MARTIN LUTHER'S EXPERIENTIAL THEOLOGY AS A MODEL FOR FAITH-SCIENCE RELATIONSHIPS

The approach of experiential realism could indicate where science and faith deal with the same reality, where science questions faith assumptions, and where faith goes beyond the mandate and method of science. Although prescientific, Martin Luther's theology is the classical prototype of an experiential theology. We experience God's creative power in all of reality. We discern its regularities through observation and reason. So faith opens up all the space needed by science. However, experienced reality is highly ambiguous. It obscures God's intentions. God's intentions are revealed in the proclamation of the gospel: God is unconditionally for us and with us and not against us. This proclamation is a promise, appropriated in faith, and geared to a vision of what ought to become. It is based on the interpretation of a catastrophe—the cross of Christ—as God's pivotal redemptive act in human history. It goes beyond the mandate and method of science, yet it is capable of giving the latter a sense of purpose, criteria of acceptability, and authority to act in the interests of humanity and the earth. Theology challenges science to acknowledge the necessity of a transcendent frame of reference and moral accountability. Scientific insight challenges theology to reconceptualize its assumptions on God, creation, and eschatology to integrate best science.     

Approaches to Wittgenstein: Collected Papers

Book reviewed:
Brian McGuinness, Approaches to Wittgenstein: Collected Papers , Routledge, 2002, xv + 299 pp, £55.00     

Atheism, Morality and Meaning

Book reviewed:
Michael Martin, Atheism, Morality and Meaning , 2002, Prometheus Books, 330pp, price £21.00 pb.     

The political economy of poverty in Egypt (1975-2000): A sociological perspective

Studies of poverty in the 1990s have been very successful--more successful than the fight against the phenomenon itself. Had the efforts exerted to combat poverty equalled the concern given to the study of the problem, the poor would have enjoyed better conditions and the level of poverty would have diminished locally and worldwide. The current study identifies the relation between impoverishment, marginalization of particular groups in society and the nature of the political, economic and social policies adopted by the state in Egypt, in one of the important stages of social structure formation in the country--1975-2000. These policies play a direct role in creating the mechanisms of impoverishment and marginalization in Egyptian society, leading naturally to producing and reproducing poverty.     

邵康节的易学思想

本文以现代日本学者的眼光对邵雍的易学思想作了较为系统的论述。认为邵雍从宇宙观和世界观的理论基础上推演出他的历史观来 ,企图把宇宙世界的生成、万物的存在以及历史的变迁都还原为抽象的数 ,因而一方面难免陷入脱离事实、空洞推演的弊端 ,而在另方面又增加了重视义理以指导人事的内容。所以他的易学思想在古代术数与宋明理学之间 ,起了继往开来的重大作用     

Self-kindness when facing stress: The role of self-compassion,goal regulation,and support in college students’ well-being

This project brought together the constructs of goal and emotion regulation as a way of understanding college students’ well-being, building on previous work that identified the ability to disengage in goal pursuit and to redirect energy toward alternative goals as an important contributor to well-being. In Study 1, we assessed the amount of variance in well-being accounted for by measures of goal management, adding to the regression measures of student stress and self-compassion, the latter defined as a healthy form of self-acceptance and characterized as a tendency to treat oneself kindly in the face of perceived inadequacy. In Study 2, the stress scale was replaced by measures of perceived need and availability of support. Across studies, although factors such as goal management, stress, and need for and availability of support were important predictors of well-being, self-compassion accounted for a significant amount of additional variance in well-being.     

BRIDGING SCIENCE AND RELIGION: "THE MORE" AND "THE LESS" IN WILLIAM JAMES AND OWEN FLANAGAN

There is a kinship between Owen Flanagan's The Really Hard Problem and William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience that not only can help us to understand Flanagan's book but also can help scholars, particularly scholars of religion, to be attentive to an important development in the realm of the "spiritual but not religious." Specifically, Flanagan's book continues a tradition in philosophy, exemplified by James, that addresses questions of religious or spiritual meaning in terms accessible to a broad audience outside the context of organized religions. Both James and Flanagan are concerned to refute the popular perception that the sciences of the mind pose a threat to meaning and particularly to meaningful processes of human growth and transformation. Where James used the subconscious to bridge between science and religion and persuade his readers of the reality of the More, Flanagan uses a scientifically grounded understanding of transcendence to enchant his readers into believing in Less. Although I think that Flanagan's attempt to link the psychological and sociocultural levels of analysis via the concept of transcendence is scientifically premature, his attempt at a naturalistic spirituality raises questions of definition that scholars of religion need to take seriously.     

OAKESHOTT ON THE CHARACTER OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: NEED THERE BE A CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION?

Michael Oakeshott reflected on the character of religious experience in various writings throughout his life. In Experience and Its Modes (1933) he analyzed science as a distinctive “mode,” or account of experience as a whole, identifying those assumptions necessary for science to achieve its coherent account of experience in contrast to other modes of experience whose quests for coherence depend on different assumptions. Religious experience, he thought, was integral to the practical mode. The latter experiences the world as interminable tension between what is and what ought to be. The question, Is there a conflict between science and religion? is, in Oakeshott's approach, the question, Is there a conflict between the scientific mode of experience and the practical mode? Insofar as we tend to treat every question as a practical one, these questions seem to make sense. But Oakeshott's analysis leads to the view that scientific experience and religious experience are categorically different accounts of experience abstracted from the whole of experience. They are voices of experience that may speak to each other, but they are not ordered hierarchically. Nor can either absorb the other without insoluble contradictions.