Robert Persons’s Resolution(1582) and the issue of textual piracy in Protestant editions of Catholic devotional literature

Abstract

Despite current attention to continuing crypto-Catholics in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, less attention has been paid to the extent to which Catholic culture may have affected the Protestant mainstream. This study demonstrates the general neglect of this subject, and examines the role played, then and now, by the attack of Robert Persons SJ on Edmund Bunny, a Church of England minister, for publishing a Protestant adaptation of Persons’s work. This study argues that Bunny had a more serious intent than the ‘piracy’ he is widely credited with, and that his editorial practices resembled those employed by Roman Catholics, including Persons himself. While more serious cases of textual piracy have been largely overlooked, conventional condemnation of Bunny’s edition has done little more than contribute to a general misunderstanding of (and a paucity of interest in) the reception of Catholic literature in whatever format by Protestants.     

Invitation to the Triune Conversation: Explorations of Prayer through the Theology of Robert Jenson

This paper attempts to contribute to our understanding of prayer through an engagement with its crucial role in the systematic thought of Robert Jenson. I present prayer as our invitation to the triune conversation. Developing some of Jenson's categories, I work to show that a Christian understanding of prayer connects to a spectrum of systematic loci, especially creation and anthropology, the sacraments and ecclesiology, mission and eschatology. In these three modes, the anthropological, the ecclesial and the eschatological, prayer enters into the ultimate conversation that animates the world through faith, love and hope. This paper concludes by arguing that such an account of prayer, if authentic, supports a contemporary retrieval of the cataphatic dimension of theology.     

IMAGO DEI AND HUMAN RATIONALITY

There is a pervasive trend in Western theology to identify imago Dei with human intellectual and cognitive capacities. However, several contemporary theologians have criticized this view because, according to the critics, it leads to a truncated view of humanity. In this article, I shall concentrate on the question of rationality, first, through theologies of Thomas Aquinas and contemporary Lutheran Robert Jenson, and second, in some branches of recent cognitive psychology. I will argue that there is a significant overlap between contemporary scientific interpretations of rationality and both a traditional Thomistic view and a contemporary ecumenical interpretation of imago Dei. Consequently, it is possible to give an account of imago Dei which takes structural features as central and which is in accord with contemporary science, without falling prey to the dangers that the critics of structuralism point out.     

体外受精技术获得诺贝尔医学奖对临床科研的启示

英国生理学家罗伯特·爱德华兹因其对体外受精技术领域做出的开创性贡献而荣膺2010年度生理学和医学诺贝尔奖。回顾体外受精技术的历程带给我们一些启示：临床科研要有强烈的创新意识,执着精神,紧密结合基础研究,同时重视医学伦理。     

Pragmatic Democracy: Inquiry,Objectivity, and Experience

This essay argues that to understand Dewey's vision of democracy as “epistemic” requires consideration of how experiential and communal aspects of inquiry together produce what is named here “pragmatic objectivity.” Such pragmatic objectivity provides an alternative to absolutism and self‐interested relativism by appealing to certain norms of empirical experimentation. Pragmatic objectivity, it is then argued, can be justified by appeal to Dewey's conception of primary experience. This justification, however, is not without its own complications, which are highlighted with objections regarding “radical pluralism” in political life, and some logical problems that arise due to the supposedly “ineffable” nature of primary experience. The essay concludes by admitting that while Dewey's theory of democracy based on experience cannot answer all of the objections argumentatively, it nevertheless provides potent suggestions for how consensus building can proceed without such philosophical arguments.     

CHRIST AND EVOLUTION: A DRAMA OF WISDOM?1

Abstract This paper argues that a genuine engagement of Christianity with evolution needs to include a discussion of Christology. Further, it develops a particular approach to Christology through a theo‐dramatic account of incarnation. The somewhat static post‐Chalcedon theological categories of divine and human natures are hard to square with contemporary evolutionary accounts of human origins. Once the divine Logos is portrayed in the active categories of Wisdom it becomes easier to envisage divine and creaturely wisdom coexisting in the person of Christ. I argue, in particular, that a focus on God's agency through a modified version of Hans Urs von Balthasar's account of theo‐drama invites participation and affirms human agency in a way that grand narratives do not. More particularly, drawing on examples from hominid evolution, contemporary discussion of paleontology and cooperative evolutionary theories, I suggest that the most convincing accounts of evolutionary biology fit into this theo‐dramatic account more readily than alternatives. As such, in the spirit of Robert Boyle, this paper deliberately blurs the categories of revealed and natural theology by arguing that we can make sense of the former through concentration on the latter.     

Helping behavior in children: Addressing the interaction of a person-situation model

A critical review of major trends and developments in the study of children's helping behavior is presented, with specific emphasis on demand characteristics of different situations (rescue, donation, assistance) and methodological difficulties inherent in such a study. In general, researchers have been able to isolate certain here-and-now situational influences which have led to mean increases in children's sharing behavior. As yet, however, relatively few studies have attempted to isolate personal characteristics of individual children as a means of examining baseline differences of individuals across different helping behaviors. As a start, this paper calls for a person-situation interactional approach to the study of children's helping behavior, examining such key factors as the child's family style, status in the peer group, and personality style as interactive with the characteristics of the particular helping situation.     

Insights from sadness: A three-step model of the development of altruism as hedonism

Research into the effects of sad mood on prosocial action is reviewed and is used as a vehicle for examining the transformation of altruism from a punishing to a gratifying event. A three-step model of the socialization of altruism as a reinforcer is proposed. The model argues for (a) an initial stage (presocialization) in which altruism occurs rarely among young children because of its punishing function, (b) a second stage (awareness of norms) in which altruism functions as a mechanism for the receipt of positive sanctions, and (c) a final stage (internalization) in which, by adulthood, altruism has acquired a gratifying function through its status as a conditioned reinforcer. Evidence for the functional equivalence of self-gratification and adult altruism is also presented.     

THE PRESENT STATE OF THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS: An Update

A survey of developments over the last forty years suggests that little progress has been made in the development of comparative religious ethics as a discipline. While authors working in this field have produced a number of interesting works, the field lacks structure, including an agreement on the basic purpose, terms, and approaches by which contributions may be evaluated as better or worse. I provide an account of this history, suggesting that a way forward will involve marrying ethicists' interest in arguments with close attention to the more and less formal structures by which groups of people organize the giving and taking of reasons.