The Resurrection and Unborn Beings: The Seeds of a Materialist Emergence Proposal

2021 ◽  
Vol 78 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-181
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Kamitsuka

This article looks at how two apparently unrelated issues—the afterlife and reproductive loss—turn out to be interrelated in complex theological and ethical ways. Eschatology is important to address, because how one thinks about resurrected bodies in the afterlife has implications for how one treats bodies that procreate in this life. Rethinking the notion of personhood lies at the heart of clarifying the nature of the resurrection. This article presents a theological anthropology that draws from the recent philosophical theory known as emergence. This theory allows us to conceptualize the resurrection of the “spiritual body” as a divinely initiated organic process that begins from a “bare seed” at death (1 Cor 15:44, 37). I hope to demonstrate that an emergence model of the resurrection both speaks to those grieving reproductive loss and also avoids eclipsing women’s exercise of moral discernment in reproductive matters.

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 191
Author(s):  
Duncan A. P. Angus ◽  
Marion L.S. Carson

As a contribution to a wider discussion on moral discernment in theological anthropology, this paper seeks to answer the question “What is the impact of mental illness on an individual’s ability to make moral decisions?” Written from a clinical psychiatric perspective, it considers recent contributions from psychology, neuropsychology and imaging technology. It notes that the popular conception that mental illness necessarily robs an individual of moral responsibility is largely unfounded.  Most people who suffer from mental health problems do not lose the capacity to make moral decisions, and mental illness on its own rarely explains anti-social or criminal behaviour. Moreover, the assumptions of some scientists, that recent developments in neuropsychology and brain imaging suggest biological determinism, must be treated with caution.


Author(s):  
Jerusha Tanner Lamptey

Interreligious feminist engagement is a legitimate and vital resource for Muslim women scholars seeking to articulate egalitarian interpretations of Islamic traditions and practices. Acknowledging very real challenges within interreligious feminist engagement, Divine Words, Female Voices: Muslima Explorations in Comparative Feminist Theology uses the method of comparative feminist theology to skillfully navigate these challenges, avoid impositions of absolute similarity, and propose new, constructive insights in Muslima theology. Divine Words, Female Voices reorients the comparative theological conversation around the two “Divine Words,” around the Qur’an and Jesus Christ, rather than Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ, or the Qur’an and the Bible. Building on this analogical foundation, it engages diverse Muslim and Christian feminist, womanist, and mujerista voices on a variety of central theological themes. Divine Words, Female Voices explores intersections, discontinuities, and resultant insights that arise in relation to divine revelation; textual hermeneutics of the hadith and Bible; Prophet Muhammad and Mary as feminist exemplars; theological anthropology and freedom; and ritual prayer, tradition, and change.


Author(s):  
Roy Tzohar

This book is about what metaphors mean and do within Buddhist texts. More specifically, it is about the fundamental Buddhist ambivalence toward language, which is seen as obstructive and yet necessary for liberation, as well as the ingenious response to this tension that one Buddhist philosophical school—the early Indian Yogācāra (3rd–6th century CE)—proposed by arguing that all language use is in fact metaphorical (upacāra). Exploring the profound implications of this claim, the book presents the full-fledged Yogācāra theory of meaning—one that is not merely linguistic, but also perceptual.Despite the overwhelming visibility of figurative language in Buddhist philosophical texts, its role and use have received relatively little attention in scholarship to date. This book is the first sustained and systematic attempt to present an indigenous Buddhist philosophical theory of metaphor. By grounding the Yogācāra’s pan-metaphorical claim in its broader intellectual context, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist, the discussion reveals an intense Indian philosophical conversation about metaphor and language that reached across sectarian lines, and it also demonstrates its potential contribution to contemporary philosophical discussions of related topics. The analysis of this theory of metaphor radically reframes the Yogācāra controversy with the Madhyamaka; sheds light on the school’s application of particular metaphors, as well as its unique understanding of experience; and establishes the place of Sthiramati as an original Buddhist thinker of note in his own right, alongside Asaṅga and Vasubandhu.


Author(s):  
Jerusha Tanner Lamptey

This chapter focuses on theological anthropology and probes the extent and reality of human freedom, especially considering structural and systemic constraint. It begins by exploring existing formulations of egalitarian anthropology that foreground tawhid, fitra, khilafah, and taqwa. It then engages Christian womanist and feminist perspectives on theological anthropology, embodiment, constraint, and survival articulated by M. Shawn Copeland, Jeannine Hill Fletcher, and Delores S. Williams. These perspectives prompt important considerations of individual autonomy and systemic injustice, and of possible responses to such injustice. The chapter concludes by articulating a Muslima theological expansion of taqwa—transformative taqwa—that centers Hajar and stresses systemic transformation through visibilization, conscientization, and prioritization of the marginalized.


2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-302
Author(s):  
Nelly Motroschilowa

Abstract This archival feature serves to present the personality and philosophy of Elena Oznobkina (1959–2010), a key figure of late-Soviet and, later, Russian philosophy. Oznobkina pioneered the present-day reception of Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl in Russia, but also made substantial contributions to Nietzsche studies and political philosophy, which are detailed in Nelly Motrozhilova’s introduction. Her philosophical work was inseparable from her personal political engagement, to which the featured archival text (“Prison or Gulag?”, 2000) testifies. It gives a poignant and concise characterisation of the prison as an object of philosophical theory, while asking the question of where Soviet prison camps and the prisons of post-Soviet Russia are to be located within this field of thought.


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