Search Results (101)

This essay argues that several of Bernadette Mayer’s major works foreground and develop experiences of subjective time as moments of resistance to the standardizing force of objective clock and calendric time that governs daily material existence. Basing my argument on a framework for subjective time developed in the field of linguistics, I show how Mayer’s play with duration, temporal recursiveness, and moments of stopped time in works including Memory, Midwinter Day, Works and Days, and Milkweed Smithereens function as subversions of the normative material every day, and I argue that throughout her work Mayer is preoccupied with not merely representing time, its content, and its passage, but rather with gaining mastery over objective time and subverting its authority altogether. This essay joins the scant research on time and temporality in Mayer’s work and offers an invitation to further study of subjective time as a mode of resistance in contemporary poetry. Full article

Trinitarian ontology represents a dynamic and fast-evolving field of research in the scope of philosophical theology with a focus on the influence of Trinitarian doctrine on the development of the Western philosophical tradition. Within this framework, this article aims to make a probe into the specific question of freedom within the Christian tradition and Trinitarian teaching. For this purpose, it examines the notion of freedom as it is presented in the work of American philosopher and theologian David C. Schindler. It pursues two lines of argumentation. Firstly, it analyses Schindler’s notion of Christian freedom (as presented in Freedom from Reality and Retrieving Freedom) and brings them into dialogue with other authors grounded in Trinitarian ontology. The key concepts of this part of the paper are the metaphysics of the gift and the primacy of actuality over potency, which both acquire their true meaning in the context of the Trinitarian mystery. The final part of the essay analyses the implications of the Trinitarian ontology of freedom for the life of the political community (as presented in The Politics of the Real and in other texts) and shows how it calls us to the inner of transformation of thought not only at the personal but also at the social level. Here, the full Christian notion of freedom is contrasted with the reductive liberal approach. It analyses the limits of political life based on the autonomy and self-determination of the modern subject and also shows how Schindler’s more original and fuller notion of freedom might contribute to the further development of the project of a Trinitarian ontology and its social and political implications. Full article

This essay serves as an expansive, conceptual anchor and scholarly argument that demonstrates the modality of “reflexive extractivist” religious studies and also orients the Special Issue on Religion in Extractive Zones. We demonstrate that critical religious and theological scholarship have existing tools and methods for deepening the study of extraction in the environmental humanities and related discourses. We make two interconnected arguments: that religion has been and continues to be produced out of extractive zones in the conflicts, negotiations, and strategic alliances of contact zones and that the complex production of sacred and secular in these zones can be fruitfully analyzed as imaginaries and counter-imaginaries of extraction. We present these arguments through a dialogical and critically integrative methodology, in which arguments from theorists across several disciplines are put into conversation and from which our insights emerge. This methodology leads to a final section of the essay that sets a framework for, and invites further dialogical and integrative scholarship on, the practical ethics of non- or counter-extractive academic research, scholarship, and publishing. Offering theoretical, methodological, and practical suggestions, we call for a turn toward reflexive extractivist religious studies, articulate the specific conceptual and methodological approaches linking religion and extraction, and thus set the framework and tone for the Special Issue. Full article

While American magisterial teaching has continuously cast abortion as part of a consistent ethic covering a comprehensive and interrelated set of issues affecting human life and dignity, the teaching also entails a set of tensions between the single issue of abortion and the larger framework, and this has been resolved by insisting that the legality of abortion affects all other issues and so deserves special focus; this focus has played out in public policy with detrimental consequences. This essay argues that if the bishops’ goals truly are a reduction in abortions, the promotion of respect for life and human dignity, and the promulgation of a truly comprehensive and consistent ethic, then there must be a change in their approach. This change would consist of a focus on the unintended lethal impacts of illegality, more grassroots arguments aimed at changing cultural attitudes, and more support—in both rhetoric and action—for measures that work, including but not limited to the myriad levels of structural justice for the poor and women in particular. These actions would, in turn, reinforce the consistent ethic. Further, the bishops should disavow a single-issue approach and move toward an actually comprehensive approach to public policy. Full article

From the Christian heartland of Europe emerged the techno-scientific culture borne from the Enlightenment movement. Prior to this cultural outlook that severed culture from its foundational roots in religion, it was the case that religion was not only a crucial agent in the shaping of culture, but in many ways, the heart of culture. With secular rationality and its underscoring of the techno-scientific mindset, a growing privatization of religion has become the acceptable ethos of contemporary Western culture. Secularism, largely understood in terms of a naked public sphere, is increasingly perceived to be the only form of rationality that can guarantee societal cohesion and the democratic spirit. But as Ratzinger pointed out in his 1993 Hong Kong Address to the Doctrinal Commissions of the Bishops Conferences of Asia, this Western understanding of culture that is governed by a hermeneutic of suspicion towards religion, and which seeks to replace the heart of culture with autonomous reason a la Kant, ends up leaving culture in a winter land of existential frostiness. By depriving culture of its roots in the transcendental dimensions of human experience, much of the wisdom and riches that have been accumulated in the pre-techno-scientific cultures—regarding fundamental questions such as “Who am I?”, “Why am I here?”, “What is the meaning of life?”, “What happens when I die?”, “Does life make sense?”, “Do I have a destiny?” and more—are now left to the manufactured logic of the techno-scientific with its anthropological reductionism that fails to offer the big picture of the cultural outlook that did not construe the scientific and the technological as antithetical to religion. This essay seeks to unpack the arguments Ratzinger made in this Address at Hong Kong, with the hope that this theological exegesis of the Hong Kong lecture could once again offer an invitation to the world of the techno-scientific, the world of secular rationality, to open up to the world of faith, so that together, the breadth and depth of the human culture would once again flourish in its greatness. Full article

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Christian pacifist who believed Jesus Christ taught nonviolence, yet Bonhoeffer was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. How did Bonhoeffer justify to himself his participation in the plot? This essay makes the argument that Bonhoeffer, influenced by Soren Kierkegaard, distinguishes between ethics and acts of faith, suggesting the possibility that Bonhoeffer believed he was responding in faithful obedience to the direct call of God to participate in the plot despite the fact that this conflicted with the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. Full article

Digital immortality and transhumanist longevity proposals are currently researched and debated independently. This essay claims that both ideas represent two sides of the same cultural denial of death, reconceptualizing them as interconnected forms of thanato-colonialism. The first form includes the digital immortality industry, in both its passive and active versions. Interpreted from the framework of data colonialism, digital immortality represents a masterful maneuver, guaranteeing that the dead can continue to contribute to the extractive logic of this new economy by endlessly generating data and serving as bait for the appropriation of human lives. In this way, data colonialism is no longer constrained by physical disappearance—transforming death itself into a profitable colonization strategy. The second kind of thanato-colonialism surfaces within the transhumanist imaginaries, which inherit the violence of historical colonialism and resort to the argument of progress to justify their ends. Nick Bostrom’s fable of the Dragon Tyrant allegorizes old age as a mythological beast, an archetype of the “other”—fundamentally different, threatening, and impossible to negotiate with—who must be subdued without contemplation. A team of engineers—humanity’s saviors—is tasked with slaying it. Full article

According to the free will theodicy of hell, the damned agent freely chooses to suffer in hell, or equivalently, to reject God. Against this view, Thomas Talbott argues that it is impossible for the agent to freely reject God because doing so is not rational. The aim of this essay is to critically respond to Talbott’s argument that it is not rational to reject God, rather than offering a full defense of the free will theodicy of hell itself. Drawing on recent work on rationality, I argue that not only does Talbott’s argument commit the fallacy of equivocation, but its two premises are also indefensible. I also explain what the reasons are for rejecting God: when the agent’s happiness consists of an incoherent combination of attitudes, it is both structurally and substantively rational for her to reject God. Full article

This essay presents two lines of argument to suggest that the extension into adulthood of specific phenotypic differentiation processes, typical of early development, is fundamental to the evolution of cognition. The first of these two lines of argument is organized in three steps. The first step reviews various studies of human development, highlighting that it has slowed down throughout evolution compared to that of great apes. The second step explores the relationship between this slowed development and human cognition. The third step discusses evolutionary comparative analyses that show a correlation between the evolution of cognitive processes and developmental changes. The second line of argument examines concepts of phenotype. First, the concepts of phenotype are reviewed in correspondence to the two meanings of the word plasticity (i.e., as the ability to alternate or as the ability to shape), and it is concluded that all phenotypes —rigid, plastic, and reversible—fit the meaning of shaping. It is proposed that a phenotypical process can be seen as a continuous series of functional differentiations that occur at different times during the life of the organism and at different contextual points, both inside and outside the organism. Finally, a brief recapitulation is presented that is focused on supporting the formation of behavioral phenotypes as a sequence of differentiation processes shaping the environmental interactions from the most general to the most particular. Full article

Jizang (549–623) is regarded as a prominent figure in Sanlun Buddhism (三論宗) and a revitalizer of Nāgārjuna’s Mādhyamaka tradition in China. In this essay, I argue that Jizang’s concept of non-empty Buddha-nature is compatible with the idea of universal emptiness. My argument unfolds in three steps. First, I argue that, for Jizang, Buddha-nature is the Middle Way (zhongdao 中道), which signifies a spiritual state that avoids the extremes of both emptiness and non-emptiness. Next, I explore how and why Jizang believes that Buddha-nature is eternal. I examine Jizang’s notions of intrinsic eternality (dingxing chang 定性常) and conditional eternality (yinyuan chang 因緣常), aiming to demonstrate that his understanding of Buddha-nature as eternal can be framed within the concept of conditional eternality, where Buddha-nature is seen as the objective manifestation of the dharma body. Since this type of eternality aligns with the principle of universal emptiness, Jizang’s assertion that Buddha-nature is eternal is thus compatible with the notion of universal emptiness. Furthermore, I illustrate that Jizang’s theory of eternal Buddha-nature carries practical implications, suggesting that this assertion serves as encouragement rather than being merely an ontological claim. Full article

This paper explores the parallel emergence of two theological movements that share ecumenical insights: Theological Interpretation of Scripture (TIS) and deification. It identifies their intrinsic connections to creeds and draws upon their recent scholarly convergence. By highlighting the absence of a robust deificational hermeneutics within the realm of theological interpretation, this paper aims to address that gap by advocating for a deificational hermeneutics that serves the interests of theological interpretation. This argument is founded on three vital theological insights: (1) similar to creeds, the theology of deification is essential to Christian theology with significant ecumenical value, (2) the imago Dei acts as a unifying framework, and (3) readerly formation is central to theological interpretation. Furthermore, through exegetical analysis of 2 Peter 1:1–11, this essay reveals aspects that would remain obscured without the “prism” of deification. Full article

All journalists have bodies. This commonsensical fact acquires more currency every day as the work of reporters and editors becomes automated, robotized, and taken over by (generative) artificial intelligence. The embodied nature of news work matters, not in the least because of the personal attachment practitioners have to what journalism is, or should be. However, in the rich history of journalism studies, bodily perspectives are remarkably absent—beyond descriptions of journalists as sociodemographic profiles. In this essay, we explore various theoretical frameworks to bring the body back into the study and practice of journalism. In our argument, we apply the insights gained from this exercise to address the well-documented gap between what journalists feel their work should be—and the reality of what their work is actually like. Full article

Readers tend to allocate more cognitive resources to processing belief-consistent than belief-inconsistent information when reading multiple texts displaying discrepant views. This phenomenon, known as the text-belief consistency effect, results in individuals being more prone to making biased decisions and falling victim to manipulation and misinformation. This issue is gaining relevance due to the undeniably vast amount of information surrounding us. Hence, schools must ensure that students complete their education prepared to face this challenge. However, international surveys and research indicate a generalized literacy deficiency among students. In the present study, recent upper secondary graduates read four texts discussing a controversial topic to explore whether they effectively overcome the text-belief consistency effect or not. Eye tracking was used to explore immediate (or passive) and delayed (or strategic) text processing, and an essay task was used to measure their resulting mental representation of the text content. Results revealed no significant differences in immediate and delayed processing depending on whether the arguments were belief-consistent or belief-inconsistent. Moreover, essays displayed a balanced and unbiased approach to the debate. Despite these results suggesting this population may be capable of overcoming the text-belief consistency effect, limitations in the study and alternative explanations must be explored before drawing definite conclusions. Full article

The practice of science appears to involve “model-talk”. Scientists, one thinks, are in the business of giving accounts of reality. Scientists, in the process of furnishing such accounts, talk about what they call “models”. Philosophers of science have inspected what this talk of models suggests about how scientific theories manage to represent reality. There are, it seems, at least three distinct philosophical views on the role of scientific models in science’s portrayal of reality: the abstractionist view, the indirect fictionalist view, and the direct fictionalist view. In this essay, I try to articulate a question about what makes a scientific model more or less appropriate for a specific domain of reality. More precisely, I ask, “What accounts for the fact that given a determinate target domain, some scientific models, but not others, are thought to be “appropriate” for that domain?” I then consider whether and the degree to which each of the mentioned views on scientific models institutes a satisfactory response to this question. I conclude that, amongst those views, the direct fictionalist view seems to have the most promising response. I then utilize this argument to develop a more precise account of the problem of differential importability, and ultimately offer a more general and less presumptive argument that the problem seems to be optimally solved by justifying comparative evaluation of model-importabilities solely in terms of comparative evaluations of what I characterize as models’ “holistic” predictive success. Full article

The focus of this paper is a suite of Latin papers from 1685, some of which are still unpublished, in which Leibniz writes in the guise of a Catholic in order to defend Catholicism and counter Protestant objections, and this despite him being a lifelong Lutheran. After providing an overview of these writings (which I refer to as Leibniz’s “Catholic” writings) and the grounds for dating them to May–June 1685, I consider their purpose, arguing against the claim that they were intended to support Church reunion and suggesting instead that they were apologetic in nature, intended as a reactivation or reimagining of Leibniz’s earlier “Catholic Demonstrations” project. I identify the patron Leibniz had in mind for these writings as Landgrave Ernst von Hessen-Rheinfels and support this by a detailed comparison of the “Catholic” writings with the Leibniz-Landgrave correspondence and the Landgrave’s still-unpublished essays. This reveals that the Protestant arguments Leibniz uses in the “Catholic” writings are the very ones that he himself used when writing to the Landgrave, and that the responses Leibniz gives to these arguments are the very ones that the Landgrave used. I also consider the context of the writings, suggesting they were crafted during a period of personal uncertainty for Leibniz and possibly aimed at securing a position under the Landgrave. Full article