Spirit, Church and Mission

2021 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-38
Author(s):  
Gregory J. Liston

Abstract This article utilises the methodology of Third Article Theology to explore the church’s missional role in the world. Initially arguing that ecclesiology and missiology are mutually informing doctrines, it develops a dialogical and pneumatological approach for viewing missiology from the vantage point of ecclesiology. This contrasts with and complements the more common approach where missiology is seen as determinative of ecclesiology. The final and major section of the article uses this approach to sketch out the constituent features of the church’s mission, particularly when the Spirit’s role is viewed as primary and constitutive.

Author(s):  
George E. Dutton

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.


2017 ◽  
Vol 88 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-319
Author(s):  
K. R. Harriman

While studies in Johannine ethics continue to develop through analysis of broad ethical instructions, this paper contributes to the conversation by conveying the belief of participatory victory that seems to inform the ethical instruction of the author of 1 John. That is, in the midst of the cosmic conflict in which John and his fellow believers find themselves, John speaks from the vantage point of one who participates in the victory of Jesus to other participants in that victory. Though there is no explicit statement of this notion of participating in the victory of Jesus, its influential place in the authorial framework is discernible at several points in the text, such as when John uses the terminology and imagery of victory, uses the terminology and imagery of participation, and particularly when he converges these two streams of thought.


1980 ◽  
Vol 162 (3) ◽  
pp. 18-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxine Greene

Informed and active engagements with works of art make new experimential openings visible as they turn attention to the concreteness of the world. The ordinary and the taken-for-granted must be bracketed out if a poem or a painting or a musical piece is to be achieved. Viewed within the brackets and from an unfamiliar vantage point, reality may become questionable, in need of interpretation, perhaps in need of repair. If learners are provided opportunities for understanding their part in realizing illusioned worlds, they may come to confront their contributions to the construction of their social realities. Teachers who create situations that permit this to happen will be opening up their classrooms, not only to a new sense of the totality, but to a consciousness of what might be, what is not yet. And this, in turn, may provide a ground for common action, for desired change.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-38
Author(s):  
Gabriela Vargas-Cetina ◽  
Manpreet Kaur Kang

The world in which we live is crisscrossed by multiple flows of people, information, non-human life, travel circuits and goods. At least since the Sixteenth Century, the Americas have received and generated new social, cultural and product trends. As we see through the case studies presented here, modern literature and dance, the industrialization of food and the race to space cannot be historicized without considering the role the Americas, and particularly the United States, have played in all of them. We also see, at the same time, how these flows of thought, art, science and products emerged from sources outside the Americas to then take root in and beyond the United States. The authors in this special volume are devising conceptual tools to analyze this multiplicity across continents and also at the level of particular nations and localities. Concepts such as cosmopolitanism, translocality and astronoetics are brought to shed light on these complex crossings, giving us new ways to look at the intricacy of these distance-crossing flows. India, perhaps surprisingly, emerges as an important cultural interlocutor, beginning with the idealized, imagined versions of Indian spirituality that fueled the romanticism of the New England Transcendentalists, to the importance of Indian dance pioneers in the world stage during the first part of the twentieth century and the current importance of India as a player in the race to space. 


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 107-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikki Usher ◽  
Matt Carlson

The network society is moving into some sort of middle age, or has at least normalized into the daily set of expectations people have for how they live their lives, not to mention consume news and information. In their adolescence, the technological and temporal affordances that have come with these new digital technologies were supposed to make the world better, or least they could have. There was much we did not foresee, such as the way that this brave new world would turn journalism into distributed content, not only taking away news organizations’ gatekeeping power but also their business model. This is indeed a midlife crisis. The present moment provides a vantage point for stocktaking and the mix of awe, nostalgia, and ruefulness that comes with maturity.


1964 ◽  
Vol 4 (37) ◽  
pp. 171-180
Author(s):  
Senedu Gabru

Just as the tree obtains nourishment at its roots, so we come to draw strength and inspiration at the very source of a noble idea, where the Red Cross was born and where it has grown.Delegates of 90 Societies, representing 157 million members, have flocked here from all parts of the world to celebrate and pay tribute to one hundred years of service and unlimited devotion to the welfare of mankind.This commemoration is a suitable vantage-point from which to review the road which has been travelled in the course of a century by a great movement and also to look ahead in order to study the future, its prospects and its limitations.


Author(s):  
Francisco J. Varela ◽  
Evan Thompson ◽  
Eleanor Rosch

This chapter demonstrates how unique histories of structural coupling can be understood from the vantage point of evolution. To this end, it provides a critique of the adaptationist view of evolution as a process of progressive fitness, and articulates an alternative view of evolution as natural drift. These unique histories of coupling, which enact incommensurable kinds of “color space,” should not be explained as optimal adaptations to different regularities in the world. Instead, they should be explained as the result of different histories of natural drift. Moreover, since organism and environment cannot be separated but are in fact codetermined in evolution as natural drift, the environmental regularities that one associates with these various color spaces must ultimately be specified in tandem with the perceptually guided activity of the animal.


2018 ◽  
pp. 351-376
Author(s):  
Georg Northoff

Why do we so stubbornly cling to the assumption of mind? Despite the so far presented empirical, ontological, and conceptual-logical evidence against mind, the philosopher may nevertheless reject the world-brain problem as counter-intuitive. She/he will argue that we need to approach the question for the existence and reality of mental features in terms of the mind-body problem as it is more intuitive than the world-brain problem. Our strong adherence to mind is thus, at least in part, based on what philosophers describe as “intuition”, the “intuition of mind” as I say. How can we resist and escape the pulling forces of our “intuition of mind”? The main focus in this chapter and the whole final part is on the “intuition of mind” and how we can avoid and render it impossible. I will argue that we need to exclude the mind as possible epistemic option from our knowledge, i.e., the “logical space of knowledge”, as I say. The concept of “logical space of knowledge” concerns what we can access in our knowledge, i.e., our possible epistemic options that are included in the “logical space of knowledge”, as distinguished from what remains inaccessible to us, i.e., impossible epistemic options, as they are excluded from the “logical space of knowledge”. For instance, the “logical space of knowledge” presupposed in current philosophy of mind and specifically mind-body discussion includes mind as possible epistemic option while world-brain relation is excluded as impossible epistemic option. This, as I argue, provides the basis for our “intuition of mind” and the seemingly counterintuitive nature of world-brain relation. How can we modify and change the possible and impossible epistemic options in our “logical space of knowledge”? I argue that this is possible by shifting our vantage point or viewpoint - that is paradigmatically reflected in the Copernican revolution in cosmology and physics. Copernicus shifted the “vantage point from within earth” to a “vantage point beyond earth”; this enabled him to take into view that the earth (rather than the sun) moves by itself which provided the basis for his shift from a geo- to a helio-centric view of the universe. Hence, the shift in vantage point modified his epistemic options and thus expanded the presupposed “logical space of knowledge”. I conclude that we require an analogous shift in the vantage point we currently presuppose in philosophy of mind. This will expand our “logical space of knowledge” in such way that makes possible to include world-brain relation as possible epistemic option while, at the same time, excluding mind as impossible epistemic option. That, in turn, will render the world-brain problem more intuitive while the mind-body problem will then be rather counter-intuitive. Taken together, this amounts to nothing less than a Copernican revolution in neuroscience and philosophy – that shall be the focus in next chapter.


Author(s):  
Rick Anthony Furtak

Once we have rejected the notion of a subject-independent objectivity, we lack any basis for assuming that our emotional responses project value onto a neutral world. Love’s vision must give us unique, unequalled access to the sort of truth that it reveals. Each person’s emotional point of view, his or her attunement to the world, makes possible a distinct form of knowledge, revealing a particular truth. Our moods, temperaments, and idiosyncratic affective outlooks must fit into this book’s account of emotions as felt recognitions of significance. Each attunement involves selective attention and focus—not distortion. An observer who is not attuned in any way would not notice anything. Each person’s affective vantage point illustrates the perspectival character of existence. Because our affective outlook is a condition of apprehending axiological reality, becoming appreciative of another person’s attunement enables us to know other sides of the truth and other significant truths.


Literator ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Viljoen

This article reads Antjie Krog’s volume of poetry Mede-wete and its English version Synapse (both published in 2014) against the background of Rebecca Walkowitz’s proposal that the future of comparative literature will entail what she calls ‘foreign reading’. In her contribution to the American Association of Comparative Literature’s 2015 report on the state of the discipline of comparative literature (http://stateofthediscipline.acla.org) Walkowitz argues that literary texts increasingly enter the world in different languages and that this requires readings that move away from the idea that literary texts ‘belong’ to a single language, that explore the diverse ways in which they are read in different languages and that acknowledges that literary texts exist in the space created by a language’s relationship to other languages. This article takes Walkowitz’s observations as the vantage point for a discussion of the ways in which Krog’s volume (1) foreignises the Afrikaans language in order to become part of an interconnected whole; (2) urges readers, critics and literary practitioners to move beyond the confines of language-based literary systems; and (3) forces them to engage in a variety of different readings, including partial readings and collaborative readings, in order to become embedded in a larger community


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