Two Accounts of Qur'anic Revelation

This essay examines the notions of revelation and prophecy as offered by Fazlur Rahman and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd. Their ideas regarding prophecy and revelation contribute to the clarification of some foundational issues in Islamic theology. For both Rahman and Abu Zayd, theology begins with the idea that divine revelation is intended for human beings. So, even though this revelation is divine in origin, it is also mostly intelligible. This rethinking of the idea of revelation is welcomed by some Muslim thinkers, but has not met with so positive a reception in more traditional Islamic circles. I argue that what makes these human-centric accounts of revelation controversial is the idea of Muhammad's “contribution” to the revelation process and the article investigates this idea as it is formulated in the work of these two scholars.     

后基因组时代的生物医学与人

后基因组时代基因组学研究在生物医学发展中将起主导作用。基因组学将在结构基因组学、功能基因组学和“结构－功能－应用”研究中发挥其观念优势、技术优势和信息优势,以解决医学科学中的相关问题。基因组学研究需要人文翔,包括关心其伦理问题、法律和社会问题以及国家安全问题等等。     

The secularisation of religious education: humanism,religion and worldview education in the Netherlands in the 1960s

Secularisation is often mentioned as an explanation for changes in worldview education in modern history. Worldview education has become less preoccupied with preaching religious truths and more with developing children’s personal worldviews. However, how secularisation exactly explains these changes is not clear. To get a clearer picture, we analyse developments in the Netherlands in the 1960s and compare these with Britain. Our source material primarily consists of educational, religious and humanist journals. We connect developments in worldview education to secularisation understood in three ways: reduced church attachment, the rise of alternatives to the dominant religion, and the decrease in references to religion in public space. Our findings show that changes in theology, decline in church attendance, professionalisation of academic pedagogy, and the growing popularity of dialogical methods strongly influenced the direction of both religious and humanist forms of worldview education in a similar way.     

Religion,Secular Humanism,and Atheism: Multi‐Institutional Politics and the USAFA Cadets’ Freethinkers Group

The recent emergence of atheist movements despite marginalization and distrust by a majority of Americans has been explained as a successful deployment of identity politics, but scholars have less often considered the importance of how identity and power intersect with political opportunity occurring within organizational and religious fields. Analyzing the case of the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA) Cadet Freethinkers Group, we demonstrate that although it encountered opportunity in the organizational shock of the 2004 USAFA proselytism controversy, this opportunity was not a blank check, but instead afforded some possibilities for action and not others. Freethinkers’ actions to secure official recognition were limited by (1) their low placement in the chain of command and (2) a collective identity inclusive of secular humanism and atheism, which did not produce enough unity to take collective actions risking punishment, and created ambiguity vis‐à‐vis religion that allowed USAFA administrators to accept or deny their institutional membership claims through appeal, respectively, to functional or substantive definitions of religion.     

APORETIC POSSIBILITIES IN CATHERINE KELLER'S CLOUD OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

In stressing the beauty of ignorance, of not knowing in the usual manner, Catherine Keller's Cloud of the Impossible evokes the death of a metaphysical (A)uthorial presence and the dissolution of closed systems of meaning. In this article, I view her text as part of a crisis of modernity that challenges dominant theological pathways, on which certain problematic views of the human have been constructed. In my reading, Keller's Cloud enriches humanistic thinking in the West and I explore the themes it shares with my own work in religious naturalism: there is no escape from the radical relationality and the irreducible materiality that structure human existence. I also emphasize that textual strategies are mere seductive, disembodied abstractions without acknowledging the force of materiality. Materiality matters; and I explore ways in which religious naturalism demonstrates how it does. In light of Keller's rich analysis, I focus on a “learned ignorance” that accompanies all of our limited interpretations emerging from the shifting, precarious positionalities as we rethink our relationality to each other and to all that it is.     

Some Practical Implications of Integrating Narrative and Humanistic/Existential Approaches to Psychotherapy

Although the humanistic/existential and the narrative approaches to psychotherapy are clearly distinct perspectives with some marked differences at the level of metatheory, they also show very important similarities in their conceptualization of the human condition and the processes involved in living adaptively (Richert, 1999). These similarities make these two approaches reasonable candidates for integration. The present paper examines five specific points of integration at the level of strategy and techniques (Neimeyer, 1993b): Interplay of experiential meanings and narrative structure in developing client meaning, use of existential themes in client narratives, deconstruction as a means of dealing with existential guilt, contextualization of wishes as a means of mobilizing will, and reflexivity as a way of developing the I–Thou relationship. A brief theoretical rationale is offered for each of these points of integration, and each is illustrated with clinical examples.     

A NEOPRAGMATIST PERSPECTIVE ON RELIGION AND SCIENCE

Abstract. Pragmatists, most notably John Dewey and Richard Rorty, propose overcoming the modern split between science and values with a new image of ourselves as language users. In this new self-understanding, both our scientific and evaluative vocabularies are integral parts of self-reliant human problem solving and coping with the larger natural environment. Our language is not the medium of any higher power from which it derives its legitimacy. On this view, the principal matter at issue between pragmatists and realists so far as interaction between religion and science is concerned is the moral one of human self-reliance.     

Religion and Science in America: Populism versus Elitism

Historian James Gilbert argues that the dialogue between science and religion is an important dynamic in the creation of contemporary American culture. He traces the dialogue not only in the confines of the academic world but also in popular culture. The science-religion dialogue reveals a basic tension between the material and the spiritual that helps define the core of the American psyche: fascination with material progress yet commitment to traditional religious beliefs. Gilbert's cultural narrative traces the dialogue in a unique way because of the attention given to popular renditions of science and religion in evangelical films used by the military, in televised science programs, in science-fiction literature, and at the Seattle World's Fair in 1962. Gilbert suggests that the discussion between science and religion is significant because it is part of the process of creating new cultural structures necessitated by social, scientific, and technological developments. The tensions between religiously informed commonsense science and professional science work to create new cultural forms in a democratic society. Religion and science in dialogue are part of the process of cultural creation. Dogmatism on the part of either scientists or religionists is countered by the democratic process itself.     

RE‐ENVISIONING HOPE: ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE,LEARNED IGNORANCE,AND RELIGIOUS NATURALISM

In this essay, I introduce religious naturalism as one contemporary religious response to anthropogenic climate change; in so doing, I offer a concept of hope associated with the beauty of ignorance, of not knowing ourselves in the usual manner. Reframing humans as natural processes in relationship with other forms of nature, religious naturalism encourages humans’ processes of transformative engagement with each other and with the more‐than‐human worlds that constitute our existence. Hope in this context is anticipating what possibilities may occur when human organisms enact our evolutionary capacities as relational organisms who can love, engaging in multilayered processes of changing behaviors, values, and relationships that promote the betterment of myriad nature.     

论班杜拉社会学习理论的人本主义倾向

班杜拉社会学习理论的逻辑基础是他的一般学习论观点,其要义是强调主体因素对人类行为的获得与表现和对人性潜能发挥的决定性。通过对主体因素的强度,班拉杜自发地走向了人本主义,从而使行的主义表现出与人本主义心理学渐趋一致的历史发展趋势。