A Review of: “Cooper,M., O'Hara,M., Schmid,P. F., & Wyatt,G. (2007). The Handbook of Person-Centered Psychotherapy and Counseling.”

Abstract

Consideration is given to our cognitive, volitional, and emotive functions as they are experienced in the I‐It and I‐Thou realms of our existence, focusing on our emotive function. Feelings in the I‐It realm are limited to the physical and psychical parts of ourselves. They are defensive and motivate our survival in the world. In the I‐Thou realm, they permeate our whole being, including that part of ourselves that is beyond phenomenological manifestation that lies at the ground of our being as potential awaiting actualization. Our ontology necessitates the experience of our primary feelings in our struggle to become what we are uniquely “created” to be. Dialogical psychotherapists consider this as crucial to our therapeutic endeavors.     

A Review of: “The Mask of Shame: Stigma of Mental Illness and an Agenda for Change,by Steven P. Hinshaw”

This case report describes the successful treatment of a 5-year-old girl who, subsequent to an accident in which she received burns covering 30% of her body, experienced nightmares and night terrors as often as 15-20 times every night. In addition to the night terrors, she developed a strong phobic reaction to a wide range of fire-related stimuli. Treatment involved multiple stages which included a response prevention procedure, extinction, and systematic desensitization.     

A CRITIQUE OF ISLAMIC ARGUMENTS ON HUMAN CLONING

Sunnism constitutes eighty percent of the Islamic world. The most academic and renowned religious seminary in the Sunni world is Al-Azhar University in Egypt, and it is from here that most verdicts on novel issues such as human cloning are decreed and disseminated throughout the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds. The perspective of this seminary and of other significant Sunni jurisprudential councils and figures are alluded to throughout this essay. I lay out the method of legal derivation employed by the Sunni clergy and scholars and then illustrate how they have arrived at their prohibition on human cloning. I demonstrate weaknesses of methodology employed by the major Sunni Muftis within the domain of jurisprudence.     

ROBERT J. RUSSELL'S ESCHATOLOGICAL THEOLOGY IN THE CONTEXT OF COSMOLOGY

The main title of Robert J. Russell's Cosmology from Alpha to Omega: The Creative Mutual Interaction of Theology and Science catches the substance of the essays; the subtitle his methodological vision. The mutualis modest as far as the influence from theology on science goes; in no way is Russell curtailing the pursuit of science. Driven by intellectual honesty, he holds that in the end religious convictions will have to stand the test of compatibility with scientific knowledge. And as a Christian he believes core beliefs of Christianity, reformulated as needed, will be able to stand this test. The essays address the origin and contingency of our universe in relation to belief in creation, and his proposal for noninterventionist objective divine action. For him a stumbling block is natural evil; the evolutionary intelligibility of evil falls short of what would be desirable theologically. As steps toward an adequate eschatology Russell seeks to develop a more complex understanding of temporality, and proposes to understand the resurrection of Jesus as the First Instantiation of a New Law of the New Creation. This area is more in tension with current science, but that could be expected when one moves from creation to redemption. Within his self-imposed boundaries, these essays are well informed and well argued, and together they provide a sincere and sustained research program.     

COSMOLOGY FROM ALPHA TO OMEGA: RESPONSE TO REVIEWS

I gratefully acknowledge and respond here to four reviews of my recent book, Cosmology from Alpha to Omega. Nancey Murphy stresses the importance of showing consistency between Christian theology and natural science through a detailed examination of my recent model of their creative interaction. She suggests how this model can be enhanced by adopting Alasdair MacIntyre's understanding of tradition in order to adjudicate between competing ways of incorporating science into a wider worldview. She urges the inclusion of ethics in my model and predicts that this would successfully challenge the competing naturalist tradition in contemporary society. John F. Haught weighs the alternatives of viewing divine action as objective versus subjective and of divine action at one level in nature or at all levels. He asks whether physics is fundamental to nature, arguing instead that metaphysics should be considered as fundamental. Michael Ruse assesses occasional versus universal divine action, the problems raised to divine action when it is related to quantum mechanics, and the way these relations exacerbate the challenge of natural theodicy. As an alternative he suggests viewing God as outside time and acting through unbroken natural law. Willem B. Drees discusses my use of the bridge metaphor for the relation between theology and science, the implications when science is inspired by theology, the role of contingency and necessity in the anthropic principle/many-worlds debate, and the challenge of cosmology to eschatology with the ensuing problem of theodicy.