基督宗教、马克思主义和"历史终结"--以解放神学为例串起的历史分析

本文以解放神学为例考察了基督宗教与马克思主义的内在关联性,对中国基督宗教的处境化作了初步的分析。     

Liberation Theology After the End of History: An Exchange

Book Reviewed in this article:
Daniel M. Bell, Liberation Theology After the End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering     

Men of Stone and Children of Struggle: Latin American Liberationists at the End of History

This article critiques the political theory of Latin American liberationists and suggests a theological source of resistance to the regnant capitalist order. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, the liberationists' commitment to politcs as statecraft, manifest originally in the hopes of seizing the state and more recently in the praise of an emergent civil society, is shown to be unable to resist paranational hyper capitalism. Instead, liberationists should reconsider the church as a public, as a social, political, economic formation in its own right. Toward this end they might learn from the Christian base communities.     

Psychology and the End of History: A Critique and a Proposal for the Psychology of Social Categorization

This paper suggests that self-categories provide the basis for political action, that those who wish to organize political activity do so through the ways in which they construct self-categories, and that political domination may be achieved through reifying social categories and therefore denying alternative ways of social being. Hence, the way in which social psychology approaches the matter of self-categorization provides a touchstone for its politics. To the extent that we too take categories for granted, we are in danger of supporting conservative and undemocratic politics. The only way to eschew tendencies toward reification within social psychology is to add a historical dimension to our own analysis of self-categorical processes.     

The Renaissance of Francis Bacon

The program of intervening, manipulating, constructing and creating is central to natural and engineering sciences. A renewed wave of interest in this program has emerged within the recent practices and discourse of nano-technoscience. However, it is striking that, framed from the perspective of well-established epistemologies, the constructed technoscientific objects and engineered things remain invisible. Their ontological and epistemological status is unclear. The purpose of the present paper is to support present-day approaches to techno-objects (“ontology”) insofar as they make these hidden objects epistemologically perceivable. To accomplish this goal, it is inspiring to look back to the origin of the project of modernity and to its founding father: Francis Bacon. The thesis is that everything we need today for an adequate (dialectic-materialist), ontologically well-informed epistemology of technoscience can be found in the works of Bacon—this position will be called epistemological real-constructivism. Rather than describing it as realist or constructivist, empiricist or rationalist, Bacon’s position can best be understood as real-constructivist since it challenges modern dichotomies, including the dichotomy between epistemology and ontology. Such real-constructive turn might serve to promote the acknowledgement that natural and engineering sciences, in particular recent technosciences, are creating and producing the world we live in. Reflection upon the contemporary relevance of Bacon is intended as a contribution to the expanding and critical discussion on nano-technoscience.     

Francis Xavier: Figure of Exile and Holiness

Abstract

Francis Xavier was one of the great Christian figures of the 16th century. The aim of this article is to delineate some of the important, and sometimes underemphasised, influences on his life in order to help shed light on the motivation which inspired his activities. It sets him first within a brief account of his family background, university education and life-changing friendship with Ignatius Loyola, which is described as generating ‘the undying archetype of the twin, with Loyola at the centre of the universe and Xavier at its periphery, complementing each other as perfectly as the point and the circle’. Against the background of ‘ever-present’ Islam, it then addresses Xavier's experiences with the corrupt and rather secularised Portuguese colonial environment in India and East Asia, and the royal ecclesiastical patronage exercised under the Padroado system, which led him to the role of a ‘counter-figure’ an exile or castaway, lançado or degregado. Japanese culture and religion and Xavier's fascination with China are two further areas explored. Permeating this account is the question of the nature of Xavier's spiritual life and personal holiness, within which his adventurous voyages may ultimately be seen as an immense pilgrimage and as the sign of a sanctity that was augmented rather than diminished by the obscurity of his death.     

The End of the Known World

The End of the Known world is the author's name for a limestone escarpment in Wyoming's Big Horn Mountains. Its location remains unnamed on any map. Over a period of twenty years, its physical and spiritual power has lured her many times to travel on foot to this precipice. As she hikes this time, however, new questions arise: What is it about certain places that calls to us? Do they sometimes wish we would leave them alone? What is the meaning of sacred space? On this journey, the author, now in her sixties, poses these questions to the genius loci, the Greek term for the particular spirit that inhabits sacred locations here on earth. As she hikes over difficult terrain, the author confronts some unexpected physical changes, such as a lack of balance when moving down a steep incline. These bodily changes parallel environmental changes, such as bark beetle damage to many Douglas fir trees that, on her first visit, stood tall and strong at the End of the Known World. The completion of her journey, however, reveals important discoveries. Mollusk fossils inscribed into limestone remain as evidence that the ground on which she stands was once an ancient sea. Eastward, over the Big Horn Basin, soft stripes of gray, blue, and white obscure the horizon, where Mother Earth marries Father Sky. The voice of the genius loci speaks of the love between person and place, and of the impermanence of all things.     

幻象：世界的终结

我很不情愿把你所提的问题①中所包含的危机符号戏剧化。相反,请让我在本世纪初的一个哲学本和我们当下的忧思之间展开一种比较。《纯粹现象学和现象学哲学观念》之第一卷,是胡塞尔在第一次世界大战前一年出版的,也是他生前所发表这部巨的惟一一卷。这部巨从一问世就让他的追随不胜困惑。