The Reality of Christian Ethics

2019 ◽  
pp. 271-288
Author(s):  
Robin Lovin
Keyword(s):  
Human Experience ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
Important Resource ◽  
Family Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Responsible Action ◽  
Theological Understanding ◽  
Concrete Reality

Reality is a central idea in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. Ethics must deal with real human problems and choices. Bonhoeffer learned this as a participant in the German resistance to Hitler, but he believed the lesson applies to all conditions of modern life. People seek concrete direction for their choices and find abstract ethics irrelevant. The contrast between concrete reality and abstraction found in the philosophy of Hegel thus provided an important resource for Bonhoeffer’s theological understanding of Jesus Christ as the reality of God in human experience. Because we cannot separate God from the world or understand either apart from Christ, responsible action is always a venture undertaken on behalf of others, and it involves a risk of guilt. Despite the uncertainty that accompanies all responsible action, the four ‘divine mandates’ of church, family, culture, and government provide contexts in which it is possible to hear the concrete commandment of God.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

Henry Kissinger's book World order: Reflections on the beginnings of nations and the course of history

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Abdul Hamid Al - Eid Al - Mousawi
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
World Order ◽  
New World Order ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
Global System ◽  
The World ◽  
Western European ◽  
Book World

The central idea of Henry Kissinger's latest book, The Global System, is that the world desperately needs a new world order, otherwise geopolitical chaos threatens the world, and perhaps chaos will prevail and settle in the world. According to Kissinger, the world order was not really there at all, but what was closest to the system was the Treaty of Westphalia, which included about twenty Western European states for almost four centuries.

Words in the World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerusha Tanner Lamptey
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Marginal Groups ◽  
Rosemary Radford Ruether ◽  
The World ◽  
Divine Words

Using the analogy of the two Divine Words, this chapter begins by exploring pressing debates in contemporary Islamic feminist and Muslima theological engagement with the Qur’an, debates that arise out of the underlying problematic of the Word in the world. The chapter, then, explores Christian perspectives on Jesus Christ from Rosemary Radford Ruether, Jacquelyn Grant, Kwok Pui-lan, and Ada María Isasi-Díaz. These theologians discuss topics ranging from the language and symbols invoked to describe Jesus to the value assigned to particular human markings of Jesus (inclusive of but not limited to Jesus’s maleness) to the affiliations of Jesus with power and marginal groups. The chapter concludes by returning to Muslima theology and constructively proposing an approach to the Qur’an that embraces hybridity, human experience, and a preference for the marginalized.

Feminism

2021 ◽  
pp. 410-426
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty
Keyword(s):  
Christian Ethics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Christian Realism ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
Contemporary Christian ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Vulnerable People ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Contemporary Context

This chapter examines three feminist responses to Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought and contemporary Christian Realism—conflict, integration, and conversation. The chapter emphasizes the need for future conversation between feminists, realists, and ethicists across a wide variety of fields with people living in the most vulnerable and precarious economic circumstances in the US and around the world. More attention and exploration of Christian concepts of sin and redemption relevant within the contemporary context are worthy of attention. Fostering more intentional conversation across established disciplinary boundaries and with the world’s most vulnerable people will chart a new course in Christian ethics and nurture a more authentic American moral conscience in light of the greatest moral and theological problems of the twenty-first century.

The Poetics of Friendship in Early Modern Spain

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Gilbert-Santamaria
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Spanish Literature ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Alternative Modality ◽  
Sancho Panza

This book posits the Aristotelian-Ciceronian notion of perfect male friendship as an independent poetic force within the development of Spanish literature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Through a re-examination of Spanish critic Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce’s notion of the “tale of two friends” tradition, the book shows how the poetics of friendship evolves in relation to other key concepts from the period—most notably exemplarity and imitatio—in a series of carefully selected examples from several important genres including the pastoral novel, the picaresque, and the Spanish comedia. Particular attention is given to the trajectory whereby the highly formalized narrativization of the traditional Aristotelian paradigm for friendship gives way to representations of personal intimacy grounded in a recognition of the idiosyncratic particularity of human experience in the world beyond the text. This alternative modality for representing friendship, which encompasses a variety of relationships beyond the Aristotelian paradigm—between women, erstwhile lovers, and pícaros, to take just three examples—reaches its fullest expression in the depiction of the evolving intimacy that grows up between the two unlikely companions, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whose shared experiences provide the main focus for Cervantes’s most important work.

Reconciliation in the Cathedral: Isaac's Religion in “Owen-Mass”

10.34690/125 ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 6-36
Author(s):  
Роман Александрович Насонов
Keyword(s):  
Song Cycle ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
Religious Symbolism ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
War Requiem ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Tradition

Статья представляет собой исследование религиозной символики и интерпретацию духовного смысла «Военного реквиема» Бриттена. Воспользовавшись Реквиемом Верди как моделью жанра, композитор отдал ключевую роль в драматургии сочинения эпизодам, созданным на основе военных стихов Оуэна; в результате произведение воспринимается подобно циклу песен в обрамлении частей заупокойной мессы. Военная реальность предстает у Бриттена амбивалентно. Совершая надругательство над древней верой и разбивая чаяния современных людей, война дает шанс возрождению религиозных чувств и символов. Опыт веры, порожденный войной, переживается остро, но при всей своей подлинности зыбок и эфемерен. Церковная традиция хранит веру прочно, однако эта вера в значительной мере утрачивает чистоту и непосредственность, которыми она обладает в момент своего возникновения. Бриттен целенаправленно выстраивает диалог между двумя пластами человеческого опыта (церковным и военным), находит те точки, в которых между ними можно установить контакт. Но это не отменяет их глубокого противоречия. Вера, рождаемая войной, представляет собой в произведении Бриттена «отредактированный» вариант традиционной христианской религии: в ее центре находится не триумфальная победа Христа над злом, а пассивная, добровольно отказавшаяся защищать себя перед лицом зла жертва - не Бог Сын, а «Исаак». Смысл этой жертвы - не в преображении мира, а в защите гуманности человека от присущего ему же стремления к агрессивному самоутверждению. The study of religious symbolism and the interpretation of the spiritual meaning of “War Requiem” by Britten have presentation in this article. Using Verdi's Requiem as a model of the genre, the composer gave a key role in the drama to the episodes based on the war poems by Wilfred Owen; as a result, the work is perceived as a song cycle framed by parts of the funeral mass. The military reality appears ambivalent. While committing a blasphemy against the ancient belief and shattering the aspirations of modern people, the war offers a chance to revive religious feelings and symbols. This experience of war-born faith is felt keenly, but for all its authenticity, it is shaky and ephemeral. The church tradition keeps faith firmly, but this faith largely loses the original purity and immediacy. Britten purposefully builds a dialogue between the two layers of human experience (church and military), finds those points where contact can be established between them. But this does not change their profound antagonism. In Britten's work, faith born of war is an “edited” version of the traditional Christian religion: in its center is not the triumphant victory of Christ over evil, but a passive sacrifice that voluntarily refused to defend itself in the face of evil-not God the Son, but “Isaac.” The meaning of this sacrifice is not in transforming the world, but in protecting the humanity of a person from his inherent desire for aggressive self-assertion.

When Christians become Naturalists

1992 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-206
Author(s):  
J. Wesley Robbins
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Religious Aspects

The classical pragmatists were as concerned as any of their modern philosophical predecessors that the moral and religious aspects of human life not be swamped by the successes of the physical sciences. It was John Dewey, after all, who said thatThe problem of restoring integration and cooperation between man's beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about the values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem of modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from that life.

scholarly journals Profanity and Play: Solidarity in the Discourse of Cyberbullying

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Jeremy Jones
Keyword(s):  
Essential Feature ◽  
Computer Mediated Communication ◽  
Mediated Communication ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Computer Mediated ◽  
The World ◽  
High Degree

Offering the world countless remarkable benefits, computer mediated communication has become an essential feature of modern life. However, it has also become a medium for personal aggression and abuse of diverse kinds. The discourse of online vilification has been the topic of much research, for instance on the behaviour of trolls. This study focuses on a little researched phenomenon, the discourse of cyberbullying, in particular a subtype, cybermobbing, in which a group of participants gather online to attack an individual over a period of time. The study takes up an example of such participants who joined a Facebook group dedicated to abusing a prominent sportsman. The purpose of the study is to identify the chief discourse characteristics of cybermobbing that bind the participants together. The analysis reveals a high degree of solidarity among the participants expressed through profanity, humour, and play. The results will also throw light on the mentality of those who engage in cybermobbing.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document