scholarly journals COVID Crisis and churches moving online – will it hasten the consumerism and commercialization of religion in Protestantism? A Sociological and Theological analysis

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Geoffrey
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Religious Control ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Religious Establishment ◽  
Better Than

A consequence of Protestantism‟s aversion to monopolistic religious control is the sprouting and growth of unorganized religious establishment by enterprising individuals in Protestantism. This aversion is justified within the context of a reformed understanding of anthropology in a twofold manner. Firstly, that the corruption in human nature makes power concentrations dangerous. Secondly to prevent human beings from slacking in their duty that arise due to human weaknesses, Adam Smith‟s idea of competitive religious markets perform better than ones where there is monopolistic control. While Protestant theology insulates us from the dangers of power concentration and slothful duty that stem from weakness in human nature, it opens us out to new problems such as consumerism, commercialization and commodification of Christianity. With the dawn of the COVID crisis and most churches and ministries being forced to move online for broadcast and connectivity, the issues of commercialization and consumerism in religion will find new avenues for manifestation. The subject of this article is to extract wisdom and strategies to deal with the same from the early church which was placed in a very similar context of commercialization and commodification of religion.

Leadership and Regimes

2020 ◽  
pp. 148-200
Author(s):  
Laurie M. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
Scientific Reason ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Political Deliberation ◽  
Civil Violence

This chapter looks at the similarities and differences between Thucydides and Hobbes on the subject of regimes. Hobbes was convinced that Thucydides had proved the absurdity of democracy and the desirability of absolute monarchy. However, Hobbes misread Thucydides on this point. For Hobbes, monarchy was the only regime in which the selfish interests of the ruler and ruled rationally coincide. Revealingly, in order to deal with the leadership of Pericles, Hobbes had to characterize him superficially as a monarch, ignoring how Pericles won and maintained his power. But it is just the type of statesmanship exemplified by Pericles that Hobbes cannot accept because of his rigid assumptions about human nature. Thucydides' focus on the importance of studying the thought, character, and actions of statesmen is an important difference between the Thucydidean and the Hobbesian realist models. Hobbes's horror at civil violence led him to lose faith in ordinary human reason and thus in political deliberation. It is because he lost faith in the latter that scientific reason emerged as a powerful alternative. But if human beings are so unreasonable that one can no longer take seriously what they say, how can one expect them to be reasonable enough to accept Hobbes's prescriptions? The Hobbesian solution is that an absolute government must enforce the plan. The chapter then argues that this solution to political problems is even more dangerous than the Thucydidean solution, which relies on political rhetoric and judgment.

Quodlibet II

2019 ◽  
pp. 218-251
Author(s):  
Turner Nevitt ◽  
Brian Davies
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Do So

This chapter presents Thomas Aquinas’s Quodlibet V, which dates from his second Parisian regency (the second time Aquinas functioned as a master in Paris). It contains Aquinas’s answers to questions about God, angels, and human beings. Specifically, the questions deal with: God’s knowledge; God’s power; God’s assumed nature; angels: Is Lucifer the subject of the aevum?; human nature; the sacrament of the Eucharist: Is the form of bread annihilated? Should a priest give an unconsecrated host to an unexposed sinner who asks him to do so?; the sacrament of penance; the sacrament of marriage; relating to the virtues; relating to the commandments; relating to prelates; relating to teachers; relating to religious; and relating to clerics.

An Enquiry Concerning the Humean Woman

Philosophy ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 56 (217) ◽  
pp. 303-312
Author(s):  
Christine Battersby
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Sexual Differences ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Systematic Treatment ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Treatise Of Human Nature ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Writings ◽  
Biological Differences ◽  
Specific Section

To discover David Hume's views on women it is necessary to bring together remarks scattered somewhat sparsely throughout his philosophical and historical writings. Although the titles of Hume's major works might suggest that he was describing the understanding and nature of all human beings, both male and female, in none of the works do we find a specific section devoted to an analysis of sexual differences in these two respects. There is a tidy chapter on female morality in A Treatise of Human Nature, but nothing comparable for female nature as such (T, 570–573). This omission does not, however, imply that Hume thought that biological differences had no concomitants in character and understanding. Neither, despite Hume's bantering remark that an essay on a ‘Subject so little to be understood as Women’ would be ‘unintelligible’, does this neglect imply that Hume was uncertain about these attendant differences (L, i, 45). Hume's exclusion of such a section seems to stem only from his desire to stress human uniformity, not from any lack of recognition of human variety. Because of the absence of any systematic treatment of the subject by Hume, it is necessary to proceed cautiously in interpreting his remarks on women. There is a further reason for caution in that Hume offers ‘jests and pleasantries’ as well as more serious comments on this subject; Hume, on occasions, gallantly woos his so-called ‘favourites’, his female readers, and when he does so sincerity is gallantly put aside.

“The Human Heart Is a Seat of Constant War”

2018 ◽  
pp. 252-282
Author(s):  
Nicholas Buccola
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Heart ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
Political Morality ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject

This chapter reconstructs what Frederick Douglass thought about human nature to deepen peoples understanding of the foundations of his political morality and to counter criticisms of liberal views of human nature. It lays out the base critiques of the liberal view of human nature in modern Western political thought and shows how Douglass viewed the competing tendencies of human beings in order to form a nuanced idea of human nature. Going into the debates in the liberal community, it cites the differing opinions of Thomas Jefferson, Reinhold Niebuhr, and John Locke. With a focus on the dualities that make up Douglass’s view on the subject, this chapter shows how his view shaped his experiences and the way he interacted with the world. The dynamism that makes up Douglass’s idea of human nature makes it a viewpoint to be taken seriously and reflects the tensions inherent within the subject.

Animality in Kant’s Theory of Human Nature

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-122
Author(s):  
David Baumeister
Keyword(s):  
Human Development ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Universal History ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Theory Of Human Nature

This chapter provides an overview of Kant’s conception of the animality (or Tierheit) of human beings. Though human animality is treated in a wide range of Kant’s writings, it has received relatively little attention from scholars, perhaps because Kant wrote no text principally devoted to the subject. With the aim of establishing its systematic unity, I track the status and role of animality across three distinct but interrelated domains of Kant’s theory of human nature—his account of animality as one of three basically good original human predispositions in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, his account of animality as the target of discipline in the pedagogy lectures, and his account of animality as simultaneously a driver of and hindrance to the progress of history in ‘Idea for a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Aim’. I argue that these accounts, taken together and in light of the teleological vision of human development that connects them, manifest a distinctively Kantian vision of the human as an actively rational, but at the same time ineliminably animal, being. Far from denying that humans are animals or seeking to repress human animality wholesale, Kant in fact offers a nuanced and robust, though still problematic, defence of the necessity, innocence, and originality of the human’s animal side.

Alienation, or Why Capitalism is Bad for Us

2018 ◽  
pp. 360-378
Author(s):  
Dan Swain
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Built Environments ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Explanatory Concept

This chapter considers the significance of Marx’s concept of alienation to his overall criticism of capitalism. At the concept’s core is the idea that while labor is potentially a fulfilling and liberating activity, under capitalism it appears only as a hostile, dominating force. Workers thus experience their own activity, natural and built environments, and fellow human beings as alien and hostile. While this idea has been deeply influential, it has also been the subject of heated controversies, in particular for its apparent dependence on an essentialist or teleological idea of human nature. While important, such controversies were often inflated by their political and intellectual context, and this chapter argues they should be considered alongside the lasting significance of alienation as an explanatory concept. Understood as such, it can still contribute a great deal to understanding and criticizing contemporary society, and provide guidance for how to transcend and replace it.

Barbarian and Greek—and Church History

1942 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-32
Author(s):  
F. W. Buckler
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Church History ◽  
Late Professor ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Better Than

The subject I have chosen for my Address tonight is the present plight of Church History, its causes, and a possible cure. It is an old story. Thirty years ago, the late Professor H. M. Gwatkin wrote:Church History has not always had a bad name in England. It was as respectable as any other till it was covered with reproach by the partizanship and credulity of the Tractarians. Whatever service they did by calling attention to the subject was far outweighed by the scandal of their uncritical methods and unhistorical dogmas. The reproach is not yet done away, for the literature with which the successors of that school have flooded the country is little better than a dream. Its writers often have their merit; but their fundamental dogmas compel them to set aside the plainest facts of history and human nature. So the outsiders who take their ideas of the subject from its professed experts are still too much inclined to set it aside with sarcastic politeness, or by way of reaction to rush into excesses of scepticism.

Quodlibet V

2019 ◽  
pp. 392-429
Author(s):  
Turner Nevitt ◽  
Brian Davies
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Do So

This chapter presents Thomas Aquinas’s Quodlibet V, which dates from his second Parisian regency (the second time Aquinas functioned as a master in Paris). It contains Aquinas’s answers to questions about God, angels, and human beings. Specifically, the questions deal with: God’s knowledge; God’s power; God’s assumed nature; angels: Is Lucifer the subject of the aevum?; human nature; the sacrament of the Eucharist: Is the form of bread annihilated? Should a priest give an unconsecrated host to an unexposed sinner who asks him to do so?; the sacrament of penance; the sacrament of marriage; relating to the virtues; relating to the commandments; relating to prelates; relating to teachers; relating to religious; and relating to clerics.

Handwriting Analysis and Personality Assessment

2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Greasley
Keyword(s):  
Personality Traits ◽  
Personality Assessment ◽  
Personnel Selection ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Handwriting Analysis ◽  
Recruitment Process ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Personnel Recruitment ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Better Than

It has been estimated that graphology is used by over 80% of European companies as part of their personnel recruitment process. And yet, after over three decades of research into the validity of graphology as a means of assessing personality, we are left with a legacy of equivocal results. For every experiment that has provided evidence to show that graphologists are able to identify personality traits from features of handwriting, there are just as many to show that, under rigorously controlled conditions, graphologists perform no better than chance expectations. In light of this confusion, this paper takes a different approach to the subject by focusing on the rationale and modus operandi of graphology. When we take a closer look at the academic literature, we note that there is no discussion of the actual rules by which graphologists make their assessments of personality from handwriting samples. Examination of these rules reveals a practice founded upon analogy, symbolism, and metaphor in the absence of empirical studies that have established the associations between particular features of handwriting and personality traits proposed by graphologists. These rules guide both popular graphology and that practiced by professional graphologists in personnel selection.

Jalan Kesempurnaan Menurut Jamaah Insan Al-Kamil di Cijati Desa Cikareo Selatan Sumedang

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Syarifudin Syarifudin
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Religious Sect ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

Each religious sect has its own characteristics, whether fundamental, radical, or religious. One of them is Insan Al-Kamil Congregation, which is in Cijati, South Cikareo Village, Wado District, Sumedang Regency. This congregation is Sufism with the concept of self-purification as the subject of its teachings. So, the purpose of this study is to reveal how the origin of Insan Al-Kamil Congregation, the concept of its purification, and the procedures of achieving its purification. This research uses a descriptive qualitative method with a normative theological approach as the blade of analysis. In addition, the data generated is the result of observation, interviews, and document studies. From the collected data, Jamaah Insan Al-Kamil adheres to the core teachings of Islam and is the tenth regeneration of Islam Teachings, which refers to the Prophet Muhammad SAW. According to this congregation, self-perfection becomes an obligation that must be achieved by human beings in order to remember Allah when life is done. The process of self-purification is done when human beings still live in the world by knowing His God. Therefore, the peak of self-purification is called Insan Kamil. 

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