Compassion and Peregrinatio

2020 ◽  
pp. 53-73
Author(s):  
Joshua Hordern
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Healthcare Professionals ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Everyday Practice ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter begins to describe the response to Chapter 1’s diagnosis. The core of a social theory which will provide therapy is introduced, namely, peregrinatio, the wayfaring and pilgrim experience of life. Peregrinatio is explained and deployed to show how it reframes healthcare encounters, illuminating the nature of compassion, its civic context, and its everyday practice and fostering six attitudes which conduce to compassion: (i) interest in the human life-course; (ii) patience with plurality of perspective; (iii) curiosity in human encounter and companionship; (iv) humility in conversation; (v) recognition of the proper value of healthcare; and (vi) perseverance in preserving the communal nature of human life amidst suffering. The benefits of such a framing of the human condition for three aspects of healing are considered: (i) the healing of the affections; (ii) the healing encounter with God amidst suffering; and (iii) the healing role of healthcare professionals. Objections to peregrinatio are considered and addressed.

The Role of the Core Moral Values in Social Work

2018 ◽  
pp. 18-24
Author(s):  
Sorin-Tudor Maxim
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Intervention ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Human Condition

We consider it appropriate to examine, within the social work act, under the new circumstances, the importance of other than traditional values which tend to become central, that human intervention relates to. In this particular context, tolerance, understood as a respect for different, but human lifestyles, and the empathy, as a way to meet real, not “presumed” expectations, of individuals and groups, have the ability to restructure the system of values of social work able to allow a different approach in order to achieve the human condition.

Compassion and Time

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-204
Author(s):  
Joshua Hordern
Keyword(s):  
Palliative Care ◽  
Life Course ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Martha Nussbaum ◽  
Policy Practice ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter explores how differing views of time and narrative give rise to different objects of hope and corresponding content to compassion. Reflection on the human life-course, increasingly influential in policy, practice, political thought, and ethics, provides a frame of reference for interrelating different interpretations of human life from conception to death. A faithfully secular enquiry is pursued to explore this possibility, being capacious enough to interweave various ways of conceiving the human condition. To show how compassion’s content is differentiated by varying accounts of time, the chapter examines the interrelation of tragedy, Christian theology, and compassion in conversation with Martha Nussbaum, with an excursus on Buddhism. The aim is to clarify how creation, sin, Christ’s death, and Christ’s resurrection influence the content of compassion. The account of time’s relationship to compassion which emerges—‘time suspended and reconciled’—is defined by Christ’s life-course and applied to obstetrics and palliative care.

scholarly journals Children of Oryx, Children of Crake, Children of Men: Redefining the Post/Transhuman in Margaret Atwood’s “ustopian” MaddAddam Trilogy

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-146
Author(s):  
Eduardo Marks de Marques
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
Use Of Technology ◽  
The Human Condition

One of the main pillars of posthuman and transhuman thought is the use of technology as a means to ameliorate human life by helping overcome the flaws and limitations of the biological body. The effect of such trends has been central to the development of contemporary, third-turn dystopian novels in English, published in the past thirty or so years. However, one important aspect of such narratives is also their list of transgressive characteristics, distancing them from their modern, second-turn counterparts. The following article aims to discuss how transgressive the ideas of dystopia and transhumanism that form Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy are, essentially discussing whatever lies at the core of the human condition.

An Adolescent Girl Experiments with Sexuality: Rain (Christine Jeffs, 2001)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Adolescent Girl ◽  
Emotional Problems ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Core ◽  
Parental Neglect ◽  
The Human Condition

The analysis in this chapter focuses on Christine Jeffs’s Rain as evidence of a shift that had occurred in New Zealand society whereby puritan repression is no longer perceived as the source of emotional problems for children in the process of becoming adults, but rather its opposite – neoliberal individualism, hedonism, and the parental neglect and moral lassitude it had promoted. A comparison with Kirsty Gunn’s novel of the same name, upon which the adaptation is based, reveals how Jeffs converted a poetic meditation on the human condition into a cinematic family melodrama with a girl’s discovery of the power of her own sexuality at the core.

scholarly journals Man, fate, and death in Indo-European tradition

2004 ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Martin Litchfield West
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Old Irish ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Linguistic Material ◽  
The Human Condition

This paper deals with Indo-European concepts concerning the human condition: the nature of man, the role of fate in shaping his life, his destiny in death. The evidence is partly drawn from linguistic material, partly from literary. The assumption is that, just as comparison of vocabulary in widely separated languages such as Hittite, Sanskrit and Old Irish makes it possible to reconstruct words of the parent language, so comparison of parallel motifs in different traditional literatures may show up inherited ideas and beliefs.

Prologue

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Objective Truth ◽  
The World ◽  
Subjective Truth ◽  
The Human Condition

Introduces some of the central ideas of existentialism—including subjective truth, finitude, being-in-the-world, facticity, transcendence, inwardness, and the self as becoming—as relevant to an individual living in the contemporary moment. Highlights existentialist concern both for human individuality and for commonly-shared features of the human condition. Emphasizes existentialist attention both to the despairing aspects of human life and to the affirmation of existence as worthy of wonder. Introduces a few key thinkers—Kierkegaard, Marcel, Heidegger, Sartre, Nietzsche—while also indicating the diversity of existentialism to be emphasized throughout the book. Addresses what existentialism may have to offer in the context of contemporary challenges to objective truth and communal forms of meaning.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Joshua Hordern
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
Healthcare Practice ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter situates the enquiry by considering the transitions which healthcare practice is undergoing because of turns in healthcare thinking towards philosophy, person-centredness, and social theory. Such changes accentuate a problem inherent in other trends in modern healthcare which have tended to reduce the scope for exploring the human condition and morally worthy ways of living life within it. The historic response of Christian ethicists to such transitions and trends is reviewed as a kind of cautionary tale which, by distinguishing different theological approaches, discloses the contested nature of an enquiry such as this. Options for the proper mode of the enquiry are thereby considered, with an argument made for a version of ‘faithful secularity’ being predominant, drawing on Nigel Biggar and Luke Bretherton, while incorporating other insights. The structure of the book is then outlined, the political context is introduced, some distinctions are highlighted, and a guide to reading is offered.

“Before the Word and World became Separate”

2020 ◽  
pp. 199-216
Author(s):  
Joe Moffett
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Spiritual Quest ◽  
The Core ◽  
Intended Destination ◽  
The Human Condition

There is in Charles Wright’s work a complicated spiritual quest that frequently turns to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Wright’s reappearing “pilgrim” persona, who, unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims, never arrives at his intended destination, persists in a stubborn search for divine insight. Wright uses Hopkins as a sounding board, both in the sense of testing his own spiritu- ality against Hopkins’s and the sense of experimenting with Hopkins’s very sounds. Wright marvels at his predecessor’s ability to combine world, word, and Word; he often attempts, and fails, to do the same, coming to believe that language has become severed from its spiritual origins, but in exploring that rift, which Wright often does in Hopkinsian terms, the poet “burrows deep into the core of the human condition” and achieves a gravity unlike that of any other contemporary poet.

Robots and the Future of Retribution

2021 ◽  
pp. 93-101
Author(s):  
John Danaher
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Traditional Practices ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter studies the future of retribution and, in particular, the role that robots will play in shaping that future. It begins by describing the Bouphonia ritual, which speaks to two important features of the human condition: the enduring significance of practices of blame and punishment in human life, and the occasional absurdity of this desire. What happens when robots — or other sophisticated artificially intelligent (AI) machines — get embedded in our societies and have a part to play in criminal acts? Should they, like the knife in the Bouphonia ritual, be blamed for their contribution? Or should something else happen, something a little more radical? The chapter makes the case for radicalism. In particular, it suggests that the rise of the robots should lead us to reconsider the wisdom of our traditional practices of punishment and blame.

An Americanist's Take on Against the Grain

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 697-699
Author(s):  
Terence N. D'Altroy
Keyword(s):  
Social Complexity ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Food Sources ◽  
Human History ◽  
Formal Institutions ◽  
Monumental Architecture ◽  
The Human Condition

In both public and professional accounts of the grand sweep of human history, a few questions recurrently beg for attention. How did technology—broadly understood to encompass everything from control of fire to domestication of food sources, to craft manufacture, to communication and transportation—transform human life? How did social complexity come into being: e.g. classes, formal institutions and the state? Why did some ancient societies invest so much effort in corporate constructions such as pyramids, temples and other monumental architecture? What were the effects of warfare and disease on the human condition? And why did the early societies of so many regions cycle between eras of concentrated power and its apparent dissolution?

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