THEN AS NOW, WHY NIEBUHR?

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 761-771
Author(s):  
K. HEALAN GASTON
Keyword(s):  
Human Beings ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Central Claim

The literature on the life and legacy of the American Protestant thinker Reinhold Niebuhr has long been driven by questions about Niebuhr's continued relevance. Like other contributions to the recent “Niebuhr revival,” each of the three books under consideration here raises this question—John Patrick Diggins's Why Niebuhr Now? (2011) by offering a series of “sympathetic reflections” on Niebuhr's central claim that human beings are both creatures and creators of history (ix); Daniel F. Rice's edited volume Reinhold Niebuhr Revisited (2009) by inviting a cadre of top Niebuhr scholars to make the case for Niebuhr's relevance to a new generation; and Rice's own Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence (2013) by contending that close attention to Niebuhr's formative relationships sheds light on his ongoing relevance.

scholarly journals SACRIFICE VS. SUSTENANCE: FOOD AS A BURIAL GOOD IN LATE PRE-IMPERIAL AND EARLY IMPERIAL CHINESE TOMBS AND ITS RELATION FUNERARY RITES

Early China ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 179-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Armin Selbitschka
Keyword(s):  
Human Beings ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Funerary Rituals ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Food And Drink ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Funerary Rites ◽  
The One ◽  
The Ancient Chinese

AbstractOne of the medical manuscripts recovered from Tomb No. 3 at Mawangdui (dated 186 b.c.e.) states that, “When a person is born there are two things that need not to be learned: the first is to breathe and the second is to eat.” Of course it is true that all healthy newborn human beings possess the reflexes to breathe and eat. Yet, the implications of death should have been just as obvious to the ancient Chinese. Once the human brain ceases to function, there is no longer a biological need for oxygen and nourishment. Nevertheless, a large number of people in late pre-imperial and early imperial China insisted on burying food and drink with the dead. Most modern commentators take the deposition of food and drink as burial goods to be a rather trite phenomenon that warrants little reflection. To their minds both kinds of deposits were either intended to sustain the spirit of the deceased in the hereafter or simply a sacrifice to the spirit of the deceased. Yet, a closer look at the archaeological evidence suggests otherwise. By tracking the exact location of food and drink containers in late pre-imperial and early imperial tombs and by comprehensively analyzing inscriptions on such vessels in addition to finds of actual food, the article demonstrates that reality was more complicated than this simple either/or dichotomy. Some tombs indicate that the idea of continued sustenance coincided with occasional sacrifices. Moreover, this article will introduce evidence of a third kind of sacrifice that, so far, has gone unnoticed by scholarship. Such data confirms that sacrifices to spirits other than the one of the deceased sometimes were also part of funerary rituals. By paying close attention to food and drink as burial goods the article will put forth a more nuanced understanding of early Chinese burial practices and associated notions of the afterlife.

Thomas Hobbes and the Divine Politics of Anarchy

2020 ◽  
pp. 129-156
Author(s):  
William Bain
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Human Action ◽  
International Order ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Divine Action ◽  
Dominant Discourse ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Central Claim

This chapter presents Thomas Hobbes as a theorist of imposed order. The central claim is that Hobbes’s conception of political order, an artificial arrangement arising from will and consent, reflects the intellectual commitments of nominalist theology. Uncovering the theological presuppositions of his thought opens space for an understanding of international order that is quite different from what the ‘Hobbesian’ tradition portrays as a domain of endemic violence. Hobbes is correctly imagined as a theorist of interstate society. The chapter examines the unity of philosophy and theology in Hobbes’s thought, focusing on a recurring analogy between divine action and human action. Human beings make and unmake their world, including the commonwealth, as God created the universe. Modern theorists reproduce these theological ideas when they invoke Hobbes to illustrate the character and consequences of anarchy. Hobbes, conceived as a theorist of imposed order, exemplifies what has become the dominant discourse of international order. The implication is that modern theories of international order might not be as uniquely modern or purely secular as contemporary theorists typically assume.

scholarly journals MODERN DESIGNS: HISTORY AND MEMORY IN LE CORBUSIER’S CHANDIGARH

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 220-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nabaparna Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Le Corbusier ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Architectural Discourse ◽  
Urban Modernity ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Architectural Modernism ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Jawaharlal Nehru

Located at the foothills of the Sivalik Mountains, Chandigarh was the dream city of independent India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1952, Nehru commissioned the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier to design Chandigarh. Scholars often locate in Corbusier’s plans an urban modernity that required a break with the past. Moving away from such scholarship, this article will argue that Chandigarh marked a climactic moment in Le Corbusier’s career when he tried to weave together modern architecture with tradition, and through it, human beings with nature. A careful study of the cosmic iconography of Chandigarh clearly reveals that nature for Le Corbusier was more than a vast expanse of greenery: it was organized in symbolic ways, as a cosmic form emblematic of Hindu mythologies. I will argue that in addition to local conditions – economic and cultural – that impacted the actual execution of Le Corbusier’s plans, cosmic iconography shaped a modernism profoundly reliant on Hindu traditions. This iconography also inspired a new generation of Indian architects like Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi (1927 – present). Doshi played a key role in authoring the postcolonial architectural discourse in India. Following Le Corbusier, he advocated an architectural modernism anchored in sacred Hindu traditions.

Self-Directed Education—Unschooling and Democratic Schooling

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Gray
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
History Education ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human History ◽  
Democratic Schools ◽  
Democratic Schooling ◽  
The World ◽  
Follow Up Studies ◽  
New Generation

Education, broadly defined, is cultural transmission. It is the process or set of processes by which each new generation of human beings acquires and builds upon the skills, knowledge, beliefs, values, and lore of the culture into which they are born. Through all but the most recent speck of human history, education was always the responsibility of those being educated. Children come into the world biologically prepared to educate themselves through observing the culture around them and incorporating what they see into their play. Research in hunter-gatherer cultures shows that children in those cultures became educated through their own self-directed exploration and play. In modern cultures, self-directed education is pursued by children in families that adopt the homeschooling approach commonly called “unschooling” and by children enrolled in democratic schools, where they are in charge of their own education. Follow-up studies of “graduates” of unschooling and democratic schooling reveal that this approach to education can be highly effective, in today’s word, if children are provided with an adequate environment for self-education—an environment in which they can interact freely with others across a broad range of ages, can experience first-hand what is most valued in the culture, and can play with, and thereby experiment with, the primary tools of the culture.

Human Being

2019 ◽  
pp. 388-406
Author(s):  
Paul Dafydd Jones
Keyword(s):  
Human Action ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Church Dogmatics ◽  
Principal Objective

This chapter analyses Barth’s thinking about the human being in the second edition of Romans and in multiple volumes of the Church Dogmatics. It does so under the headings of ‘encounter’, ‘election’, ‘freedom’, and ‘community’. Its principal objective is to demonstrate that Barth’s emphatic affirmation of God’s priority and sovereignty is not exclusive, but rather the presupposition, of an expansive and nuanced account of human being and action. Close attention is paid to Barth’s vivid sense that human action enriches the covenant of grace—a covenant fulfilled by Christ’s saving work, and held temporally and spatially ‘open’ for the Spirit-led action of human beings.

Love and Trust

Runaway ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Chaney
Keyword(s):  
Human Agency ◽  
Environmental Problems ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ecology Of Mind ◽  
Purposive Action ◽  
Dialectics Of Liberation

This chapter interrogates Gregory Bateson's message to the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in particular, and his ecology of mind in general, on the question of defeatism and despair. If human partiality and purposive action introduce errors into the larger system, and if at scale, these errors are systemically destructive, how are human beings to respond to the social and environmental problems they face? Transcripts from Bateson's final appearance on a congress panel dramatize these questions. Actions and answers offered by Stokely Carmichael, R. D. Laing, and Emmett Grogan, the congress's most discussed participants, are examined. These figures took the position that solutions can be found in the ancient call for individual heroism. Bateson, in contrast, called for an indirect, non-purposeful class of actions that generate love of systemic integrity. These actions include the practices of art, ritual, non-utilitarian science, and "the best of religion." These practices may provide pathways to systemic correction. Because they come from a position of dependence, they call for trust. The debate between Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard Niebuhr is revisited concerning the moral significance of human agency in order to underscore Bateson's argument for the immanence of mind in nature.

scholarly journals THE EXPERIMENTAL TRANSMISSION OF COLORADO TICK FEVER

1944 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 165-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lloyd Florio ◽  
Mabel O. Stewart ◽  
Edward R. Mugrage
Keyword(s):  
Blood Cell ◽  
White Blood Cell ◽  
Spotted Fever ◽  
Rocky Mountain ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever ◽  
Cytoplasmic Bodies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Tick Vaccine ◽  
New Generation

1. The symptoms, history of tick bite, characteristic fever curve, and white blood cell picture should enable the physician to make a diagnosis of Colorado tick fever in nearly every case. 2. The typical white blood cell picture is a depression of the total leucocytes with a shift to the left of the granulocytes. Basophilic cytoplasmic bodies appear occasionally in lymphocytes 3 to 4 days after clinical recovery. 3. The disease can be transmitted serially in human beings by parenteral injection of blood or serum. Such transfers have not resulted in decreased or increased virulence. 4. The naturally acquired and experimental cases of Colorado tick fever are identical in their manifestations. 5. An attack of Colorado tick fever confers a degree of definite immunity to the disease. 6. Colorado tick fever is not a mild form of Rocky Mountain spotted fever since individuals immunized with ground tick vaccine against Rocky Mountain spotted fever are still susceptible to Colorado tick fever. 7. Adult Dermacentor andersoni ticks allowed to feed on typical cases, then carried through to a new generation and fed on susceptible adults, failed to transmit the disease. 8. Colorado tick fever has been successfully transmitted to an experimental animal, the golden hamster.

IN THE ENVIRONMENT OF IDEAS: ARTHUR LOVEJOY AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS AS A FORM OF CULTURAL HISTORY

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 439-464
Author(s):  
DANIEL WICKBERG
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Academic Cultures ◽  
Dead End ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Disciplinary Cultures

The last fifteen years have seen a number of attempts to imagine what lies “beyond” the linguistic and cultural turns of recent decades in historiography. The impulse is derived, one suspects, from the need for academic cultures to declare current established practice “dead” in favor of some new departure. We have had thirty years of discourse study, cultural analysis of texts and meaning, attention to the constitutive power of language, and suspicion of reading texts as unmediated referential documents. It seems inevitable that voices would arise declaring the attention to culture and language exhausted, asking us to turn away from language and culture and plant our feet on some firmer ground. Academic disciplinary cultures, try as they might to abandon modernist commitments to a belief in progress in which today's know-how trumps yesterday's ignorance, can't seem to transcend their nineteenth-century origins. We know, or think we do, that the humanities are not the bearers of progress in knowledge, that we are no wiser than our forebears, that the holy grail remains as far out of reach as it ever was. And yet we act as if we can expose the shortcomings of our intellectual ancestors and in doing so inaugurate a new and better understanding of the realm in which human beings act and create meaning. Hence a new generation, having decided that it has either absorbed the lessons of the cultural and linguistic turns or realized what a constraining dead end such a turn represents, advocates a departure for more fertile ground.

scholarly journals Kant on Human Dignity: Autonomy, Humanity, and Human Rights

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-98
Author(s):  
Sunday Adeniyi Fasoro
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Categorical Imperative ◽  
Moral Principle ◽  
Special Importance ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
New Frontier ◽  
Kant's Ethics ◽  
Central Claim

This paper explores the new frontier within Kantian scholarship which suggests that Kant places so much special importance on the value of rational nature that the supreme principle of morality and the concept of human dignity are both grounded on it. Advocates of this reading argue that the notion of autonomy and dignity should now be considered as the central claim of Kant’s ethics, rather than the universalisation of maxims. Kant’s ethics are termed as repugnant for they place a high demand on the universalisation of maxims as a universal moral principle. As a result, they argue that there is an urgent need to rescue Kant’s ethics from the controversies surrounding maxims and universalisability, and the best way to rescue his ethics is by “leaving deontology behind”. It must be left behind because the categorical imperative is not needed in order to rescue Kant’s ethics, as deontology is often overrated. Consequently, the highest duties of the human being are to ensure that his fellow human beings enjoy unhindered autonomy and receive the honour that their dignity duly deserves, as well as to look after their welfare and treat them with respect, regardless of their dispositions. I review recent literature to appraise this new frontier within Kantian scholarship. I also explore the works of philosophers, such as Herman, Korsgaard, Wood, Höffe, and, specifically, Hill, on Kant’s conception of human dignity in relation to its conception as autonomy, humanity, and the source of human rights.

“The Human Heart Is a Seat of Constant War”

2018 ◽  
pp. 252-282
Author(s):  
Nicholas Buccola
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Heart ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
Political Morality ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject

This chapter reconstructs what Frederick Douglass thought about human nature to deepen peoples understanding of the foundations of his political morality and to counter criticisms of liberal views of human nature. It lays out the base critiques of the liberal view of human nature in modern Western political thought and shows how Douglass viewed the competing tendencies of human beings in order to form a nuanced idea of human nature. Going into the debates in the liberal community, it cites the differing opinions of Thomas Jefferson, Reinhold Niebuhr, and John Locke. With a focus on the dualities that make up Douglass’s view on the subject, this chapter shows how his view shaped his experiences and the way he interacted with the world. The dynamism that makes up Douglass’s idea of human nature makes it a viewpoint to be taken seriously and reflects the tensions inherent within the subject.

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