scholarly journals Gratitude to God: Jonathan Edwards and the Opening of the Self

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-131
Author(s):  
Kyle Strobel
Keyword(s):  
Theological Anthropology ◽  
The Self ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Recent Interest ◽  
Natural Counterpart ◽  
God's Grace ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Meaningful Research

Abstract: The study of gratitude has become an increasingly important topic among psychologists to address the nature of human flourishing. Of more recent interest is how gratitude to God specifically functions within an account of human flourishing, with theologians seeking to provide a distinctively Christian account of the nature of gratitude. This article enters into the ongoing conversation by attending to Jonathan Edwards’s (1703-1758) theological anthropology and development of natural and supernatural gratitude. In particular, Edwards’s anthropology includes within it an account of how the self can, and should, enlarge to receive another in love. This “enlargement” is the creaturely mirror of God’s self-giving and is the supernatural response to the creature who has received God’s grace and been infused with divine love. As a supernatural response based on God’s action in the soul, this account of gratitude differs from its natural counterpart. On Edwards’s account, therefore, there is a need to develop studies that differentiate natural and supernatural gratitude. Furthermore, this article ends with a suggestion for a study that could pick up this task based on recent psychological studies that attend to how gratitude affects self-relation. On Edwards’s account of the enlargement of the self, as well as his notion of supernatural gratitude, there is meaningful research to be done on how these can help assess development in the formation of gratitude and human flourishing.

Human and Divine Love Cocreating the Self

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Marandiuc
Keyword(s):  
Theological Anthropology ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Human Subjectivity ◽  
Universal Love ◽  
Human Desire

In conversation with Kierkegaard, the chapter argues that human and divine loves interweave to cocreate the self. Referring to Plato’s thought that love is a union between need and desire, the chapter suggests that underneath the gospel commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself, which channels human desire, lies a powerful need for love. It is argued that Kierkegaard’s bilayered theological anthropology corresponds to his theology of love whereby universal love for human beings forms a ground from which preferential loves grow and gives birth to human subjectivity through the Spirit’s mediation. The chapter distinguishes between universal neighbor love, which Kierkegaard counts as Kantian duty, and particular love attachments, which home the self and anchor its freedom. Kierkegaard inherits from Scotus the framework of dovetailing human and divine loves and uses it to portray one’s love for God as a letter sent with a forwarding address to another human being.

The Goodness of Home

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Marandiuc
Keyword(s):  
Attachment Theory ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Middle Term ◽  
Human Love ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Theological Argument

The question of what home means and how it relates to subjectivity has fresh urgency in light of pervasive contemporary migration, which ruptures the human self, and painful relational poverty, which characterizes much of modern life. Yet the Augustinian heritage that situates true home and right attachment outside this world has clouded theological conceptualizations of earthly belonging. This book engages this neglected topic and argues for the goodness of home, which it construes relationally rather than spatially. In dialogue with research in the neuroscience of attachment theory and contemporary constructions of the self, the book advances a theological argument for the function of love attachments as sources of subjectivity and enablers of human freedom. The book shows that paradoxically the depth of human belonging—thus, dependence—is directly proportional to the strength of human agency—hence, independence. Building on Søren Kierkegaard’s imagery alongside other sources, the book depicts human love as interwoven with the infinite streams of divine love, forming a sacramental site for God’s presence, and playing a constitutive role in the making of the self. The book portrays the self both as gifted from God in inchoate form and as engaged in continuous, albeit nonlinear becoming via experiences of human love. The Holy Spirit indwells the attachment space between human beings as a middle term preventing its implosion or dissolution and conferring a stability that befits the concept of home. The interstitial space between loving human persons subsists both anthropologically and pneumatologically and generates the self’s home.

Love Divine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan Wessling
Keyword(s):  
Human Beings ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Systematic Account ◽  
God's Love ◽  
The Creation ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Wrath Of God

This book provides a systematic account of the deep and rich love that God has for humans. Within this vast theological territory, the objective is to contend for a unified paradigm regarding fundamental issues pertaining to the God of love who deigns to share His life of love with any human willing to receive it. Realizing this objective includes clarifying and defending theological accounts of the following: • how the doctrine of divine love should be constructed; • what God’s love is; • what role love plays in motivating God’s creation and subsequent governance of humans; • how God’s love for humans factors into His emotional life; • which humans it is that God loves in a saving manner; • what the punitive wrath of God is and how it relates to God’s redemptive love for humans; • and how God might share His intra-trinitarian love with human beings. As the book unfolds, a network of nodal issues are examined related to God’s love as it begins in Him and then overflows into the creation, redemption, and glorification of humanity. The result is an exitus-reditus structure driven by God’s unyielding love.

The Affinities Between J.-K. Huysmans and the “Rosicrucian” Stories of W. B. Yeats

PMLA ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 74 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 464-469
Author(s):  
Michael Fixler
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
The Self ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Group ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
God's Grace ◽  
The Guardian ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
The Devil

In march of 1890, after a preparatory experience with Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society, W. B. Yeats joined the Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn. Like Joris-Karl Huysmans, who at about this time became interested in the activities of the French counterpart of the Golden Dawn, “Le Grand Ordre Kabbalistique du Rose Croix,” Yeats's interests were largely aroused by the willingness of the members of the group to experiment with magical practices. Where Yeats, however, committed himself by oaths and rituals to a cult which pretended to be the guardian of ancient insights into the super-sensory life, Huysmans stood apart, first skeptical, then fascinated, and finally outraged. The eccentric MacGregor Mathers headed the London Rosicrucians, and he and his French wife, the sister of Henri Bergson, were acquainted with all the principal figures involved with the slightly older French order. The latter had been founded in 1888 by Sâr Joséphin Péladan and the self-styled nobleman Stanislas de Guaita. The French group existed on the shady fringe of clerical politics in the hostile rationalism of the early Third Republic, and it was in search of documentary material for a novel about this fantastic circle of clerical Royalists that Huysmans was first drawn to them. Like Saul who only sought lost asses, this quest led him, as he came to believe, to God's grace.Before he became a Catholic Huysmans was, in effect, something of a Manichean. As Yeats did, he sought experimental evidence to confirm the existence of opposing forces of good and evil, and when he had this evidence he rejected forcefully the Devil through whom he had found God. Yeats was more equivocal. The inversion of values in Huysmans' A rebours, and of ritual in his Là-bas never confounded or reconciled the opposition of good and evil and of false and true worship, as Yeats tried to do in his Rosicrucian stories of 1896. But then Huysmans was never so deeply involved as Yeats in constructing out of the farrago of late nineteenth-century occult beliefs a systematic basis for his life. The Rosicrucian Golden Dawn did provide the beginnings for such a systematic basis, and in his three stories of 1896, “The Tables of the Law,” “Rosa Alchemica,” and “The Adoration of the Magi,” Yeats draws on the beliefs and rituals of his cult. It seems to me that there are elements in the first two of these Rosicrucian stories which have curious affinities to the writings of Huysmans, and these become significant in the context of other relations between the two writers.

scholarly journals A Study on Development of Engine Fault Diagnostic System

2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hwa-seon Kim ◽  
Seong-jin Jang ◽  
Jong-wook Jang
Keyword(s):  
Data Transmission ◽  
Diagnostic System ◽  
The Self ◽  
System Management ◽  
Diagnostic Code ◽  
Quick Response ◽  
System A ◽  
Message Structure ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Engine Condition

This study implemented a mobile diagnosing system that provides user-centered interfaces for more precisely estimating and diagnosing engine conditions through communications with the self-developed ECU only for industrial CRDI engine use. For the implemented system, a new protocol was designed and applied based on OBD-II standard to receive engine data values of the developed ECU. The designed protocol consists of a message structure to request data transmission from a smartphone to ECU and a response message structure for ECU to send data to a smartphone. It transmits 31 pieces of engine condition information simultaneously and sends the trouble diagnostic code. Because the diagnostic system enables real-time communication through modules, the engine condition information can be checked at any time. Thus, because when troubles take place on the engine, users can check them right away, quick response and resolution are possible, and stable system management can be expected.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Miikka Ruokanen
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Medieval Theology ◽  
True Nature ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
Human Situation ◽  
The Will ◽  
God's Grace ◽  
Theological Language ◽  
Theological Conflict ◽  
To Receive

The debate between Luther and Erasmus was basically about to what degree, if any, a sinner can freely prepare him/herself for the reception of divine grace. When rejecting the bull of Pope Leo X, Luther had used an exaggerating deterministic or necessitarian theological language which alarmed Erasmus. Erasmus concentrated on the application of God’s grace into the human situation “from below”; Luther, on the contrary, focused on the theocentric nature of grace “from above.” Erasmus promoted the commonly accepted rational view of Late Medieval Catholic soteriology: “to those who do what they can God does not deny his grace,” God’s justice requires that he necessarily grant grace to anyone who freely prepares him/herself to receive it, while Luther spoke the language of Biblical realism: Although human will is free in relation to the natural world, the human being is captivated by the overwhelming power of unfaith, sin, and Satan, being incapable of changing his/her ultimate psychic orientation. In his criticism Luther rehabilitated Augustine’s teaching on the radical limits of human freedom and on the Pneumatological dynamism of divine grace, the view neglected in Medieval theology. Research on Luther’s The Bondage of the Will has not recognized the strong Pneumatological and Trinitarian accent of his theology. Instead, the contradiction between Luther and Erasmus has been explained in philosophical terms such as free will, determinism, necessity, and predestination; this has not revealed the true nature of the profoundly theological conflict between the two “forms of Christianity.” The work at hand makes critical comments on Luther research of the last hundred years and launches the task of a detailed and thorough systematic-theological analysis of the major treatise of Luther.

scholarly journals Educational justice and the gifted

2008 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael S. Merry
Keyword(s):  
Gifted Children ◽  
Hypothetical Case ◽  
Educational Justice ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Normal Children ◽  
Educational Provision ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Special Provision

This article examines two basic questions: first, what constitutes a gifted person, and secondly, is there justification in making special educational provision for gifted children, where special provision involves spending more on their education than on the education of `normal' children? I consider a hypothetical case for allocating extra resources for the gifted, and argue that gifted children are generally denied educational justice if they fail to receive an education that adequately challenges them. I further argue that an adequately challenging education is essential to human flourishing, but that most children can be adequately challenged in schools in ways that promote flourishing without doing so at the expense of other children.

scholarly journals Recommendation Systems as Technologies of the Self: Algorithmic Control and the Formation of Music Taste

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nedim Karakayali ◽  
Burc Kostem ◽  
Idil Galip
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
Recommendation Systems ◽  
The Self ◽  
Music Recommendation ◽  
Web Technologies ◽  
Technologies Of The Self ◽  
Cultural Medium ◽  
Care Practices ◽  
Creative Self ◽  
To Receive

The article brings to light the use of recommender systems as technologies of the self, complementing the observations in current literature regarding their employment as technologies of ‘soft’ power. User practices on the music recommendation website last.fm reveal that many users do not only utilize the website to receive guidance about music products but also to examine and transform an aspect of their self, i.e. their ‘music taste’. The capacity of assisting users in self-cultivation practices, however, is not unique to last.fm but stems from certain properties shared by all recommendation systems. Furthermore, unlike other oft-studied digital/web technologies of the self which facilitate ‘self-publishing’ vis-à-vis virtual companions in social media, recommender algorithms themselves can act as ‘intimate experts’, accompanying users in their self-care practices. Thus, recommendation systems can facilitate both algorithmic control and creative self-transformation, which calls for a theorization of this new cultural medium as a space of tension.

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