The Liberating Awareness

The purpose of this article is to reflect on the search for racial justice as a call from God, using biblical readings and documents produced by the World Council of Churches (WCC). It is anchored in the increasingly intense challenges that emerge in this respect in Brazil, a country whose Indigenous peoples were annihilated in its colonization process, and which up until the 19th century received the largest flow of enslaved Africans in the world. The article combines the Latin American methodology “See, Judge, Act” with the theological methodology of the WCC's Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace and its three steps: “Celebrating Gifts,” “Visiting the Wounds,” and “Transforming Injustice.” The first part of the paper reflects the “See” and exposes the expressions of everyday racism in Brazil. The second part presents the “Judge,” seeking references to the challenge of racial justice in the Bible and in ecumenical reflection. The third and final section, “Act,” reflects on the possibility for transforming racial injustices, sharing experiences from Brazil as well as one of the Pilgrim Team Visits organized by the WCC in 2019.     

Understanding Liberals and Conservatives

It is helpful to teach students of religion and theology that it's not just the teachings and practices of a religion that are important, but the way in which these beliefs and practices are handled that's critical, whether in a liberal or a conservative way. Recent work in Cognitive Linguistics has helped pastors and religion teachers introduce this other dimension of their subject in new ways.     

Liberating Ecological Reason Through Interdisciplinarity

The theory and practice of ecological reason have consistently suffered various shortcomings, versions of anthropocentrism and holism prominent among them. Even definitions of ecological reason that rely on philosophically informed policy studies and that explicitly take the functional and substantive moments of reason into account have not escaped these problems. An account of interdisciplinarity can shed light on how these intractable problems arise, since many of them fail to build interdisciplinarity as such sufficiently into the definition of ecological reason. Genuine interdisciplinarity, distinguished from both multidisciplinarity and metadisciplinarity, can thus be seen to be necessary (not sufficient) to liberate ecological reason and to illuminate its theory and practice for late moderns.     

Liberating Language in Linji and Wittgenstein

Our aim in this paper is to explicate some unexpected and striking similarities and equally important differences, which have not been discussed in the literature, between Wittgenstein's methodology and the approach of Chinese Chan or Japanese Zen Buddhism. We say ‘unexpected’ similarities because it is not a common practice, especially in the analytic tradition, to invest very much in comparative philosophy. The peculiarity of this study will be further accentuated in the view of those of the ‘old school’ who see Wittgenstein as a logical positivist, and Zen as a religious excuse for militarism or sadomasochism. If the second claim were true, the following investigation would not only be futile but also impossible. That the first claim, concerning the ‘old school’ perspective on Wittgenstein, is incorrect, we will demonstrate in the ensuing discussion. By now more experts have come to accept this claim and we hope that our comparative perspective will add even more momentum.     

Liberating Effects of Losing Executive Control

ABSTRACT— Across numerous domains, research has consistently linked decreased capacity for executive control to negative outcomes. Under some conditions, however, this deficit may translate into gains: When individuals' regulatory strategies are maladaptive, depletion of the resource fueling such strategies may facilitate positive outcomes, both intra- and interpersonally. We tested this prediction in the context of contentious intergroup interaction, a domain characterized by regulatory practices of questionable utility. White participants discussed approaches to campus diversity with a White or Black partner immediately after performing a depleting or control computer task. In intergroup encounters, depleted participants enjoyed the interaction more, exhibited less inhibited behavior, and seemed less prejudiced to Black observers than did control participants—converging evidence of beneficial effects. Although executive capacity typically sustains optimal functioning, these results indicate that, in some cases, it also can obstruct positive outcomes, not to mention the potential for open dialogue regarding divisive social issues.     

Liberating Moral Traditions: Saga Morality and Aristotle's Megalopsychia

It is a matter for both surprise and disappointment that so little has been written from a philosophical perspective about the moral tradition enshrined in Europe's oldest living literature, the Icelandic sagas. The main purpose of the present essay is to start to ameliorate this shortcoming by analysing and assessing the moral code bequeathed to us by the saga literature. To do so, I draw attention to the striking similarities between saga morality and what tends to be called an 'ancient moral outlook' (with special reference to Aristotle's much-maligned virtue of megalopsychia) and then try to defend the credentials of both outlooks in so far as they clash, or seem to clash, with certain aspects of a 'modern moral outlook.'     

Liberals, moderates and jihadists: protesting Danish cartoons in Indonesia

Muslim liberals, moderates, and radical “jihadists,” together with the Indonesian government, condemned Danish caricatures of Prophet Muhammad as insulting and hateful. However, the form of protest of these diverse segments of Indonesian Muslims was shaped by their ideological frameworks and political agendas. The “mainstream” of Indonesia’s increasingly radical “moderate” Muslim community, as represented by Nahdlatul Ulama, Muhammadiyah, and the Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS), squarely condemned the images within their particular perspectives, while distancing themselves from the “anarchist” radical demonstrators. The Liberal Islam Network (JIL), dedicated to fighting against “fundamentalists,” pointed out the role of detrimental fundamentalisms around the world. Several small radical groups, MMI, FPI and HTI actively staged street demonstrations fitting this case into their ideological framework of jihad, defending Islam, and/or striving for an Islamic state. These varied responses are better understood as integral to ongoing processes of radicalization, liberalization, and cultural and politico-jural Islamization.

Sexual Morality: The Cultures and Emotions of Conservatives and Liberals1

Political conservatives and liberals were interviewed about 3 kinds of sexual acts: homosexual sex, unusual forms of masturbation, and consensual incest between an adult brother and sister. Conservatives were more likely to moralize and to condemn these acts, but the differences were concentrated in the homosexual scenarios and were minimal in the incest scenarios. Content analyses reveal that liberals had a narrow moral domain, largely limited to the “ethics of autonomy” (Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 1997) while conservatives had a broader and more multifaceted moral domain. Regression analyses show that, for both groups, moral judgments were best predicted by affective reactions, and were not predicted by perceptions of harmfulness. Suggestions for calming the culture wars over homosexuality are discussed.     

Deep Alignment with Country Shrinks the Moral Gap Between Conservatives and Liberals

Moral foundations theory suggests that relative to liberals, conservatives care more about values that are believed to bind group members together: loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and purity/degradation. In contrast, we propose that individuals who are deeply aligned (“fused”) with their group should display elevated commitment to group‐oriented moral values, regardless of their political orientation. The results of three studies supported this hypothesis. The tendency for conservatives to endorse the binding foundations more than liberals only emerged among weakly and moderately fused Americans. In fact, liberals strongly fused with the United States endorsed “binding” foundations more than average conservatives and to the same extent as strongly fused conservatives. These results indicate that to fully understand moral prerogatives, one must consider the nature of the connections people form to the group, as well as their political orientation.     

世界佛教徒联谊会潘·瓦那密提主席致函慰问我国疫情

当前我国新型冠状病毒感染肺炎疫情形势受到国际佛教界广泛关注。1月28日,世界佛教徒联谊会潘·瓦那密提主席致我会演觉副会长慰问函,代表世界佛教徒联谊会及所属机构、世界佛教青年联谊会、世界佛教大学及各地区中心和泰国民众,对疫情表示深切关注和诚挚慰问,祈愿三宝慈光护佑中国民众健康平安。