Critics of Modern Politics

2021 ◽  
pp. 10-31
Author(s):  
Joshua Mauldin
Keyword(s):  
Modern Society ◽  
Alasdair Macintyre ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
Stanley Hauerwas ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Human Good ◽  
The Church

This chapter sets up the central question of the project by examining three recent critics of modern politics. For historian Brad Gregory, the ills of modern society are traceable to the Protestant Reformation, which destroyed the unified society that Catholicism once provided in Europe. For Alasdair MacIntyre, modern society lacks an account of the human good and thus of the virtues that help human beings achieve this good. Stanley Hauerwas agrees with MacIntyre about the hopelessness of liberal modernity, and suggests that the Church can provide an alternative to the barbarity of the wider society, bedeviled as it is by disagreement, distrust, and violence. For these critics it is the marginalization of religion that is the source of modernity’s ills. The remainder of the book will examine the works of prominent religious thinkers who reflected on the ethical life of modern society at a time when that viability was even more questionable than it is today.

scholarly journals Budaya “Pakewuh” Santri pada Kyai: Relevansi Budaya Pendidikan Pesantren Terhadap Tantangan Dunia Islam di Era Globalisasi

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
M Baiqun Isbahi ◽  
Novy Setia Yunas
Keyword(s):  
Modern Society ◽  
Communication Process ◽  
Public Confidence ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Educational Culture ◽  
Religious Doctrine ◽  
Transitional Society ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

The phenomenon of communication process in pesantren occurs among kyai, ustadz, and santri creating a distinctive educational culture among pesantren. The relationship among them is very close, because santri permanently live in a pesantren environment nearby the kyai’s house. Europe in the mid-century is full of power, doctrine and domination of the church which has purpose to guide people towards a righteous life, but on the other hand the dominance of this church without thinking of the dignity and freedom of human beings who have feelings, thoughts, desires and ideals to determine his own future, therefore the development of science is inhibited. Meanwhile, the culture of education in pesantren raises a similar similarity though not the same, where the position of kyai is considered as the representative of the god who escaped the error. Both of these phenomena are presenting the dominance of the religious doctrine that can penetrate the layers of public confidence in various areas of life. Based on the study, it can be concluded that the leadership in pesantren with the "pekewuh" culture of Islamic religious figures (kyai) is found in the traditional society, and the leadership in the transitional society-especially in modern society and the metropolis-has experienced a crisis of legitimacy, irrelevant sense in the era of globalization , and degradative change, due to the various dynamics and changes that occur, both internal and external dynamics of the Muslim community.

scholarly journals 新冠疫情下基督宗教醫治觀念及實踐的倫理糾結

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-82
Author(s):  
Wai Luen KWOK
Keyword(s):  
Modern Society ◽  
Healthcare Services ◽  
Public Healthcare ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Medical Systems ◽  
The Public ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Christian Understanding ◽  
Eternal Salvation ◽  
The Church

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English. 基督宗教自創教以來，其信息和實踐都與醫治息息相關。人類犯罪墮落的肉身和靈魂，雖然有「因信稱義」之拯救，但更需要教會的聖禮及群體生活來使之潔淨與得醫治。它們都是信徒需要親身參與的活動，被視為不能隨意缺席的集體活動。 另外，教會一直在瘟疫流行時贈醫施藥、照顧病者。基督徒無私的醫治服務，雖然在歷史上為大眾所尊崇，但這些舉動也令他們冒上受感染的風險。在前現代的社會裡，教會的「醫治」仍能對民眾的健康作出貢獻，但現代社會已不需教會扮演公共保健和醫療的角色。尤有進者，基督宗教的醫治觀念和實踐，在今次的新冠病毒疫情裡，被描述為危害公共健康的行徑。本文旨在探討這種變化背後的倫理糾結，並分析教會的回應策略，如何重新詮釋基督宗教的醫治觀念，及應對現今的倫理挑戰。 From its very beginning, the message and practice of the Christian faith have been inextricably related to healing. Although the eternal salvation of sinful human beings' body and soul is provided by justification through faith, the Church teaches that our soul and body should be purified and healed by sacraments and communal Christian life. These in-person activities are essential to Christian practice. Moreover, historically, the Church has dispensed medicine and taken care of the sick during pandemics. Christianity's caring service has been well respected by the public throughout its history, and in pre-modern society, Christian healthcare services often contributed substantially to the psychological and physical wellbeing of many people. In modern society, however, the role of the Church has been replaced by the public healthcare and medical systems. Particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Christian understanding and practice of healing has sometimes been accused of endangering public health. This paper therefore investigates the ethical landscapes behind the change of public opinion and the strategies used by Christian churches to meet this challenge.

scholarly journals Survivors of the nations: a response to Fergusson and Pecknold

2006 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Stout
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Alasdair Macintyre ◽  
The Other ◽  
Stanley Hauerwas ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

This paper responds to two article reviews of Democracy and Tradition – one by David Fergusson, the other by C. C. Pecknold. The first part of the paper seeks to clarify the author's critique of Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas, in particular MacIntyre's claim that our society is inherently incapable of sustaining rational discussion and Hauerwas's conception of what ‘being the church’ implies. The second part defends and extends the author's account of secularization. The third part considers truth, objectivity and the relationship between philosophy and political culture.

ХРИСТИЯНСЬКА МІСІЯ В ЕПОХУ ПОСТПРАВДИ: 80 РОКІВ УКРАЇНСЬКІЙ РЕДАКЦІЇ РАДІО «ВАТИКАН»

2020 ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
I. Tsyperdiuk
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Main Task ◽  
Editorial Office ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Values And Beliefs ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Church

<div><p><em>The milestones of the activity of the Ukrainian editorial office of Vatican Radio during its 80-year history are considered in the article. The reasons for the creation of the Ukrainian editorial office, the peculiarities of its work under the pressure of Soviet propaganda during the Cold War are analyzed. It was found that the broadcast of the Ukrainian editorial office of Vatican Radio was intended to help the faithful preserve unity with the church in the conditions of the destruction of the UGCC and the total onset of militant atheism. It was demonstrated that the work of the Ukrainian editorial office of Vatican radio was still aimed at defending the truth, although it was much easier to conduct evangelization in the conditions of confrontation between the USSR and the West. Rapid information and communication development of society has allowed everyone to speak publicly. At the same time, it made it possible to manipulate public opinion and to disseminate disinformation instantly and in the end contributed to the emergence of a post-truth phenomenon that not only replaced traditional propaganda but also made it part of it. The appeal to the foundations of the Christian being in a changing world distinguishes programs of the Ukrainian editorial office from materials of other broadcasters, the main focus of which is on socio-political events.</em> <em>The reform of the information system implemented by the Vatican has shown that there has been a shift from preaching in the conditions of aggressive propaganda during the confrontation between the two systems to counteracting post-truth, which destroys the objective perception of the world. It is shown that the main task of the editorial office is to unite Ukrainians around Christian values, to preserve and promote the key principles of human existence in the conditions of spreading populism, disinformation, secularization, and relativism of modern society. In its programs, the Ukrainian editorial office of Vatican Radio encourages the audience to cultivate faith, to rely on Christian values and beliefs, emphasizing its unchanging purpose of serving God, people, and the church.</em></p></div><p><strong><em>Key words: </em></strong><em>the Ukrainian editorial office of Vatican Radio, Vatican News, Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, post-truth, Christian values.</em></p>

Atonement

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleonore Stump
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Negative Emotions ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Mind Reading ◽  
Shared Attention ◽  
History Of Interpretation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Eleonore Stump

The doctrine that Christ has saved human beings from their sins, with all that that salvation entails, is the distinctive doctrine of Christianity. Over the course of many centuries of reflection on the doctrine, highly diverse understandings have been proposed, many of which have also raised strong positive or negative emotions in those who have reflected on them. In this book, in the context of this history of interpretation, Eleonore Stump considers this theological doctrine with philosophical care. The central question of the book is the nature of the atonement. That is, what is it that is accomplished by the passion and death of Christ (or the life, passion, and death, of Christ)? Whatever exactly it is, it is supposed to include a solution to the problem of the post-Fall human condition, with its guilt and shame. This volume canvasses major interpretations of the doctrine of the atonement that attempt to explain this solution, and it argues that all of them have serious shortcomings. In their place, Stump employs an extension of a Thomistic account of love and forgiveness to argue for a relatively novel interpretation of the doctrine, which she calls ‘the Marian interpretation.’ Stump argues that this Marian interpretation makes better sense of the doctrine of the atonement than other interpretations do, including Anselm’s well-known theory. In the process of constructing the Marian interpretation, she also discusses love, union, guilt, shame, forgiveness, retribution, punishment, shared attention, mind-reading, empathy, and various other issues in moral psychology and ethics.

The Church of England and the Churches of Europe

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Claydon
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
The Church

In the period 1662–1829 the Church of England saw itself simultaneously as a national Church for England, as a branch of the European Protestant Reformation, and as a part of a community of Churches across the continent. These identities caused tensions by suggesting different answers to the question of who were true Christians abroad. Anglicans might feel affinities both with Roman Catholic establishments and with the Protestant populations who challenged them. These tensions were managed in part by ambiguity and a determination not to press one identity too hard at the expense of others. This allowed the Church to maintain strong links with a wide variety of the faithful overseas. But tensions were also managed by an increasing spirit of accommodation. Both the Toleration Act of 1689 and the eventual emancipation of Dissenters and Catholics were aided by the struggles of the Church to contain its own internal diversity.

Led by the Spirit and the Church: Finland's Licensed Lutheran Lay Preachers, c.1870–1923

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 277-299
Author(s):  
Matleena Sopanen
Keyword(s):  
Modern Society ◽  
Institutional Control ◽  
Lutheran Church ◽  
Church Life ◽  
Church Law ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Church ◽  
Growing Population ◽  
Church Buildings

This article examines the interplay between religious agency and institutional control. The Church Law of 1869 gave members of the Lutheran Church of Finland the right to apply to chapters for permission to preach. Men who passed the examinations became licensed lay preachers, who could take part in teaching Christianity and give sermons in church buildings. Applicants had varying backgrounds, skills and motivations. In order to avoid any disruption in church life, they had to be screened carefully and kept under clerical supervision. However, licensed lay preachers could also be of great help to the church. In a rapidly changing modern society with a growing population and a recurring lack of pastors, the church could not afford to disregard lay aid. The article shows how the Lutheran Church both encouraged and constrained the agency of the licensed lay preachers.

Allegories of Creativity and Territory

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Bartra
Keyword(s):  
Aggressive Behavior ◽  
Ecological Niche ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Death Of God

Ecology defines territory as an area defended by an organism or a group of similar organisms with the purpose of pairing off, nesting, resting, and feeding. The defense of this space frequently brings about an aggressive behavior toward intruders and the marking of boundaries by means of repulsive chemical odors. Human beings, though they lack a precise ecological niche and are capable of adapting themselves to diverse spaces, also define territorial limits, from which emanate particular aromas that identify certain social groups. This is a question not of chemical perfumes but rather of codified cultural effusions that fill these groups with pride, even though they may, on occasion, strike others as repulsive. Many years ago, theories established that modern society impels a relentless process of deterritorialization and decodification, a process that tends to be ill regarded by ecologists, the populist left, fundamentalists, and conservatives. The proponents of this idea in the 1970s, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, stated in their renowned but forgotten book Anti-Oedipus (1972) that this process would end in the liberation of “desiring machines” and the dismantling of the oppressive state, in the same way that the death of God announced by Nietzsche was to be a liberating catastrophe. It is curious that these theories should end up hermetically codified and entombed beneath the seven seals of postmodernism and deconstruction, in the territory of an insufferable and unnecessary jargon.

The Church, the City, and Modernity

2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-111
Author(s):  
Florian Mazel
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political History ◽  
The State ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Binary Opposition ◽  
Institutional Church ◽  
The City ◽  
The Town ◽  
The Church ◽  
Political Figure

Dominique Iogna-Prat’s latest book, Cité de Dieu, cité des hommes. L’Église et l’architecture de la société, 1200–1500, follows on both intellectually and chronologically from La Maison Dieu. Une histoire monumentale de l’Église au Moyen Âge (v. 800–v. 1200). It presents an essay on the emergence of the town as a symbolic and political figure of society (the “city of man”) between 1200 and 1700, and on the effects of this development on the Church, which had held this function before 1200. This feeds into an ambitious reflection on the origins of modernity, seeking to move beyond the impasse of political philosophy—too quick to ignore the medieval centuries and the Scholastic moment—and to relativize the effacement of the institutional Church from the Renaissance on. In so doing, it rejects the binary opposition between the Church and the state, proposes a new periodization of the “transition to modernity,” and underlines the importance of spatial issues (mainly in terms of representation). This last element inscribes the book in the current of French historiography that for more than a decade has sought to reintroduce the question of space at the heart of social and political history. Iogna-Prat’s stimulating demonstration nevertheless raises some questions, notably relating to the effects of the Protestant Reformation, the increasing power of states, and the process of “secularization.” Above all, it raises the issue of how a logic of the polarization of space was articulated with one of territorialization in the practices of government and the structuring of society—two logics that were promoted by the ecclesial institution even before states themselves.

scholarly journals Developing Pandemic Prevention and Control by ANP-QFD Approach: A Case Study on Urban Furniture Design in China Communities

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 2653
Author(s):  
Jing Liu ◽  
Khairul Manami Kamarudin ◽  
Yuqi Liu ◽  
Jinzhi Zou
Keyword(s):  
Product Design ◽  
Prevention And Control ◽  
Quality Function Deployment ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Analytic Network Process ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Furniture Design ◽  
Design Strategies ◽  
And Control

Background: An infectious disease can affect human beings at an alarming speed in modern society, where Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has led to a worldwide pandemic, posing grave threats to public security and the social economies. However, as one of the closest attachments of urban dwellers, urban furniture hardly contributes to pandemic prevention and control. Methods: Given this critical challenge, this article aims to propose a feasible solution to coping with pandemic situations through urban furniture design, using an integrated method of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and Analytic Network Process (ANP). Eight communities in China are selected as the research sites, since people working and living in these places have successful experience preventing and containing pandemics. Results: Three user requirements (URs), namely, usability and easy access, sanitation, and health and emotional pleasure, are determined. Meanwhile, seven design requirements (DRs) are identified, including contact reduction, effective disinfection, good appearance, social and cultural symbols, ergonomics, smart system and technology and sustainability. The overall priorities of URs and DRs and their inner dependencies are subsequently determined through the ANP-QFD method, comprising the House of Quality (HQQ). According to the theoretical results, we propose five design strategies for pandemic prevention and control. Conclusion: It is demonstrated that the incorporated method of ANP-QFD has applicability and effectiveness in the conceptual product design process. This article can also provide a new perspective for pandemic prevention and control in densely populated communities in terms of product design and development.

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