Forum: Teaching With,Against, and To Faith

These three articles deal with the issue of faith in the classroom – whether one should teach “to,” “for,” or “against” faith. While their institutional settings and experiences are different, the authors all contend that more serious reflection needs to be given to the matter of how religious commitment plays out in our diverse pedagogical settings. The initial article by Carolyn Medine surveys the current climate regarding student spirituality in the classroom, the broader governmental concerns, and, the tensions that inform the choices available to a professor. Todd Penner's essay analyzes faith‐as‐ideology in the undergraduate classroom, and Marjorie Lehman's contribution analyzes how the issue manifests differently in Jewish Studies.     

How Interesting is the “Boring Problem” for Luck Egalitarianism?

Imagine a two‐person distributive case in which Ernest's choices yield X and Bertie's choices yield X + Y, producing an income gap between them of Y. Neither Ernest nor Bertie is responsible for this gap of Y, since neither of them has any control over what the other agent chooses. This is what Susan Hurley calls the “Boring Problem” for luck egalitarianism. Contrary to Hurley's relatively dismissive treatment of it, it is contended that the Boring Problem poses a deep problem for standard luck egalitarianism. To counter it, luck egalitarianism needs to be recast as a baseline‐relative theory. This new version of luck egalitarianism is then put to work against some significant problems that have been encountered by luck egalitarianism: Saul Smilansky's “Paradox of the Baseline,” the “Partiality Worry,” and the “Pluralism Worry.” But baseline‐relative luck egalitarianism is not without problems of its own.     

Teaching World Religions without Teaching “World Religions”

Tomoko Masuzawa and a number of other contemporary scholars have recently problematized the categories of “religion” and “world religions” and, in some cases, called for its abandonment altogether as a discipline of scholarly study. In this collaborative essay, we respond to this critique by highlighting three attempts to teach world religions without teaching “world religions.” That is, we attempt to promote student engagement with the empirical study of a plurality of religious traditions without engaging in the rhetoric of pluralism or the reification of the category “religion.” The first two essays focus on topical courses taught at the undergraduate level in self‐consciously Christian settings: the online course “Women and Religion” at Georgian Court University and the service‐learning course “Interreligious Dialogue and Practice” at St. Michael's College, in the University of Toronto. The final essay discusses the integration of texts and traditions from diverse traditions into the graduate theology curriculum more broadly, in this case at Loyola Marymount University. Such confessional settings can, we suggest, offer particularly suitable – if somewhat counter‐intuitive – contexts for bringing the otherwise covert agendas of the world religions discourse to light and subjecting them to a searching inquiry in the religion classroom.     

BETWEEN BARTH AND WITTGENSTEIN: ON THE AVAILABILITY OF HANS FREI'S LATER THEOLOGY

This paper explores the “cultural‐linguistic” dimensions of Hans Frei's theology. I make the case that several of the pragmatic and sociological concerns usually identified as distinctive marks of Frei's later theology of the 1980s are, in fact, central to his work as far back as the early 1960s. Moreover, I demonstrate that such “cultural‐linguistic” insights present important continuous threads in the development of his theology from early to late. Attending to this dimension illuminates the trajectory of Frei's thinking as consistently Wittgensteinian in sensibility, and deeply indebted to his career‐long conversation with Karl Barth's theology. If successful, this reading should clarify the ways in which Frei's early work is more innovative, and his later work less derivative, than is often recognized.     

Meaning‐making in women's tattooed bodies

Tattooed women's practices of resistance and conformity are constituted within social, cultural, and historical contexts that produce normative values around “good” and “bad” tattoos. Tattoos enable the performance of multiple femininities, constructing the female body in a way that is personal and meaningful to that individual and opening an agentic space in which they can do so. The vast majority of research that is available on tattoos concerns mostly men or, at least, does not fully understand the implications of specific gendered discourses that regulate the (feminine) body. In this paper, we argue that meaning‐making for women's tattoos serves to function as legitimating, producing tattooed feminine bodies as more acceptable. We argue for a closer examination of the regulatory discourses that feed into the choices that women make in relation to their tattooed bodies.     

Organic imagination as intuitive intellect: Self‐knowledge and self‐constitution in Hegel's early critique of Kant

This paper concerns Hegel's early treatment of the productive imagination in his 1803–1804 Faith and Knowledge. I show how he articulates that activity in terms of a pair of speculative unities, which solve lingering problems of self‐knowledge and self‐constitution from Kant's B‐deduction. On the one hand, I argue that the familiar unity of spontaneity and receptivity makes possible knowledge of the moment of self‐positing. On the other hand, I contend that Hegel's talk of imagination as both an “organic idea” and an “intuitive intellect” refers to a self‐constituting capacity that intellects like ours possess. I show that self‐constitution is possible, for Hegel, only in so far as intellects like ours possess a capacity to unify possibility and actuality in thought, or to think themselves into being.     

D. Z. Phillips and Wittgenstein's On Certainty

I start from Phillips' discussion of Rhees's dissatisfaction with the idea of a language‐game. Then, from a rereading of Moore, I go on to exemplify interconnected uses of the expressions “language‐game,”“recurrent procedure,”“world‐picture,”“formal procedure,”“agreement in judgment,”“genre picture” and “form of life.” The discussion is related to sense perception, our knowledge of time and space, and the picture‐theory. These topics connect with Wittgenstein's earlier treatment of the will – which changed markedly later. The subtext (in footnotes) confronts (i) the sceptical methods of Descartes and Hume with the grammatical methods of Leibniz, Kant and Wittgenstein, and (ii) the realism of Leibniz and the Tractatus with the transcendental idealism of Kant. My conclusion is that, although the method of Wittgenstein's later work remains in a sense grammatical, (i) in its new form it can free us from the conviction that the intellect can and must resolve one way or the other the conflicts that arise in the course of the latter confrontation, and that (ii), although release from such a conviction is to be seen as the aim of philosophical discourse in general, it allows philosophy to retain its overriding significance. A positive element in that lies in the respect the method demands for that in a human life which is transcendental to the activity of scientific theorising: respect, therefore, for the unique perspective of the individual historical agent.     

CREATED CO-CREATOR IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF CHURCH AND ETHICS

Abstract Philip Hefner's work on created co‐creator is presented for consideration as a contemporary theological anthropology. Its reception within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America falls into three main lines, which are reviewed here because they are suggestive of its potential impact on Christian thinking. This review raises two major questions and leads to a critique. The first question is whether created co‐creator should be replaced by another term for the sake of more clearly encapsulating the ideas represented in Hefner's work. The second question concerns the moral “payoff” of created co‐creator. Such questions lead to the critique that Hefner's corpus gives insufficient attention to responsibility as integral to freedom and that it lacks a theory of obligation. I then sketch the amenability and benefit of linking created co‐creator with “responsibility ethics,” exemplified by the work of Hans Jonas.     

Putting the Protest Back into Protestant

When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church on 31 October 1517, he did so in protest at abuses in Catholic theology and practice. Contemporary times, too, call for protest. The first “protest” concerns the revitalization of education and an increased commitment to intellectual excellence. The second “protest” concerns a recovery of Luther as a figure of protest. While scholars have tamed Luther's dangerous doctrines, the popular imagination still perceives him as an urban legend who spoke truth to power. An expansive notion of scholarship on Luther is required in order to approach a Luther who continues to inspire people around the world. The third “protest” is a critical protest of Luther's religious intolerance, specifically his anti‐Judaism. Christian theologians must acknowledge Luther's anti‐Judaism as central to his theology and radically revise this legacy to promote justice in inter‐religious relations.     

Vulnerability by Marriage: Okin's Radical Feminist Critique of Structural Gender Inequality

The central thesis of Susan Okin's Justice, Gender, and the Family—that the ideology of the traditional family is the linchpin of contemporary gender inequality in the US—remains significant more than a quarter‐century after the book's publication. On a political register, Okin's insistence on structural analysis of gender inequality is an important corrective to recent mainstream feminist emphasis on individual women's choices. On an academic register, her work reveals the incoherence of scholarly classifications of feminist theories as “liberal feminist” or “radical feminist” by confounding such distinctions. I argue that her thesis is best understood in relation to the early radical feminism of Juliet Mitchell's Woman's Estate, a book Okin praised. Placing Okin's work in the context of its radical roots clarifies her “linchpin thesis,” but also reveals the limitations of her argument: in her emphasis on what Iris Young has termed the “distributive paradigm of justice,” Okin unnecessarily adopts a much narrower definition of the family than did Mitchell, and overestimates the influence of economic vulnerability after divorce on women's capacity to exit marriage. I suggest modifications to her theory, and conclude by showing the continuing relevance of her argument for analyzing recent legal, policy, and demographic shifts.     

Quine on the Nature of Naturalism

Quine's metaphilosophical naturalism is often dismissed as overly “scientistic.” Many contemporary naturalists reject Quine's idea that epistemology should become a “chapter of psychology” (1969a, 83) and urge for a more “liberal,” “pluralistic,” and/or “open‐minded” naturalism instead. Still, whenever Quine explicitly reflects on the nature of his naturalism, he always insists that his position is modest and that he does not “think of philosophy as part of natural science” (1993, 10). Analyzing this tension, Susan Haack has argued that Quine's naturalism contains a “deep‐seated and significant ambivalence” (1993a, 353). In this paper, I argue that a more charitable interpretation is possible—a reading that does justice to Quine's own pronouncements on the issue. I reconstruct Quine's position and argue (i) that Haack and Quine, in their exchanges, have been talking past each other and (ii) that once this mutual misunderstanding is cleared up, Quine's naturalism turns out to be more modest, and hence less scientistic, than many contemporary naturalists have presupposed. I show that Quine's naturalism is first and foremost a rejection of the transcendental. It is only after adopting a broadly science‐immanent perspective that Quine, in regimenting our language, starts making choices that many contemporary philosophers have argued to be unduly restrictive.     

Altruistic love in psychoanalysis opportunities and resistance

Many patients manifest a desire to help the analyst. This is usually understood as being derivative of defensive aims or in the service of other primary motivations. This paper argues for the developmental and clinical importance of primary altruistic aims, which are often warded off by the patient because of his or her fears of exploitation or rejection. Several pathogenic beliefs and varieties of psychopathology result from the failure of the patient's caretakers to allow the child to contribute to their welfare, to “take”; the child's “help.”; Similarly, some patients require tangible evidence that they are having a positive impact on their analyst. Ordinary “good‐enough”; technique often reinforces the patient's view that he or she has nothing to offer. A full appreciation by the analyst of the importance to patients of having their altruistic gestures and concerns recognized and accepted can open up possibilities for analytic progress and therapeutic growth. Various sources of resistance to and misunderstanding of these dynamics are explored, ranging from ethical concerns to certain traits that cluster in the personalities of analysts.     

The Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today's World

Pope Francis's Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium has much to teach both Catholics and other Christians about the way the gospel needs to be proclaimed in today's world. This article first outlines five implications of the document for gospel preaching: the embodiment of the gospel in the church, a message of joy, a message of mercy and tenderness, a contextualized message, and a message in solidarity with the poor. It then sketches four prospects of these implications in terms of the church. The message calls for a church of “missionary disciples,” a church that is “poor and for the poor,” a de‐clericalized church, and a church of dialogue.     

UNIVERSITY WITH CONDITIONS: A DECONSTRUCTIVE READING OF DERRIDA'S “THE UNIVERSITY WITHOUT CONDITION”

The possibility of a Derridian theory of the university lies not in the discussion of the “as if” in “The University without Condition” but, rather, in a theoretical crack that Derrida's book promised to elucidate—between the “as if” and the “perhaps,” the performative and the event, transcendence and immanence. Moreover, we see a kind of rupture between this book and numerous texts from the 1970s and 80s, which are collected and published under the title of Right to Philosophy. Here lies a real philosophical stake. We see between the early Derrida and the later Derrida not only an ethico‐political turn but also, so to speak, a radical transition from the problematic of institution or case law (jurisprudence) to the axiomatic of law (loi) by aggravation of the transcendental.     

Distinctive Preferences Toward Risk in the Substantive Domain of Sociality*

As with standard models of rationality, theorists generally treat prospect theory's demonstration of risk aversion in gains but risk tolerance in losses as domain‐general. Yet evolutionary psychology suggests that natural selection has designed a domain specific cognitive architecture—with systems specialized for some substantive domains but not others. Here we address risky choices through that lens asking whether humans' risk responses dispose them to enter social relationships even when doing so is counter to normative rationality and regardless of whether the “enter” versus “not enter” choice is framed as between gains and losses. Laboratory findings in five sites across three countries provide a positive answer to both possibilities. Participants could enter or not enter inherently risky social relationships. They were more willing to enter such relationships than rational choice models would predict and were equally so willing regardless of whether equivalent alternatives were framed as gains and as losses. With the “social context” extracted in otherwise identical games, participants' risk responses were consistent with prospect theory. The present findings suggest the possibility of adaptations designed to facilitate sociality—despite its risks and how those risks are framed.     

Moral (dis)engagement with anthropogenic climate change in online comments on newspaper articles

Anthropogenic climate change (ACC) is widely acknowledged to be morally significant, but little is known about everyday moralising around ACC. We addressed this gap via quantified thematic analysis of 300 online comments to British newspaper articles on ACC, drawing on Bandura's moral disengagement theory. Moral disengagement through denial of ACC was widespread. Other disengagement strategies, such as palliative comparison and diminishing agency, occurred less often. There was also some moral engagement, most often through assertions of the existence of ACC and/or its harmful effects. Moral disengagement was significantly more common in comments on right wing than left wing newspapers, whereas the opposite was true of moral engagement. Although Bandura's framework provided a useful starting point to make sense of ACC moralising, it did not capture moral concerns that extended beyond its “harm/care” remit. In particular, many “denial” comments included a “dishonesty” discourse, whereby ACC proponents were accused of deception for ulterior motives. To classify this discourse as moral disengagement obscures its engagement with a different set of moral issues around trust and honesty. We suggest that Bandura's theory represents one possible “moral landscape” around ACC and could be extended to encompass a broader range of moral concerns.     

Freedom from and Freedom for: Luther's Concept of Freedom for the Twenty‐First Century

This article examines Martin Luther's two fundamental claims around Christian freedom. Drawing on Luther, I suggest three primary characteristics of Christian freedom that should be recovered and championed in our twenty‐first‐century context: it is relational, it is a gift; and it contains within it an ethical imperative for the sake of the neighbor. Together, these three characteristics point to the fact that in a Christian understanding, “freedom” is never considered by itself, but only in the larger context of “freedom from” and “freedom for.”     

Apocalyptic Specularity in Dante's Eschatology: Narcissus and the Imagination of Salvation

Dante's Commedia provides a performative eschatology or “apocalyptic specularity” that shows well how to keep concerns for apophasis, imagination, and salvation in balance. His literary appreciation for mirroring enables him to re‐present and imitate revelation. Displaying a metaphysically robust imagination, Dante's eschatology is akin to the biblical genre of apocalypse. Dantean analogy—personal and historical while theological and apocalyptical—resists tendencies to account for theology in reducibly negativist terms. The Divine Comedy hopes for the salvation of Narcissus, whose figure reflects the “everyman,” who would furthermore reflect even the triune God.     

Situating Experience: Agency,Perception, and the Given

William Alston has been a long‐time critic of the arguments of Wilfrid Sellars, and he has recently revisited the arguments made by Sellars in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” Alston's work attempts to show how Sellarsian views fail to account for our understanding of perception by making a two‐part attack on Sellars's account: part one of the attack takes up the Sellarsian approach to ‘looks’‐talk, and part two concerns Sellars's thoroughgoing conceptualism with regard to perception. In this article, I argue that there is much in Alston's view that does violence to our understanding of theoretical and practical reason by removing concepts (and thereby constraint by norms) from perception, and I show that Alston's two‐pronged attack fails due to its inadequate reading of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” and its problematic underlying epistemology.