Where in the world is God? On finding the Divine in Esther

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-191
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Newman
Keyword(s):  
Human Agency ◽  
Human Action ◽  
The Other ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
Divine Action ◽  
Divine Agency ◽  
The World ◽  
Insight Into

The word “God” does not appear in the book of Esther. Some argue that this divine absence highlights human action over against Divine providence or sovereignty. I maintain, however, that it is a theological mistake to place divine and human action in separate domains. Divine action is not only the ground that makes human action possible; it is also the compelling spring that draws persons to act faithfully. Aristotle’s account of friendship sheds light on how friends act through one another, enabling each to become and do more than they would have otherwise. Aquinas’s discussion of primary and secondary causality provides compelling insight into how human agency relies upon Divine agency enabling us to move toward our true telos: communion with God. With Esther and Mordecai, one sees shared human agency: both rely upon the other to act. Even more, one sees how their faithfulness derives from their identity as persons in covenant with God, whose saving deeds on behalf of the Jews and the world make their lives possible.

Hegel’s Account of Christianity and Religious Alienation

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-152
Author(s):  
Jon Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Insight Into

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel argues that the development of the religions of the world leads up to and culminates in Christianity, which is the one true religion. One key element which separates Christianity from the other religions, according to Hegel, concerns the issue of alienation. He argues that the previous religions all contain some form of alienation, which can be found in their conceptions of the divine. In this paper, I wish to examine Hegel’s view that Christianity alone overcomes religious alienation. What is it that makes Christianity so special in this regard? This is a particularly important issue given that the question of alienation is so central in the post-Hegelian thinkers such as Feuerbach, Bauer, and Marx, who all insist that, far from overcoming alienation, Christianity is guilty of causing it. I wish to argue that this issue provides new insight into the old criticism of Hegel as a thinker of abstraction.

Hegel’s Account of Christianity and Religious Alienation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Insight Into

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel argues that the development of the religions of the world leads up to Christianity, which is the one true religion. One key element which separates Christianity from the other religions, for Hegel, concerns the issue of alienation. He claims that the previous religions all contain some form of alienation, which can be found in their conceptions of the divine. I wish to examine Hegel’s view that Christianity alone overcomes religious alienation. What is it that makes Christianity so special in this regard? This is a particularly important issue given that the question of alienation is so central in the post-Hegelian thinkers such as Feuerbach, Bauer, and Marx, who all insist that, far from overcoming alienation, Christianity is guilty of causing it. I argue that this issue provides new insight into the old criticism of Hegel as a thinker of abstraction.

Atonement and the Work of Christ

2018 ◽  
pp. 84-97
Author(s):  
William J. Abraham
Keyword(s):  
Human Action ◽  
Divine Action ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
Action Theories ◽  
Core Meaning

In sorting through how best to understand the work of Christ we need a narrative that captures the core meaning of “atonement” and a way to deploy the various theories that abound in the tradition. At the root of the issue is a narrative of reconciliation that highlights the serious alienation that exists between human agents and God. Fixing this problem requires both divine and human action. Theories of atonement seek to spell out the divine action involved. Each has its own advantage in developing complementary descriptions of what has gone wrong with the world and how to fix it.

The Ternus Effect

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Hein
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eye Movements ◽  
Visual System ◽  
Apparent Motion ◽  
Perceptual Grouping ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Motion Display ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Insight Into

The Ternus effect refers to an ambiguous apparent motion display in which two or three elements presented in succession and shifted horizontally by one position can be perceived as either a group of elements moving together or as one element jumping across the other(s). This chapter introduces the phenomenon and describes observations made by Pikler and Ternus in the beginning of the twentieth century. Next, reasons for continued interest in the Ternus effect are discussed and an overview of factors that influence it offered, including low-level image-based factors, for example luminance, as well as higher-level scene-based factors, for example perceptual grouping. The chapter ends with a discussion of theories regarding the mechanisms underlying the Ternus effect, providing insight into how the visual system is able to perceive coherent objects in the world despite discontinuities in the input (e.g., as a consequence of eye movements or object occlusion).

More than a Person

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Matthias Remenyi
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Second Step ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
Divine Action ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
Truth Claim ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

The question whether God should be thought of as personal or a-personal is closely linked to the issue of an appropriate model of God-world relation on the one hand and the question how to conceive divine action on the other hand. Starting with a discussion of the scientific character of theology, this article critically examines the univocal-personal concept of God. Traditional Christian conceptions of God have, however, always acknowledged a radical asymmetry between the personal existence of created beings and the ground of being itself. In a second step, the ontological truth claim associated with this way of speaking about God is being related to its methodological consequences. In final step, attention is given to the relation of immanence and transcendence as it is defended in different versions of panentheism: As an alternative to divine interventionism, panentheism can be shown to explicate divine providence as formal and final causation.

Unverified Prognosis

1884 ◽  
Vol 30 (130) ◽  
pp. 223-233
Author(s):  
H. Hayes Newington
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Experience ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
The Other ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Partial Recovery ◽  
Direct Examination ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
Insight Into

In none of the more practical aspects of insanity, with the exception perhaps of that of pathology, does the alienist stand at so much disadvantage with the other members of the medical profession as in the matter of prognosis. In diagnosis we have, as a rule, an easy task, though now and then cases arise in which it requires much thought to come to a determination whether some unhappy event is due to insanity or to crime. Again, in treatment we fairly hold our own, taking into consideration the complex nature of the organs and functions that are affected, coupled with the impossibility of direct examination and treatment of them. But in prognosis we are distinctly less sure of our footing, and it is unfortunate that this uncertainty is accompanied by a most pressing demand for accurate forecasts from the relatives of those who are placed under our charge. This pressure, no doubt, arises in chief from the necessity in nearly every case for modifying, either temporarily or for good, those circumstances, domestic, official, and pecuniary, from which the patient has been removed; but there is this further difficulty, that while in cases of general disease, other than insanity, the friends have some sort of knowledge and opinion of their own as to the probable result, gained from insight into similar cases, in insanity such clinical experience is denied them by the necessity for withdrawing patients from the observation of the public. They are thus almost entirely without guides of their own, and in consequence they come to lean more heavily on the doctor. The strain and responsibility for error thus cast on us would be intolerable were there only the two eventualities of absolute recovery and absolute loss of mind; but, fortunately, there are many stages to fill up the huge gap between these two extremes, stages of partial recovery which allow of the restoration of the patient to various degrees of liberty and usefulness in the world. It is not too much to say that the problem of the future of the patient has to be faced never less often, generally more frequently, than that of treatment.

Travelling Through the Rock to the Otherworld: The Shamanic ‘Grammar of Mind’ Within the Rock Art of Siberia

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-432
Author(s):  
Andrzej Rozwadowski
Keyword(s):  
Rock Art ◽  
The Other ◽  
Rock Surface ◽  
Upper Palaeolithic ◽  
The World ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Universal Nature ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Cave Art

One of the aspects of the relationship between rock art and shamanism, which has been supposed to be of a universal nature, inspired by trance experience, concerns the intentional integration of the images with rock. Rock surface therefore has been interpreted, in numerous shamanic rock-art contexts, as a veil beyond which the otherworld could be encountered. Such an idea was originally proposed in southern Africa, then within Upper Palaeolithic cave art and also other rock-art traditions in diverse parts of the world. This paper for the first time discusses the relevance of this observation from the perspective of unquestionable shamanic culture in Siberia. It shows that the idea of the otherworld to be found on the other side of the rock actually is a widespread motif of shamanic beliefs in Siberia, and that variants of this belief provide a new mode of insight into understanding the semantics of Siberian rock art. Siberian data therefore support previous hypotheses of the shamanic nature of associating rock images with rock surface.

(Selektywne) zwierciadło bazy danych. O dwóch wymiarach baz danych w kontekście Archiwum Badań nad Życiem Codziennym

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 85-111
Author(s):  
Przemysław Nosal
Keyword(s):  
Human Action ◽  
The Other ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Objective Information ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Content ◽  
The One

The aim of this article is to show the socio-cultural ambivalence of databases. On the one hand, they are perceived as impersonal technological representations providing their users with objective information. On the other, they are the result of intentional human action, were created in a specific context, and serve the realization of some purpose defined by their creators. The metaphor that arises from this duality is that of a mirror—reflecting the image of the world, but at the same time deforming it in various manners. The author presents the three main aspects of databases’ ambivalence. The first is the question of selecting the material for the database: the material’s ostensible objectivity and the subjective nature of the choice. The second is the question of the exhibition of cultural content within the framework of the database: the tension between an ideologically neutral presentation of the world and the strategy of exhibition. The third subject raised is the use of databases: full access for users, a framework imposed by the creators, or somewhere in between.

Providence and the Christian Scholar

1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-140
Author(s):  
Karl W. Giberson ◽  
Donald A. Yerxa ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Divine Providence ◽  
Divine Action ◽  
Methodological Naturalism ◽  
Physical Universe ◽  
The World

God's action in the world poses a challenge for the Christian scholar. At the scholarly level of one's discipline, invocations of divine Providence as an explanatory category are considered unacceptable. Yet the scholar-believer necessarily acknowledges that God is indeed active in His Creation. Generally, this tension is resolved via the assumption of methodological naturalism at the level of one's discipline and the embrace of theism at the level of one's faith. This can result in an incoherence between the commitments of one's discipline and one's faith. Yet both theology and physics suggest that this tension may be relieved somewhat by acknowledging that the physical universe is no longer understood to be closed to the possibility of divine action. Consequently, Christian historians may want to reconsider the value of Providence as an explanatory category.

Threats

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Barash
Keyword(s):  
Animal Behavior ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fear Of Death ◽  
Social Stability ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
The World ◽  
Book Studies ◽  
Gun Culture ◽  
Insight Into

This book studies situations in which individuals threaten each other or feel threatened by society, and often respond in ways that threaten social stability in turn. Animals also engage in all sorts of threats, an understanding of which opens one's eyes to the world of animal behavior otherwise hidden, while also revealing the strange and important question of honest versus dishonest communication. The dynamic of threat-and-response gives insight into such human dilemmas as the fear of death and how this has been manipulated by many organized religions; how fear of strangers and supposed enemies has given rise to an American gun culture that in turn threatens those seeking to avoid such threats; how nativist fears of “the other” has promoted right-wing nationalist populism, which has been making things worse not only for democracy itself, but also for those who feel threatened in the first place; and how capital punishment—intended to contain the threat of murderous criminals—has made this problem worse. Most important and worrisome is how countries convey the ultimate threat against each other: deterrence. Brandishing the threat of mutual annihilation in the expectation that this will keep a country safe is, paradoxically, the ultimate example of a posture that endangers threatener and threatened alike.

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