The Tragic and Faith in Pastoral Counseling

This essay uses Edward Farley's notion of the interrelation of tragic vulnerability and creation and Niebuhr's idea of faith in offering a conceptualization of the process and goals of pastoral counseling. Openness, novelty, separation, and change, which characterize creative activity, give rise to anxiety, fear, and suffering as created entities seek to achieve their ends and needs amidst the limits of life. Faith as vital concern—defined as human and transcendent relations marked by reciprocal belief, hope, trust, and fidelity—is a response that represents participation and cooperation in creative activity with its concomitant anxiety and suffering. Pastoral counseling may be understood as an activity that facilitates a response of faith as vital concern. The process of pastoral counseling involves three essential and interrelated tasks. First, the counselor invites the person to experience present and past painful disappointments, losses, and betrayals. Second, the counselor invites the client to explore the types of trust and fidelity that are distorted and diminish his or her capacities for risking intimacy, spontaneity, and freedom. The third task is learning to recognize, contain, and work through the inevitable disappointments, broken promises, frustrations, and betrayals encountered in human relationships. Thus the work of pastoral counseling involves reciprocal experiences of belief, hope, trust, and fidelity, which provide the essential and necessary ground through which persons develop a) the capacities for and experiences of spontaneity, awe, and freedom, b) the ability to handle and work through experiences and perceptions of distrust and infidelity, and c) a sense of subjective and intersubjective identity, continuity, and cohesion.     

Habitus and the storied self: Religious faith and practice as a dynamic means of consolidating identities

It is increasingly argued that individuals comprise multiple selves, and from this it follows that they manifest many identities. During my research among British Quakers, I found that there is, furthermore, an implicit tendency to articulate these several selves in order to promote, consciously and/or unconsciously, a measure of coherence, of unity, and of harmony. Newcomers to meeting on Sunday mornings came with identities that they presented either overtly or covertly as disjointed or lacking coherence, because of their experience of other faiths or perhaps because of the absence of ‘religion’ in their lives. It is possible that their participation in the Quaker meeting provided a means by which their several identities might be brought into consonance. We might say that the storied selves that individuals plotted separately came increasingly under the rubric of a single, overarching narrative, signified for example in the expression ‘coming home’. Switching metaphors, the Quaker meeting as habitus provided the several scales from which individuals constructed or improvised their own score. Although I would not claim that this is a neat, linear process open to precise analysis and theoretical closure, it does seem suggestive of a dynamism in identity formation prompted by the re‐discovery of religious faith and practice that may be pervasive in late modern societies.     

Making sense of ourselves: self-narratives and personal identity

Some philosophers take personal identity to be a matter of self-narrative. I argue, to the contrary, that self-narrative views cannot stand alone as views of personal (or numerical) identity. First, I consider Dennett’s self-narrative view, according to which selves are fictional characters—abstractions, like centers of gravity—generated by brains. Neural activity is to be interpreted from the intentional stance as producing a story. I argue that this is implausible. The inadequacy is masked by Dennett’s ambiguous use of ‘us’: sometimes ‘us’ refers to real human beings, and sometimes ‘us’ refers to selves or fictional characters. Second, I consider Schechtmann’s view that self-narratives create persons (in the sense that she calls ‘characterization’ or personality. I argue that the sense in which a self-narrative creates a person cannot stand on its own: a person must already exist (in the sense of numerical identity) in order for there to be a self-narrative. Finally, I offer my own account of persons.     

Closed Causal Loops and the Bilking Argument

The most potentially powerful objection to the possibility oftime travel stems from the fact that it can, under the right conditions, give rise to closedcausal loops, and closed causal loops can be turned into self-defeating causal chains;folks killing their infant selves, setting out to destroy the world before they were born,and the like. It used to be thought that such chains present paradoxes; the receivedwisdom nowadays is that they give rise to physical anomalies in the form of inexplicably correlated events. I argue against the received wisdom. I can find nothing in them that argues against the possibility (even, the probability) of time travel.     

The role of social identity processes in mass emergency behaviour: An integrative review

This review provides a new integration of recent research that has formed the basis of a social identity explanation of supportive collective behaviour among survivors in emergencies and disasters. I describe a model in which a sense of common fate is the source of an emergent shared social identity among survivors, which in turn provides the motivation to give social support to others affected. In addition, by drawing on the concept of relational transformation in psychological crowds, I show how an emergent shared social identity can engender a range of further behavioural and cognitive consequences that contribute to collective self-organisation in emergencies, including expected support, coordination of behaviour, and collective efficacy. It will be argued that the model can been applied to explaining how potentially dangerous crowd events avoid disaster: shared social identity operates as the basis of spontaneous self-organisation in these cases, as in many emergencies and disasters.     

Collective Obligations: Their Existence,Their Explanatory Power,and Their Supervenience on the Obligations of Individuals

In this paper I discuss a number of different relationships between two kinds of (moral) obligation: those which have individuals as their subject, and those which have groups of individuals as their subject. I use the name collective obligations to refer to obligations of the second sort. I argue that there are collective obligations, in this sense; that such obligations can give rise to and explain obligations which fall on individuals; that because of these facts collective obligations are not simply reducible to individual obligations; and that collective obligations supervene on individual obligations, without being reducible to them. The sort of supervenience I have in mind here is what is sometimes called ‘global supervenience’. In other words, there cannot be two worlds which differ in respect of the collective obligations which exist in them without also differing in respect of the individual obligations which exist in them.     

Structural correspondence between theories and convergence to truth

While “scientism” is typically regarded as a position about the exclusive epistemic authority of science held by a certain class of “cultured despisers” of “religion”, we show that only on the assumption of this sort of view do purportedly “scientific” claims made by proponents of “intelligent design” appear to lend epistemic or apologetic support to claims affirmed about God and God’s action in “creation” by Christians in confessing their “faith”. On the other hand, the hermeneutical strategy that better describes the practice and method of Christian theologians, from the inception of theological reflection in the Christian tradition, acknowledges the epistemic authority of the best available tests for truth in areas of human inquiry such as science and history. But this strategy does not assume that such tests, whose authority must be regarded as provisional, provides authority for the warrant of affirming claims constituting the confessed “faith”. By attributing theological import to claims advanced by appeal to the best available tests for truth in the practice of science, supporters of ID not only confuse the epistemic authority of these tests with the normative authority of a faith community’s confessional identity, but impute to scientific tests for truth a sort of authority that even goes beyond the “methodological naturalism” against which they counterpose their claims.     

Reply to Meyers,Cahoone, Colapietro,and Pratt

This paper responds to four commentators (Diana Tietjens Meyers, Lawrence Cahoone, Vincent Colapietro, and Scott L. Pratt) on my book The Network Self: Relation, Process, and Personal Identity (2019). Aspects of the book focused on and about which I respond include reflexive communication (Meyers); identity and integrity (Cahoone); embodiment, self-deception, and autonomy (Colapietro); and social location and power (Pratt). I also clarify my strategy in the book, namely, to shift the ontological framework away from the dualistic mind/body or psychological/animalist distinction and embrace the idea that as relational processes selves are particular kinds of natural complexes (to use a term from Justus Buchler). In doing so, I aim to avoid metaphysically narrow views of human selves or persons, and to provide a framework for conceptualizing selves in both abstract and practical terms.     

Religious Queer People Beyond Identity Conflict: Lessons from Orthodox LGBT Jews in Israel

A key thread of research on how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons of faith navigate and make sense of gender and sexual identities and desires that defy their religious traditions’ teachings focuses on identity conflict, management, negotiation, and reconciliation. Drawing on interviews with 64 Orthodox Jewish same-sex attracted persons in Israel, supplemented by physical and digital ethnographic data, I argue that the conflict frame is empirically imprecise and conceptually flawed. I demonstrate fluidity and ambivalence vis-à-vis religiosity and sexual identity and argue that ambivalence is generative: In the process of making sense of their sexual and religious selves, my respondents challenge what it means to be Orthodox and what it means to be same-sex attracted, thereby challenging the conflict frame's categorical schema. I then make the case for a more contextualized and dynamic framework for theorizing LGBT negotiations of religious and sexual identities. I also observe that the limitations of the conflict lens are symptomatic of broader tendencies in the sociology of religion to rely on U.S. and Christian cases and a pattern of limited engagement with work in other disciplines and subdisciplines.     

Proxy Agency in Collective Action

This paper gives an account of proxy agency in the context of collective action. It takes the case of a group announcing something by way of a spokesperson as an illustration. In proxy agency, it seems that one person or subgroup's doing something counts as orconstitutes or is recognized as (tantamount to) another person or group's doing something. Proxy agency is pervasive in institutional action. It has been taken to be a straightforward counterexample to an appealing deflationary view of collective action as a matter of all members of a group making a contribution to bringing about some event. I show that this is a mistake. I give a deflationary account of constitutive rules in terms of essentially collective action types. I then give an account of one form of constitutive agency in terms of constitutive rules. I next give an account of status functions—of which being a spokesperson is one—that also draws on the concept of a constitutive rule. I then show how these materials help us to see how proxy agency is an expression of the agency of all members of the group credited with doing something when the proxy acts.     

Collective Reasoning and the Discursive Dilemma

Abstract

The paper begins with a discussion of Philip Pettit's distinction between individualistic and collectivistic reasoning strategies. I argue that many of his examples, when correctly analysed, do not give rise to what he calls the discursive dilemma. I argue for a collectivistic strategy, which is a holistic premise-driven strategy. I will concentrate on three aspects of collective reasoning, which I call the publicity aspect, the collective acceptance aspect, and the historical constraint aspect: First, the premises of collective reasoning, unlike the premises of a private individual, have to be public in some sense. Second, the group members collectively accept the public premises, and thereby commit themselves to following them in their collective practical reasoning.Third, a person need not be consistent with his earlier private judgements, he is free to change his mind, but prior collective judgements, if not collectively abandoned, constrain the member's future judgements and decisions. I conclude that collective practical reasoning can be accounted for without collectivist ontological commitments.     

Is Patriotism an Associative Duty?

Associative duties—duties inherent to some of our relationships—are most commonly discussed in terms of intimate associations such as of families, friends, or lovers. In this essay I ask whether impersonal associations such as state or nation can also give rise to genuinely associative duties, i.e., duties of patriotism or nationalism. I distinguish between the two in terms of their objects: the object of patriotism is an institutionalized political community, whereas the object of nationalism is a group of people who share a common identity, often grounded in a belief in shared history, and an aspiration for collective self-government together. I explore three arguments for the thesis that a special concern for one’s polity and fellow-citizens, or one’s nation and co-nationals, is an associative duty: from reciprocity, from collective self-determination, and from the well-being of compatriots or co-nationals. I argue that the relationship among compatriots is a more plausible contender for generating associative duties than the relationship among co-nationals, although even in this case there are questions whether these are genuinely associative duties, or simply special duties. Although the relationship among co-nationals is a less plausible contender for associative duties, the well-being argument does apply to the relationship among both co-nationals and compatriots. I also suggest that there is a certain privileging of the status quo in the way that associative duties arguments work, because they tend to operate from existing relations and associations.     

Is Narrative Identity Four‐Dimensionalist?

The claim that selves are narratively constituted has attained considerable currency in both analytic and continental philosophy. However, a set of increasingly standard objections to narrative identity are also emerging. In this paper, I focus on metaphysically realist versions of narrative identity theory, showing how they both build on and differ from their neo‐Lockean counterparts. But I also argue that narrative realism is implicitly committed to a four‐dimensionalist, temporal‐parts ontology of persons. That exposes narrative realism to the charge that the narratively constituted self, on the one hand, and the self that is the object of much of our everyday self‐reference and self‐experience, on the other, can't be the same thing. This conclusion may well force narrativists to abandon metaphysical realism about narrative selves—which, in turn, may leave the invocation of ‘narrativity’ as identity‐constituting somewhat under‐motivated.     

Role of Religious Attendance and Identity Conflict in Psychological Well-being

A sample of individuals who identified as gay or lesbian were administered measures of church attendance, their religious organization’s view of homosexuality, perceived conflict between religious faith identity and sexual orientation identity, social support, depression, and generalized anxiety. Among participants who rated their church as rejecting of homosexuality, greater frequency of attendance was related to a higher incidence of GAD symptoms, but not depression. No correlation was found for those attending accepting faith communities. Those who attend rejecting faith communities attended services less often, experienced greater identity conflict, and reported significantly less social support than those of the Accepted group. Regression analyses indicated that identity conflict and social support did not fully account for the relationship between attendance and GAD symptoms. Overall, findings from the current study support previous suggestions that participation in conservative or rejecting religious communities may adversely affect the emotional well-being of GL individuals.     

Emotional Schemas and Self-Help: Homework Compliance and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Many patients will either refuse to enter treatment or will drop out of treatment where exposure and response prevention (ERP) are employed. Patients may have a number of “good reasons” for noncompliance with ERP. For example, they may view their intrusions as conveying responsibility, reflecting higher threat, as personally relevant, and as requiring perfect and certain solutions. Inducing anxiety, from this perspective, only exacerbates the “problem.” Moreover, patients may employ beliefs about emotion and anxiety that conflict with exposure—such as the belief that anxiety should always be avoided or decreased because it is assumed to rise indefinitely and cause psychological harm. Homework or between-session self-help necessarily involves exposure with increased anxiety and discomfort. In the current case study, both meta-cognitive and meta-emotional conceptualization and strategies were employed in the treatment of a previously treatment-resistant case of OCD, and homework compliance was improved through the use of an emotional schema approach.     

THE MORAL LEGACY OF COMMUNAL WRONGS: ETHNIC IDENTITY GROUPS AND INTERGENERATIONAL MORAL SENTIMENT

Abstract: Many individuals experience feelings of collective guilt or shame for the blameworthy historical acts of the nations or ethnic groups to which they belong. I reject the idea that collective moral sentiment rests on inherited moral responsibility. I suggest that the possibilities for individual action inherent in membership in ethnic identity groups can be a source of special moral duties. I argue that collective guilt and shame are moral emotions that individuals experience in response to complex assessments of their groups' histories and of their own practical responses to those histories. The approach I take to analyzing the concept of an ethnic identity group makes use of tools developed by Max Weber. Weber's conceptual work on social groups and related phenomena has been strongly criticized in a widely discussed book by Margaret Gilbert. I show that Gilbert's arguments fail to discredit Weberian analyses of social groups and their properties.     

The Temporally Extended Self: The Relation of Past and Future Selves to Current Identity,Motivation, and Goal Pursuit

People's current identity is constructed not only in the present moment but also by looking back to past selves and forward to future selves. In this article, we review research on the temporally extended self, with a focus on recent work informed by temporal self‐appraisal theory. People often recall the past and imagine the future in ways that contribute to a favorable current identity. Subjective temporal distance (how near or distant a point in time feels) plays a powerful role in determining temporal self‐appraisals. In turn, people's judgments of subjective distance can shift when considering temporal selves with good or bad implications for current identity. We will describe research exploring the complex interconnections between past, present, and future identity. In addition, we consider some of the unique implications that people's constructions of future selves might have for their plans and goals, and how predicted selves might influence goal‐pursuit motivation and behavior.     

The Dutch Identity: A new tool for the study of item response models

The Dutch Identity is a useful way to reexpress the basic equations of item response models that relate the manifest probabilities to the item response functions (IRFs) and the latent trait distribution. The identity may be exploited in several ways. For example: (a) to suggest how item response models behave for large numbers of items—they are approximate submodels of second-order loglinear models for 2 ^J tables; (b) to suggest new ways to assess the dimensionality of the latent trait—principle components analysis of matrices composed of second-order interactions from loglinear models; (c) to give insight into the structure of latent class models; and (d) to illuminate the problem of identifying the IRFs and the latent trait distribution from sample data.This research was supported in part by contract number N00014-87-K-0730 from the Cognitive Science Program of the Office of Naval Research. I realized the usefulness of the identity in Theorem 1 while lecturing in the Netherlands during October, 1986. Because this was in no small part due to the stimulating psychometric atmosphere there, I call the result the Dutch Identity.