“And Yet It Moves”: Dream and Reality of the Ecumenical Movement

This article offers an overview of the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches, which met in Karlsruhe, Germany, in August–September 2022. It sets out the context in which the assembly took place, the main issues discussed, and perspectives for the future. The article argues that the assembly in Karlsruhe demonstrated that the ecumenical movement still is alive and can offer enormous potential in a world at the brink of a new East–West divide, facing a significant weakening of multilateral structures of cooperation, and even the threat of nuclear war. Moreover, the Karlsruhe assembly demonstrated that on subjects such as the Middle East, peace ethics, and nationalism, and in the deep commitment and spiritual life of its participants, the ecumenical movement is vital and vibrant and represents a countercultural force against rigid nationalisms.     

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.     

Internet resources in applied behavior analysis

Internet communication is becoming an important tool for both academic and clinical areas in psychology and behavior analysis. The Internet, a confederation of thousands of computer systems covering the entire globe (Plaud, 1996b), can significantly enhance behavior analysis in at least three major areas: (a) information exchange and communication among behavior analysts through list servers, (b) dissemination of empirical data and commentary through on-line journals and information servers, and (c) promotion of programs and services in behavior analysis. This commentary provides specific examples in each of these areas and addresses the basics of connecting to the Internet.     

Cogmic space for narrative-based world representation

Representing a world or a physical/social environment in an agent’s cognitive system is essential for creating human-like artificial intelligence. This study takes a story-centered approach to this issue. In this context, a story refers to an internal representation involving a narrative structure, which is assumed to be a common form of organizing past, present, future, and fictional events and situations. In the artificial intelligence field, a story or narrative is traditionally treated as a symbolic representation. However, a symbolic story representation is limited in its representational power to construct a rich world. For example, a symbolic story representation is unfit to handle the sensory/bodily dimension of a world. In search of a computational theory for narrative-based world representation, this study proposes the conceptual framework of a Cogmic Space for a comic strip-like representation of a world. In the proposed framework, a story is positioned as a mid-level representation, in which the conceptual and sensory/bodily dimensions of a world are unified. The events and their background situations that constitute a story are unified into a sequence of panels. Based on this structure, a representation (i.e., a story) and the represented environment are connected via an isomorphism of their temporal, spatial, and relational structures. Furthermore, the framework of a Cogmic Space is associated with the generative aspect of representations, which is conceptualized in terms of unconscious- and conscious-level processes/representations. Finally, a proof-of-concept implementation is presented to provide a concrete account of the proposed framework.     

The Liberating Awareness

The purpose of this article is to reflect on the search for racial justice as a call from God, using biblical readings and documents produced by the World Council of Churches (WCC). It is anchored in the increasingly intense challenges that emerge in this respect in Brazil, a country whose Indigenous peoples were annihilated in its colonization process, and which up until the 19th century received the largest flow of enslaved Africans in the world. The article combines the Latin American methodology “See, Judge, Act” with the theological methodology of the WCC's Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace and its three steps: “Celebrating Gifts,” “Visiting the Wounds,” and “Transforming Injustice.” The first part of the paper reflects the “See” and exposes the expressions of everyday racism in Brazil. The second part presents the “Judge,” seeking references to the challenge of racial justice in the Bible and in ecumenical reflection. The third and final section, “Act,” reflects on the possibility for transforming racial injustices, sharing experiences from Brazil as well as one of the Pilgrim Team Visits organized by the WCC in 2019.     

Framing a Theological Response to COVID-19 in the Presence of the Religious Other

The Christian faith has a long history of responding to pandemics. Its past practice bore witness to the desire to care for others: it furnished an exemplary model with some notable exceptions. The dilemma that COVID-19 presents is that the understanding of viral spread now lies within the preserve of a professionalized health system. The evident risk as a consequence is one of theological quietism and being “unavailing.” Now is not the time for simple hyper compliance at the expense of an enquiring confessional claim. The ecumenical witness in solidarity with other faiths/religions lends itself to a desire to consider how the present pandemic crisis might serve as an invitation for a theological enquiry into wider planetary issues.     

Are historic years understood as numbers or events? An fMRI study of numbers with semantic associations

While numbers generally cue processing of quantity or order, they can also contain semantic information, as in the case of historic years (e.g., “1492” calls forth associations of Columbus sailing the ocean blue). Whether these dates are processed as quantities or events may depend on the context in which they occur. We examined such “ambiguous number” processing in two different contexts using a paired-comparison task, recording both behavioral responses and brain activity. Participants were either asked to think of all items as numbers and to choose the larger number, or were told to treat the comparators as events and to choose the later event. Behaviorally, all events showed a normal distance effect, establishing that they may be understood and compared in an ordinal sequence. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) demonstrated significant differences between years when treated as numbers versus as events. Dates in both contexts shared activity in parietal lobe regions previously implicated in number processing. Dates as numbers showed no extra-numeric activity, while dates thought of as events evoked activity in temporal semantic processing and frontal semantic retrieval areas. These differences suggest that extra-numeric information may be easily accessed and incorporated during processing when supported by even a weak context. This work supports previous studies showing a dissociation between quantity and meaning, and illustrates the brain areas involved in these different aspects.