Cur deus caro: Jesus and the Cosmos Story

Abstract

There seems to be a vast gulf between the grand-scale story of the world of creation, cosmic in scope and pitiless in its operations, and the small-scale story of Jesus as embodying divine empathy. The concept of deep incarnation offers a bridge by arguing that God's own Logos or Wisdom, when assuming the particular life story of Jesus, also conjoins the material conditions of God's world of creation at large (“all flesh”), shares the fate of all biological life forms (“grass and lilies”), and experiences the pains of all sentient creatures (“sparrows and foxes”). Incarnation is thus the story of God's reach into the very tissue of material and biological existence. In the embodied Logos, the “flesh” of Jesus Christ is co-extensive with his divinity. Otherwise, the incarnation would be skin deep, confined to a historical figure of the past, or merely an external appendix to divine life.     

The corona crisis unmasks prevailing social ideologies

This essay contrasts two visions of selfhood: the buffered, autonomous self, and the flexible, resonant self. The autonomous self, while robustly assertive and active, seeks to insulate itself from threats, thereby robbing it of vital connections to other selves and to nature. The resonant self, in contrast, risks more by standing in fluid relationships of resonance and dissonance with its social and natural environments. While the two stand in tension, a baptismal theology entails both elements of a sheltered self and a resonant self that remains flexible and responsive to the ups and downs of human experience. Conversely, even a secular-minded person will have access to important zones of resonance.     

Note on the rationality of rule-based versus exemplar-based processing in human judgment

This paper reports a study of the relationship between rule- versus exemplar-based processing and criteria for rationality of judgment. Participants made probability judgments in a classification task devised by S. W. Allen and L. R. Brooks (1991). In the exemplar condition, the miscalibration was accounted for by stochastic components of the judgment with a format-dependence effect, implying simultaneous over- and underconfidence depending on the response scale. In the rule condition, there was an overconfidence bias not accounted for by the stochastic components of judgment. In both conditions the participants were additive on average and reasonably transitive, but the larger stochastic component in the exemplar condition produced somewhat larger absolute deviations. The results suggest that exemplar processes are unbiased but more perturbed by stochastic components, while rule-based processes may be more prone to bias.     

Exemplars, prototypes, and the flexibility of classification models

J. P. Minda and J. D. Smith (2001) showed that a prototype model outperforms an exemplar model, especially in larger categories or categories that contained more complex stimuli. R. M. Nosofsky and S. R. Zaki (2002) showed that an exemplar model with a response-scaling mechanism outperforms a prototype model. The authors of the current study investigated whether excessive model flexibility could explain these results. Using cross-validation, the authors demonstrated that both the prototype model and the exemplar model with a response-scaling mechanism suffered from overfilling in the linearly separable category structure. The results illustrate the need to make sure that the best-fitting model is not chasing error variance instead of variance attributed to the cognitive process it is supposed to model.     

Exemplar effects in categorization and multiple-cue judgment

Categorization and multiple-cue judgment are similar tasks, but the influential models in the two areas are different in terms of the computations, processes, and neural substrates that they imply. In categorization, exemplar memory is often emphasized, whereas multiple-cue judgment generally is interpreted in terms of integration of cues that have been abstracted in training. In 3 experiments the authors investigated whether these conclusions derive from genuine differences in the processes or are accidental to the different research methods. The results revealed large individual differences and a shift from exemplar memory to cue abstraction when the criterion is changed from a binary to a continuous variable, especially for a probabilistic criterion. People appear to switch between qualitatively distinct processes in the 2 tasks.     

Covariation neglect among novice investors

In 4 experiments, undergraduates made hypothetical investment choices. In Experiment 1, participants paid more attention to the volatility of individual assets than to the volatility of aggregated portfolios. The results of Experiment 2 show that most participants diversified even when this increased risk because of covariation between the returns of individual assets. In Experiment 3, nearly half of those who seemingly attempted to minimize risk diversified even when this increased risk. These results indicate that novice investors neglect covariation when diversifying across investment alternatives. Experiment 4 established that naive diversification follows from motivation to minimize risk and showed that covariation neglect was not significantly reduced by informing participants about how covariation affects portfolio risk but was reduced by making participants systematically calculate aggregate returns for diversified portfolios. In order to counteract naive diversification, novice investors need to be better informed about the rationale underlying recommendations to diversify.     

Hope and athlete burnout: Stress and affect as mediators

ObjectiveIn this study we examined the relationship between trait hope and burnout in elite junior soccer players and whether stress and positive and negative affect mediated this relationship.MethodsParticipants were 238 Swedish soccer players (166 males, 71 females; one did not indicate gender) aged 15–19 years who completed questionnaires measuring trait hope, perceived stress, positive and negative affect, and athlete burnout (i.e., emotional/physical exhaustion, a reduced sense of accomplishment, and sport devaluation).ResultsBivariate correlations were consistent with hope theory contentions indicating significant negative relationships between hope and all three burnout dimensions. The relationship between hope and emotional/physical exhaustion was fully mediated by stress and positive affect. For sport devaluation and reduced sense of accomplishment, stress and positive affect partially mediated the relationship with hope. In contrast, negative affect did not mediate the relationship between hope and any of the burnout dimensions.ConclusionThe results support earlier findings that hope is negatively related to athlete burnout. Support was also found for the hypothesis that high hope individuals would experience less stress and therefore less burnout. Promoting hope may be relevant in reducing the likelihood of this detrimental syndrome.     

The Philosophy of Interdisciplinarity: Sustainability Science and Problem-Feeding

Traditionally, interdisciplinarity has been taken to require conceptual or theoretical integration. However, in the emerging field of sustainability science this kind of integration is often lacking. Indeed sometimes it is regarded as an obstacle to interdisciplinarity. Drawing on examples from sustainability science, we show that problem-feeding, i.e. the transfer of problems, is a common and fruitful-looking way of connecting disparate disciplines and establishing interdisciplinarity. We identify two species of problem-feeding: unilateral and bilateral. Which of these is at issue depends on whether solutions to the problem are fed back to the discipline in which the problem originated. We suggest that there is an interesting difference between the problem-feeding approach to interdisciplinarity and the traditional integrative perspective suggested by among others Erich Jantsch and his colleagues. The interdisciplinarity resulting from problem-feeding between researchers can be local and temporary and does not require collaboration between proximate disciplines. By contrast, to make good sense of traditional integrative interdisciplinarity we must arguably associate it with a longer-term, global form of close, interdisciplinary collaboration.