. Psychology needs to demonstrate its relevance to the particular sociocultural conditions of these countries and to development policy in each of these fields. This requires close collaboration with other social sciences. Theories and techniques developed in Western societies (e.g., pre-school enrichment and aptitude testing) need to be unpackaged so that Third World policy-makers can decide which aspects are most relevant to their goals. Revitalization of endogenous cultural development is essential for developing a valid and socially acceptable psychology. This requires both sensitivity to the cultural load of Western psychology and systematic exploration of distinctive indigenous concepts.     

THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY AND THE RHETORIC OF EXCESS

If militarism violates the ideals of liberty and justice in one way, and rapidly increasing social stratification violates them in another, then American democracy is in crisis. A culture of democratic accountability will survive only if citizens revive the concerns that animated the great reform movements of the past, from abolitionism to civil rights. It is crucial, when reasoning about practical matters, not only to admit how grave one's situation is, but also to resist despair. Therefore, the fate of democracy depends, to some significant degree, on how we choose to describe the crisis. Saying that we have already entered the new dark ages or a post‐democratic era may prove to be a self‐fulfilling prophecy, because anyone who accepts this message is apt to give up on the hard work of organizing and contestation that is needed to hold political representatives accountable to the people. This paper asks how one might strike the right balance between accuracy and hope in describing the democracy's current troubles. After saying what I mean by democracy and what I think the current threats to it are, I respond to Romand Coles's criticisms of reservations I have expressed before about rhetorical excess in the works of Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Richard Rorty. This leads to a discussion of several points raised against me by Hauerwas. A digression offers some of my reasons for doubting that John Howard Yoder's biblical scholarship vindicates Hauerwas's version of pacifism. The paper concludes by arguing that Sheldon Wolin's work on the evisceration of democracy, though admirably accurate in its treatment of the dangers posed by empire and capital, abandons the project of democratic accountability too quickly in favor of the romance of the fugitive.     

THE CENTRALITY OF INCARNATION

What we urgently need at the beginning of the twenty‐first century is a christological vision that can shape and inform a new and powerful way of helping humankind to interpret their place within the universe. A christological vision that is unintelligible and uninteresting can have a profoundly deleterious soteriological implication: the orbit of God's saving grace will not be wide enough to encompass the universal place of humankind. Arthur Peacocke's move is clear and to the point: Only when the foundations and universal scope of God's grace are fully established for all of creation, only then can the importance of God's specific work in Jesus the Christ be established.     

Deprivation 2 3

The author describes her experience of setting up a therapeutic service for 'looked-after children' in a social services department, and the change of approach from a focus on individual therapy 8 to consultation and liaison with the network. The idea that children in the 'care system' suffer a triple deprivation when the 'double deprivation', as described by Henry (1974), is compounded by organizational difficulties, is explored. Material is presented of work with foster-parents which helped to prevent placement breakdown. The ways in which disturbing emotional states of clients are re-enacted within the organization are discussed. The author suggests that the paralysis in a social services system, which can lead to 'drift', resembles the 'collapse of strategy' of babies displaying a 'disorganized/disoriented' attachment response to a frightened or frightening mother. The need for a 'secure base' for social workers and their managers is stressed if they are to provide the same for their clients.