Message of Pope Francis to the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches

This is the text of the message of greetings of His Holiness Pope Francis to the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches, meeting in Karlsruhe, Germany, from 21 August to 8 September 2022.     

Youth Testimony at the Opening Prayer of the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches

This is the text of the youth testimony at the opening prayer of the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches on 31 August 2022.     

Message from the Ecumenical Youth Gathering

This is the message of the Ecumenical Youth Gathering held in advance of the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches, which met in Karlsruhe, Germany, in August–September 2022. In their message, the youth voiced a series of laments, and recognized and prayed for justice, forgiveness, and reconciliation of the wounds the church has inflicted and continues to inflict in the world, and they called on the WCC to provide a meaningful space for an equal representation of young people in all its processes.     

Social Activism's Possibility through Perspectives of Gloria Anzaldúa,Walter Benjamin and C. G. Jung1

This paper explores the vertices of Jung's, Anzaldúa's and Benjamin's distinct ontologies and the way in which they connect in the shared recognition that what has been estranged in human history is enigmatically lodged in the world's fabric today. Cultural distress, in other words, is the outcome of what has become repudiated in the self and the collective across time. From this perspective, the paper argues that we have a collective responsibility to listen to the claims of the dead laid bare in moments of contemporary real-world danger and it elaborates the psychical dimensions of being that are cultivated in times of danger. The author contends that these psychical presences are the dead of human history including our ancestral heritage that linger and possibly may penetrate our awareness. They haunt and hold a potential to animate our movement towards a sublimatory process that can be seen as a precursor to social responsiveness and action. The author explores this through her own experience with an example of the spawning of spiritual activism within the socio-political maelstrom of AIDS.     

Empirical tests of scientific realism: A quantitative framework

The scientific realism debate in philosophy of science raises some intriguing methodological issues. Scientific realism posits a link between a scientific theory's observational and referential success. This opens the possibility of testing the thesis empirically, by searching for evidence of such a link in the record of theories put forward in the history of science. Many realist philosophers working today propose case study methodology as a way of carrying out such a test. This article argues that a qualitative method such as case study methodology is not adequate for this purpose, for two reasons: to test scientific realism is to pose an effects-of-causes question, and observational and referential success are quantities that theories possess to a greater or lesser degree. The article concludes that an empirical test of scientific realism requires a quantitative method.     

Dance becomes therapeutic in the mid to late 20th century

The convergence of dance art and therapeutic culture engendered the development of dance-movement therapy in the mid to late 20th century internationally. This article traces the sociopolitical, institutional, and aesthetic influences that coalesced in this process by contrasting histories of dance-movement therapy in Hungary and in the United States. The professionalization dance-movement therapy, through which it established its own theory, practice, and training institutions, occurred first in the United States in the late 1940s. Modern dancers in the United States began to conceptualize their activity as therapeutic, and the dancer as a (secular) healer, a therapist. The influx of therapeutic concepts into the field of dance is viewed as an example of therapeutic discourse permeating various areas of life in the 20th century. The Hungarian case provides a contrasting history of therapeutic culture, one that deviates from the predominant view of the phenomenon as a product of the global spread of Western modernization and the growth of free-market capitalism. Hungarian movement and dance therapy indeed developed independently from its American predecessor. Its history is intimately tied to the sociopolitical context of state-socialist period, particularly to the institutionalization of psychotherapy in public hospitals, and to the adaptation of Western group psychotherapies within the informal setting of the “second public sphere.” The legacy of Michael Balint and the British object-relations school provided its theoretical framework. Its methodology was rooted in postmodern dance. The methodological differences between American dance-movement therapy and the Hungarian method reflects the shift in dance aesthetics that occurred internationally between 1940 and 1980s.     

Trauma,protest, and therapeutic culture in Algeria since the 1980s

This article focuses on the shift in sensitivities that took place between the 1980s and 2019 toward psychological suffering in Algeria. Promoters of psychotherapy showed an increase in receptivity—via the media, public authorities, and the general population—to their practices and discourses during this period. Based on professional literature, interviews with psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts, and newspaper articles and essays, this article considers the following aspects: the use of psychotherapy, the authority of psychoanalytic/psychopathological analyses, and the ethics of relation in politics. Taking a social and cultural history of politics approach, it traces the discontinuous politicization of psychotherapy over the course of events (namely the uprising of 1988, the civil war of the 1990s, and the 2019 popular movement) and examines the interactions between the state, popular mobilizations, and the psychotherapists. The civil war of the 1990s coincided with the normalization of “trauma” on a global scale, and procedures for the prevention of posttraumatic stress disorder were put in place in Algeria from 1997 onwards. In this process of legitimizing psychological suffering and its treatment, the promoters of psychotherapy who belonged to the less visible margins gained authority. The year-long protest movement (2019) against the regime performed the ethics of relation, focusing on human relations, reflexivity, and living together. Promoters of psychotherapy identified consistently with the political subjectivities produced within the 2019 popular movement characterized by massive pacifist marches against the regime.     

Revival of psychology in former Czechoslovakia and the contemporary Czech Republic after the fall of Totalitarian communist regimes

After the general societal and political change in November 1989 in Czechoslovakia, the subject “History of Psychology” became the stable component of curriculum of studying psychology at the Department of Psychology of Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. The author of this paper has taught “History of Psychology” in Czech since 1998 for more than 20 years all students of psychology and he is teaching this subject the students of ERASMUS+ program from whole Europe, studying at Charles University in Prague, now. Indivisible part of the curriculum is represented by the history of Czechoslovak and Czech psychology. In References, the most important publications in the field of history of Czechoslovak and Czech psychology are presented.     

Psychology and the fall of Communism: The special case of (East) Germany

The fall of Communism is now universally agreed to be what the philosopher Hegel called a world historical event—one that few predicted but nearly everyone saw as inevitable after it happened. In the aftermath many lives—and worldviews—changed, not only, but also in the human sciences. These remarks attempt to address in a preliminary way both the impact of the fall of Communism on psychology in former East Germany (including changes in personnel and approach) and the ways in which these sciences were employed as resources for reflection on the Communist past as well as the transition to new social and political regimes.     

Why philosophy needs a concept of progress

This paper defends the usefulness of the concept of philosophical progress and the common assumption that philosophy and science aim to make the same, or a comparable, kind of progress. It does so by responding to Yafeng Shan's (2022) arguments that the wealth of research on scientific progress is not applicable or useful to philosophy, and that philosophy doesn't need a concept of progress at all. It is ultimately argued that while Shan's arguments are not successful, they reveal the way forward in developing accounts of philosophical progress.