Preserving the world for Christ

2008 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Conceptual Basis ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Common Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World

AbstractThe practices, habits and convictions that once allowed the inhabitants of Christendom to determine what they could reasonably do and say together to foster a just and equitable common life have slowly been displaced over the past few centuries by new configurations which have sought to maintain an inherited faith in an underlying purpose to human life while disassociating themselves from the God who had been the beginning and end of that faith. In the end, however, these new configurations are incapable of sustained deliberations about the basic conditions of our humanity. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology provides important clues into what it takes to make and keep human life human in such a world. The first part of this essay examines Bonhoeffer's conception of the last things, the things before the last, and what binds them together. He argues that the things before the last do not possess a separate, autonomous existence, and that the positing of such a breach has had disastrous effects on human beings and the world they inhabit. The second part looks at Bonhoeffer's account of the divine mandates as the conceptual basis for coping with a world that has taken leave of God. Though this account of the mandates has much to commend it, it is hindered by problematic habits of interpretation that leave it vacillating between incommensurable positions. Bonhoeffer's incomplete insights are thus subsumed within Augustine's understanding of the two orders of human society set forth in City of God.

Tradition and Human Life

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald O’Collins, SJ
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Theological Reflection ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
New Members ◽  
The Past ◽  
Peter Berger ◽  
Global View ◽  
Anthony Giddens ◽  
Edward Shils ◽  
Traditional Patterns

Help towards understanding the human and religious functions of tradition comes from such sociologists as Peter Berger, Anthony Giddens, and Edward Shils. Tradition by Shils continues to illuminate how, although human beings modify inherited beliefs and change traditional patterns of behaviour, the new always incorporates something of the past. Shils takes a global view of tradition; it embodies everything individuals inherit when born into the world. It is through tradition that new members of society begin to identify themselves. The bearers of tradition may be not only official but also ‘learned’ and ‘ordinary’. Shils dedicates many further pages to changes in traditions and the forces leading to these changes. What sociologists like Giddens say about globalization also affects theological reflection on tradition. Surprisingly, the very few theologians who have published on tradition have ignored the sociologists.

scholarly journals Gandhian Model of Community Development

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Bharat Prasad Badal
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Community Development ◽  
Development Strategy ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Balance Sheet ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Mahatma Gandhi ◽  
Development Indicators ◽  
Great Leader ◽  
The World

 Gandhian Model of Community Development (GMCD) is a sustainable development model for governments in the central, provincial, and local levels of democratic federal countries in the world by the scientific analysis of Gandhian ideology in a specified community. Community Development is a method, a strategy, and a campaign to uplift human life settlements and to solve the community problems from a simple local perspective. The human settlement with local communal acceptance, local norms, and values, environmental protection, help and cooperation, trusteeship, health, education, sanitation, training, transportation, marketing, etc. are the major components of the Gandhian Model of Community Development. The global acceptance with local initiation, norms, knowledge and practices in the positive changes on human life is Gandhian Community Development. It is the core ideological view of the great leader of south Asia-Mahatma Gandhi. Mahatma Gandhi is also pronounced as second Buddha of the world. The main objective of the study is to develop a Gandhian Model of Community Development with the incorporation of thoughts and ideologies of Mahatma Gandhi. The study is the collection of Gandhian ideology with a programmatic model for the future development of the human being specified within the boundary with the specified indicators of the Gandhian Model of Community Development. It is a hermeneutic and historical interpretation of three universal truths- Generation, Operation, and Destruction for the liberation of human beings from a sustainable development strategy guided by Mahatma Gandhi. His ideas are herminuted in contemporary sustainable community development. In conclusion, the Gandhian Model of Community development is a model having Balance Sheet of Production and Consumption within the specified municipality and Gandhian Development Indicators for human liberation or development toward ultimate freedom.

scholarly journals MENJADI PENDIDIK YANG TERDIDIK

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (01) ◽  
pp. 81-90
Author(s):  
Sumiati Sumiati
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Educational Goals ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Common Phenomenon ◽  
Educational Activities ◽  
Philosophy Of Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Organizational Differences ◽  
Human Education

ABSTRAK Pendidikan merupakan suatu kegiatan yang universal dalam kehidupan manusia. Di manapun di dunia ini terdapat masyarakat manusia, dan di sana pula terjadi pendidikan. Walaupun pendidikan merupakan gejala umum dalam kehidupan masyarakat, namun perbedaan pandangan hidup, perbedaan falsafah hidup yang dianut oleh masing-masing bangsa atau masyarakat menyebabkan adanya perbedaan penyelenggaraan termasuk perbedaan tujuan pendidikan yang ingin dicapai oleh suatu bangsa atau masyarakat. Kegiatan pendidikan tidak dapat dilepaskan dari yang hendak dicapainya. Bagi manusia pendidikan merupakan suatu keharusan, karena manusia lahir dalam keadaan tidak berdaya, ia sangat membutuhkan bantuan dan bimbingan orang lain untuk dapat berdiri sendiri. Di samping itu manusia lahir tidak langsung dewasa yang mengidentifikasikan manusia dengan moral yang berlaku, dan manusia yang bertanggung jawab, manusia yang sanggup mempertanggungjawabkan segala konsekuensi dan perbuatannya. Oleh karena itu, perbuatan mendidik merupakan perbuatan yang mempunyai tujuan, ada suatu yang ingin dicapai dengan perbuatan tersebut. Orang tua menyuruh anaknya melaksanakan shalat lima waktu, melatih anaknya melaksanakan saum pada bulan ramadhan, melarang anaknya kencing di sembarang tempat dan sambil berdiri, menyekolahkan anaknya dan lain-lain, semuanya itu memiliki maksud dan tujuan yang ingin dicapai, khususnya bagi anaknya. Kata Kunci: Pendidik, Terdidik ABSTRACT Education is a universal activity in human life. Everywhere in the world there is human society, and there is also education. Although education is a common phenomenon in the life of the community, the differences in life views, differences in the philosophy of life adopted by individual nations or societies lead to different organizational differences, including differences in educational goals to be achieved by a nation or society. Educational activities cannot be separated from what they want to achieve. For human education is a must, because humans are born in a state of helpless, he urgently needs the help and guidance of others to be able to stand on their own. In addition man is born indirectly mature which identifies man with the prevailing morals, and responsible man, man who is able to account for all consequences and actions. Therefore, the act of educating is a purposeful act, there is something to be achieved with the action. Parents asked their children to perform the five daily prayers, to train their children to carry out fasting in Ramadan month, to forbid their children to urinate in any place and to stand up, send their children to school and others, all of which have a purpose and goal to be achieved, especially for their children. Keywords: Educator, Educated

The Academic Study of French Civilization

PMLA ◽  
1915 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 614-628
Author(s):  
Albert Léon Guérard
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
German Empire ◽  
Insurance System ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Automatic Adaptation ◽  
Academic Study

If history is to giv us a tru picture of human life in the past, it cannot limit itself to political events. The chief end of man never was to frame, uphold, and overthro governments, stil les to wage war and sign treaties. These ar accidents or epiphenomena. Man's primary concern is and was from the first his daily fight for existence, the necessity of getting food and shelter, the desire of getting them with a minimum of painful exertion. Man does not merely adapt himself to his surroundings: he attempts to alter his surroundings so as to suit himself. Thus he creates new conditions from which new problems arise. Human society groes ever farther away from that brutish state of automatic adaptation which poets call the Erthly Paradise. From the erliest stone implement to the aeroplane, from the first concerted hunt to the elaborate insurance system of the German Empire, we see the progres of this warfare against nature. The result of these efforts is what we understand by civilization.

The Sphere of the Human

2019 ◽  
pp. 267-322
Author(s):  
Helmuth Plessner ◽  
J. M. Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Psychological Experience ◽  
The World ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
The Way

“Centric positionality” is a form of organism-environment relation exhibited by animal forms of life. Human life is characterized not only by centric but also by excentric positionality—that is, the ability to take a position beyond the boundary of one’s own body. Excentric positionality is manifest in: the inner, psychological experience of human beings; the outer, physical being of their bodies and behavior; and the shared, intersubjective world that includes other human beings and is the basis of culture. In each of these three worlds, there is a duality symptomatic of excentric positionality. Three laws characterize excentric positionality: natural artificiality, or the natural need of humans for artificial supplements; mediated immediacy, or the way that contact with the world in human activity, experience, and expression is both transcendent and immanent, both putting humans directly in touch with things and keeping them at a distance; and the utopian standpoint, according to which humans can always take a critical or “negative” position regarding the contents of their experience or their life.

Assessment of Available Technologies for Hospital Waste Management

2017 ◽  
pp. 172-188
Author(s):  
Alok Rai ◽  
Richa Kothari ◽  
D. P. Singh
Keyword(s):  
Waste Management ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Hospital Waste ◽  
Liquid Discharge ◽  
Hospital Wastes ◽  
Hospital Practices ◽  
Modern Hospital

Modern hospital practices with galloping growth in medical technology facilitate increase human life span, decrease mortality rate and increase natality rate. Life supporting health services generates potentially hazardous and infectious hospital wastes like pharmaceuticals, cottons, food, paper, plastics, radionuclide, sharps, and anatomical parts etc. These wastes are complex in nature with maximum part of municipal solid waste and small part of biomedical waste (anatomical parts, body parts etc.). Improper conduct and management of hospital waste create several problems and nosocomial diseases to human beings and harms environment. Traditional practices included for management are open burning, mixing waste, liquid discharge and waste disposal without treatment normally. Hence, this issue comes in lime light and several guidelines come to sort out this problem. Thus, challenges associated with traditional hospital waste management techniques and modern techniques for management are assessed in general and association with human society in particular in this chapter.

3. Animals and the environment

2020 ◽  
pp. 31-47
Author(s):  
Damien Keown
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Meat Eating ◽  
Plant Life ◽  
The World ◽  
The Buddha

Is Buddhism truly an ‘eco-friendly’ religion? ‘Animals and the environment’ examines the implications of Buddhist teachings such as that human beings can be reborn as animals and vice versa. While the Buddhist ‘sublime attitudes’ such as kindness and compassion seem at first to favour animals to a greater degree than we find in Christianity, human life still takes precedence in the hierarchy of living beings. Rules about plant life are unclear, with Buddhist writers acknowledging the beauty of both the wilderness and civilization. Vegetarianism is largely seen as a morally superior diet, but meat-eating was common at the time of the Buddha and is widely practised by monks today. Buddhist attitudes toward the natural world are complex and are to some extent overshadowed by the belief that the world as we know it is fundamentally flawed.

scholarly journals Divinity, Noēsis, and Aristotelian Friendship

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 01-29
Author(s):  
John A. Houston
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Second Order ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Human Community ◽  
Rational Nature ◽  
Living Together ◽  
The World ◽  
Virtuous Activity

Aristotle's NE X claim that the best human life is one devoted to contemplation (theoria) seems in tension with his emphasis elsewhere on our essentially political nature, and more specifically, his claim that friendship is necessary for our flourishing. For, if our good can be in principle realized apart from the human community, there seems little reason to suggest we 'need' friends, as he clearly does in NE VIII & IX. I argue that central to Aristotle's NE X discussion of contemplation is the claim that our chief good accords with whatever is 'most divine' in us, viz. our rational nature (NE 1177b2-18). Thus, the best human life involves the excellent exercise of our rational capacities. I distinguish two ways in which human beings flourish through exercising their rationality. The first is in the activity of theoria. The second, I argue, can be found in the virtuous activity of complete friendship (teleia philia). For Aristotle the truest form of friendship is an expression of rationality. It is characterized not merely by our living together, but conversing, and sharing one another's thoughts (NE 1170b12-14). Examining Aristotle's notion of a friend as 'another self (alios autos), I argue that through friendship human beings come to better know themselves and the world in which they live. Complete friendship involves a (uniquely human) second-order awareness of oneself in another, and through this awareness our understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live is enriched, confirmed, and enjoyed through the presence of other minds. Thus, the highest form of Aristotelian friendship is an intellectual activity through which we attain an analogue of the divine contemplation of the unmoved mover, thereby living with respect to what is most divine in us, but doing so in accordance with our uniquely rational-political nature.

scholarly journals Eating Human Beings: Varieties of Cannibalism and the Heterogeneity of Human Life

Philosophy ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 483-501
Author(s):  
Mikel Burley
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Important Task ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Face ◽  
Human Flesh ◽  
Ways Of Being

AbstractPhilosophy as well as anthropology is a discipline concerned with what it means to be human, and hence with investigating the multiple ways of making sense of human life. An important task in this process is to remain open to diverse conceptions of human beings, not least conceptions that may on the face of it appear to be morally alien. A case in point are conceptions that are bound up with cannibalism, a practice sometimes assumed to be so morally scandalous that it probably never happens, at least in a culturally sanctioned form. Questioning this assumption, along with Cora Diamond's contention that the very concept of a human being involves a prohibition against consuming human flesh, the present article explores how cannibalism can have an intelligible place in a human society – exemplified by the Wari’ of western Brazil. By coming to see this, we are enabled to enlarge our conception of the heterogeneity of possible ways of being human.

Of Iron Cages, Double Binds, Epistemological Crises, and Environmental Destruction

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 358-379
Author(s):  
Anthony O. Balcomb
Keyword(s):  
Max Weber ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Greek Culture ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
The World ◽  
Prediction And Control ◽  
Epistemological Crises ◽  
And Control

The Western worldview, otherwise known as the modern worldview, has its origins in ancient Greek culture and its best known analyst and critic is Max Weber. Weber described the rationalization processes by which it came about as involving the disenchantment of the world, the disengagement of the autonomous self from the world in order to become its central agent, the objectification of the cosmos and the bureaucratization of all aspects of human life with the intention of mastery and control. This has led to what Weber called the Iron Cage in which modern human beings find themselves, unable to escape the alienation that such disengagement has brought about but equally unable to find an alternative. The exploitative nature of the western project is the basic cause of the contemporary destruction of the environment. Gregory Bateson probes more deeply into the alienating influences of the modern worldview which he says is based on its inability to understand the world holistically, which will inevitably lead to the world’s destruction. At the heart of this condition is his theory of the double bind. His advocacy for a more holistic understanding of the world resonates with postmodern critics in the fields of philosophy, anthropology, and theology, all of whom are advocating engagement, vulnerability, and participation as opposed to separation, prediction, and control.

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