Anthropocentric Rhetorical Discourse in Popular Science Writing about Human Evolution

Discourse describing evolution in contemporary popular science writing often posits that humans evolved not from an ape, but from a merely ape-like or generalized primate. Contemporary fossil and genetic evidence, though, have revealed what can accurately be described as an extinct ape species as ancestral to the human lineage. The persistence of ambiguous terms in popular science writing may be interpreted as a form of anthropocentric rhetorical discourse. Nonetheless, while such discourse is often justified in terms of increasing the public understanding of science, it may also mitigate (whether consciously intended or not) religion-based resistance to evolutionary theory.     

Reverse-engineering ‘esotericism': how to prepare a complex cultural concept for the cognitive science of religion

The article introduces a framework for preparing complex cultural concepts for the cognitive science of religion (CSR) and applies it to the field of Western esotericism. The research process (‘reverse engineering') rests on a building block approach that, after problematic categories have been deconstructed, seeks to reconstruct new scholarly objects in generic terms that can be operationalized in interdisciplinary contexts like CSR. A four-step research process is delineated, illustrated by a short discussion of previous work on ‘Gnosticism,' ‘magic,' and ‘religion,' before applying it to ‘esotericism.' It is suggested that the implicit scholarly objects of esotericism scholarship can be reconstituted in generic terms as concerned with processes of creating and disseminating ‘special knowledge.' Five definitional clusters are identified in the literature; these provide a basis for formulating research programs on the psychological and cognitive level, drawing on metarepresentational processes, event cognition, and psychological dispositions for altering experience.     

谈钱还是谈情:企业如何引导消费者分享自媒体营销

社交网络的发展弱化了传统媒体的影响力,强化了消费者的影响力;在这种情况下,企业需要思考如何借助消费者传播营销信息,以影响其他消费者。本文从企业如何设计营销信息入手,探究消费者与企业所处的关系范式对消费者信息转发行为的影响。通过二手数据分析与实验法,本文得出如下结论:经济类刺激对触发交易关系范式下消费者的转发行为更有效;情感类刺激对触发共有关系范式下消费者的转发行为更有效;交易关系范式下消费者出于回报企业的动机分享,共有关系范式下消费者出于利己动机而分享。     

KAGAWA TOYOHIKO (1888–1960): WITNESS TO THE COSMIC DRAMA

At home and abroad, Kagawa Toyohiko was probably the best‐known Japanese Christian evangelist, social reformer, writer, and public intellectual of the twentieth century, nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature twice (1947, 1948) and the Nobel Peace Prize three times (1954, 1955, 1956). Appealing to the masses with little knowledge of Christian faith, Kagawa believed that a positive, religio‐aesthetic interpretation of nature and science was a key missiological concern in Japan. He reasoned that a faith rooted in the kenotic movement of incarnation and self‐giving must strongly support the scientific quest. A voracious reader of science and especially biology, he argues for “directionality,” or what he calls “initial purpose” in the long, painful, cosmic journey from matter to life to mind (or consciousness). Through an antireductionistic, a posteriori methodological pluralism that sought to “see all things whole,” this “scientific mystic” employed Christian, Buddhist, Neo‐Confucian, personalist, and vitalist ideas to envision complementary roles for science and religion in modern society.     

AMERICAN MISSIONARIES TRANSMITTING SCIENCE IN EARLY TWENTIETH‐CENTURY EASTERN TIBET

This article is based on the author's extensive research on the missionaries to Tibet from the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church) USA, and discusses various missionary efforts to transmit scientific and practical knowledge such as medicine, building, and agriculture in Eastern Tibet from 1904–1919. It shows that American missionaries played a prominent and distinctive role in the dissemination of scientific and practical knowledge as a result of their hard work and wisdom. In this sense, they made an important contribution to the development of Tibetan society and the modernization movement in early twentieth‐century Eastern Tibet.     

SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: A PERSONAL VIEW ON THE CONTEMPORARY SCENE

This article considers the current state of the science–religion debate in the United Kingdom. It discusses the societies, groups, and individual scholars that shape that debate, including the dialogue between theology and physics, biology, and psychology. Attention is also given to theology's engagement with ecological issues. The article also reflects on the loss of influence of denominational Christianity within British society, and the impact both on the character of the debate and the role of the churches. Finally, some promising trajectories of development for the future are outlined.     

PHILOSOPHER OF PRECISION AND SOUL: INTRODUCING WALKER PERCY

This article introduces the work of philosopher‐novelist Walker Percy to the Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science readership. After some biographical and contextual preliminaries, I suggest that the conceptual collecting feature to Percy's work is his critique of abstractionism manifest in a tripartite congruence of Cartesianism, derivatively misapplied science, and social atomism.     

THE ATOMIC PRIESTHOOD AND NUCLEAR WASTE MANAGEMENT: RELIGION,SCI‐FI LITERATURE,AND THE END OF OUR CIVILIZATION

This article discusses the idea of an “Atomic Priesthood,” a religious caste that would preserve and transmit the knowledge of nuclear waste management for future generations. In 1981, the US Department of Energy commissioned a “Human Interference Task Force” (HITF) that would examine the possibilities of how to maintain the security of nuclear waste storage sites for 10,000 years, a period during which our civilization would likely perish, but the dangerous nature of nuclear waste would persist. One option that was discussed was the establishment of an “atomic priesthood,” an idea that science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov and Arsen Darney had already toyed with. Reading the HITF report alongside sci‐fi novels, my article will shed light on the question of how the sheer force of nuclear power (and the longevity of nuclear waste) lends itself to religious interpretations and how the idea of the atomic priesthood is connected with the utopian/dystopian aspects of nuclear power.     

EARLY MODERN PROTESTANT VIRTUOSOS AND SCIENTISTS: SOME COMMENTS

The following essay is divided in three parts. First, while sharing in principle Harrison's hypothesis of an affinity between the sixteenth‐century Reformation and early modern science, it questions the connection between the latter and the Weberian “disenchantment of the world.” Second, it suggests a broader group of possible actors than that envisaged by Harrison in referring to virtuoso collectors and their cabinets of curiosities who are rather marginalized in Harrison's narrative. And third, it highlights (in agreement with Harrison) the physico‐theology of the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century and beyond as an important temporary fusion of religion/theology and science at a time when the new science was still striving for social and religious respectability.     

Innateness as a natural cognitive kind

Innate cognitive capacities are widely posited in cognitive science, yet both philosophers and scientists have criticized the concept of innateness as being hopelessly confused. Despite a number of recent attempts to define or characterize innateness, critics have charged that it is associated with a diverse set of properties and encourages unwarranted inferences among properties that are frequently unrelated. This criticism can be countered by showing that the properties associated with innateness cluster together in reliable ways, at least in the context of the study of cognition (though perhaps not in other scientific domains). Even though the causal connections between these cognitive properties are not always strict, they are robust enough to warrant considering innateness to be a natural kind as used in contemporary cognitive science.