scholarly journals Gerhard Lohfink’s Interpretative Key to the Sermon on the Mount

Verbum Vitae ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 1335-1355
Author(s):  
Marian Szczepan Machinek
Keyword(s):  
Moral Norms ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Sermon On The Mount ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
New Israel

The purpose of this article is to elicit and analyze the main interpretative key used by the German exegete Gerhard Lohfink in his reading of the Sermon on the Mount. It does not attempt, however, tracing in detail the scholar's interpretation of the individual passages within that biblical text. In Lohfink’s understanding, the Sermon on the Mount is not addressed directly to all people but only to those who become disciples of Jesus, and who allow themselves to be gathered as the new Israel. By living according to the message of the Sermon on the Mount, communities of disciples become a light to the world, creating a “contrast society” and thereby demonstrating to the world that human relationships can be shaped in new ways. It is only through this mediation of Christian communities that the world at large can discover the message of the Sermon on the Mount which, in the end, is not a set of abstract moral norms, but rather an indication of the way of life appropriate for the social sphere in which God reigns.

scholarly journals Herd Morality. Nietzsche and the Public Dimension of Human Life

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Scolari
Keyword(s):  
Cross Section ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
Negative Pole ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Masses

Nietzsche is almost always regarded as one of the thinkers who advocate extreme individualism, totally indifferent to or exclusively polemical towards the public human dimension. While this is very difficult to contradict, if we read his texts carefully we can see how his constant celebration of the individual runs parallel to an acute awareness of living in a new era, which he defined as ‘the century of the multitude and the masses’. The herd, conformism, mediocrity, public opinion: a civilisation in which community attempts suffocate all individual inspiration, and which therefore seems to row in the opposite direction. Although Nietzsche often uses collective life merely as a negative pole for more effectively emphasising the individual, his provocative words—pushed to the limits of the inexorable victory of the herd and of the paradoxical impossibility of all that is ‘public’—offer us a direct testimony of the tragic way of life of the man of his time. This provides us with an extremely clear and interesting phenomenological cross-section of the social sphere, as well as a very finely tuned and valuable seismograph for the continual monitoring of our everyday coexistence with and perception of the constantly incumbent dangers of its degeneration.

Value-driven issues throughout the development of sociological theory

2020 ◽  
pp. 147-160
Author(s):  
Gulbarshyn Chepurko ◽  
Valerii Pylypenko
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social System ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Different Levels

The paper examines and compares how the major sociological theories treat axiological issues. Value-driven topics are analysed in view of their relevance to society in times of crisis, when both societal life and the very structure of society undergo dramatic change. Nowadays, social scientists around the world are also witnessing such a change due to the emergence of alternative schools of sociological thought (non-classical, interpretive, postmodern, etc.) and, subsequently, the necessity to revise the paradigms that have been existed in sociology so far. Since the above-mentioned approaches are often used to address value-related issues, building a solid theoretical framework for these studies takes on considerable significance. Furthermore, the paradigm revision has been prompted by technological advances changing all areas of people’s lives, especially social interactions. The global human community, integral in nature, is being formed, and production of human values now matters more than production of things; hence the “expansion” of value-focused perspectives in contemporary sociology. The authors give special attention to collectivities which are higher-order units of the social system. These units are described as well-organised action systems where each individual performs his/her specific role. Just as the role of an individual is distinct from that of the collectivity (because the individual and the collectivity are different as units), so too a distinction is drawn between the value and the norm — because they represent different levels of social relationships. Values are the main connecting element between the society’s cultural system and the social sphere while norms, for the most part, belong to the social system. Values serve primarily to maintain the pattern according to which the society is functioning at a given time; norms are essential to social integration. Apart from being the means of regulating social processes and relationships, norms embody the “principles” that can be applied beyond a particular social system. The authors underline that it is important for Ukrainian sociology to keep abreast of the latest developments in the field of axiology and make good use of those ideas because this is a prerequisite for its successful integration into the global sociological community.

Commentary

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peggy J. Miller ◽  
Grace E. Cho
Keyword(s):  
Self Esteem ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Active Engagement ◽  
Socioeconomic Conditions ◽  
Personal Meanings ◽  
Self Evaluation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Past Experiences

Chapter 12, “Commentary: Personalization,” discusses the process of personalization, based on the portraits presented in Chapters 8–11. Personalization is not just a matter of individual variation; it is a form of active engagement through which individuals endow imaginaries with personal meanings and refract the imaginary through their own experiences. The portraits illustrate how the social imaginary of childrearing and self-esteem entered into dialogue with the complex realities of people’s lives. Parents’ ability to implement their childrearing goals was constrained and enabled by their past experiences and by socioeconomic conditions. The individual children were developing different strategies of self-evaluation, different expectations about how affirming the world would be, and different self-defining interests, and their self-making varied, depending on the situation. Some children received diagnoses of low self-esteem as early as preschool.

Developing algorithms to optimize the Russian regions' social overheads advancement

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-299
Author(s):  
Valerii P. CHICHKANOV ◽  
Aleksandra V. VASIL'EVA
Keyword(s):  
Social Development ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Russian Regions ◽  
Analysis Techniques ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

Subject. This article analyzes the effectiveness of public administration in the social sphere. Objectives. The article aims to standardize the decision-making process for managing the region's social development through statistical analysis techniques. Methods. For the study, we used correlation and cluster analyses. Results. The article highlights weaknesses in the development of the social sphere and assesses the relationship between the individual areas of its development, and the effectiveness of its financing. It offers algorithms that take into account the patterns of social development and the specifics of certain types of economic activity. Conclusions. The results obtained were used to develop algorithms to optimize the development of the social sphere at the regional level. The socio-economic differentiation of the Russian Federation subjects in a number of regions requires an analysis of the specifics of the development of the social sphere of the region under consideration and adjustments to the proposed algorithms.

Reconsidering Arnold Van Gennep’s Les rites de passage from the perspective of ‘Performance Studies’

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 283-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruthie Abeliovich
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Rites Of Passage ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Three Phases

This article probes into the performative dimensions embedded in Arnold Van Gennep’s book Les rites de passage. Focusing on the tripartite structure of Van Gennep’s ritual scheme, I argue that its current reigning interpretations underestimate what “Performance Studies” heightens: not the ritual and its consequences, but the dynamic passage—the durational procession—delineates the affiliation of the individual to society and outlines the transformative actions a community must undergo in order to secure its survival through time. Thus, rather than focusing on liminality as the pivot of rites of passage, this article addresses the agency of the passage between the three phases of Van Gennep’s ritual model. I offer three central dimensions essential to Performance Studies, through which performativity in Les rites de passage is re-examined: the incursion of the fictional into the social sphere, compulsive repetition, and embodied dynamics are inextricably interrelated dimensions of the processual formation of a tightly knit community through rituals.

scholarly journals The ethics of absolute relativity: An eschatological ontological model for interpreting the Sermon on the Mount

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andre Van Oudtshoorn
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction Of Reality ◽  
Sermon On The Mount ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
Everyday World ◽  
Ontological Model ◽  
In Christ ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Church

Jesus� imperatives in the Sermon on the Mount continue to play a significant role in Christian ethical discussions. The tension between the radical demands of Jesus and the impossibility of living this out within the everyday world has been noted by many scholars. In this article, an eschatological-ontological model, based on the social construction of reality, is developed to show that this dialectic is not necessarily an embarrassment to the church but, instead, belongs to the essence of the church as the recipient of the Spirit of Christ and as called by him to exist now in terms of the coming new age that has already been realised in Christ. The absolute demands of Jesus� imperatives, it is argued, must relativise all other interpretations of reality whilst the world, in turn, relativises Jesus� own definition of what �is� and therefore also the injunctions to his disciples on how to live within this world. This process of radical relativisation provides a critical framework for Christian living. The church must expect, and do, the impossible within this world through her faith in Christ who recreates and redefines reality. The church�s ethical task, it is further argued, is to participate with the Spirit in the construction of signs of this new reality in Christ in this world through her actions marked by faith, hope and love.

scholarly journals Politics and the Craft of War in Sam Shepard’s States of Shock

لارك ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (20) ◽  
pp. 30-40
Author(s):  
Sanaa Lazim Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Western Culture ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Controversial Subject ◽  
Sam Shepard ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

Sam Shepard is one of the controversial modern American playwrights who wrote about issues that are concerned with the individual in America rather than the institution In his theatre, the audience expects to see everything that concerns itself with the western culture and ignores that which is global. He is very much interested in the inner landscape of America rather than its position as the leader of the world. Thus, in his drama he preaches such ideology urging the US Administration to focus the attention on the American welfare. The research attempts an analysis on his play The States of Shock using the New Historicism approach through studying the writer’s point of view concerning the craft of war. Modern politics has been very influential on both the social as well as the literary scene. Wars, whether launched or were only loomed at, has been considered the most controversial subject about which plays, poems, and books were written. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, writers

Augmented Reality: Breaking into What World?

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4-2) ◽  
pp. 351-371
Author(s):  
Vladimir Ignatyev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Augmented Reality ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Complex Structure ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Relational Theory ◽  
Direct Perception ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Biological Substrate ◽  
The Individual

The article considers the phenomenon of augmented reality as a special hybrid reality and a part of social space. The author compares the differences in approaches to the interpretation of reality in philosophy, social theory and natural science. The provisions of phenomenological sociology are used as a methodological basis for the study. The author substantiates the necessity of conjugation of ontological and epistemological perspectives of interpretation of the “multilayer” social reality. The lack of concentration of attention in most studies on distinguishing these angles leaves the category of social reality on the periphery of the construction of social ontologies. And this is not a paradox, but a desire to avoid difficulties in choosing a research position when solving a problem of a certain class each time that arises: either to build ontological models of each layer of the social, or to re-enter into polemics about the permissible limits of avoiding solipsism. The article shows one of the possible ways out of the vicious circle of polemics about the demarcation of ontology and epistemology by presenting the concepts of ‘social reality’ and ‘social actuality’ as a means of separating research angles. Their application makes it possible to establish that the environment formed by augmented reality is much more complex than it seems to the individual in his direct perception. It includes four spaces: 1) the objective world; 2) the mental world; 3) a hybrid world as a symbiosis of real and imaginary worlds; 4) symbiosis of fragments of the real world - torn apart in space and time and combined with the help of technologies in devices, which make it possible for an individual to be present while observing their combined existence and to operate with them. The author comes to the conclusion that this feature of the organization of space with the help of augmented reality implies the specificity of the changed social space in which individuals have to interact. There is a transformation of the basic ‘cell’ of society - the system of social interaction. It has been established that augmented reality technologies provide additional, qualitatively new opportunities for influencing individual pictures of the world. Augmented reality also complicates virtual reality, introducing, in addition to fictional characteristics, the content of practical actions. Augmented reality not only ‘comprehends’ the world, but is in direct practical contact with it, turning into a special side of constant reality. It was found that the interaction of augmented reality with social reality is reversible. Thanks to this process, social reality from ‘augmented’ reality is transformed into a ‘complex’ one, the qualitative determination of which can be designated as ‘hybrid social reality’. Its mode of existence is more complex than that of the human community, and is inaccessible to them as long as they retain the biological substrate of their corporeity. But no less significant consequence for social and anthropogenic transformation is the emergence in society of its new structural unit - a techno-subject, as an actor of a new species and a new agent that forms a hybrid society. It has been established that the user of augmented reality transforms the provided visual effects in his imagination into really (beyond imagination) existing things and phenomena (ontologization). A reverse movement also takes place - from illusions fixed in the imagination as objects (created by augmented reality), back to pure illusions (reverse hypostatization). The distinction between the observed and the hidden through the introduction of the concepts of social reality and social actuality makes it possible to discover a more complex structure of the social - its multi-layered nature, supplementing the ontology of social reality and, in particular, P. Donati’s relational theory of society, with ideas about such layers as actual and potential, virtual and valid. The article considers the possibility of extending the idea of the heterarchical principle of the structure of society (developed in the works of I.V. Krasavin on the basis of the model of W. McCulloch) to the further development of the augmented reality ontology. The formation of space connections using AR technology is a continuation of the embodiment of the heterarchy principle, which brings the social structure beyond the structures of a constant society.

Abstract Right: Natural Immediacy within the Matrices of Personhood

2018 ◽  
pp. 168-188
Author(s):  
Wes Furlotte
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Social World ◽  
Acting Out ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Opening Section

Chapter ten, therefore, examines the opening section of Hegel’s Rechtphilosophie, “Abstract Right,” in order develop a ‘preliminary sketch’ of the concepts of right and juridical personhood. The chapter historically contextualizes Hegel in relation to the mechanical deterministic conception of the individual (Hobbes) and abstract, though free, conceptions (Rousseau, Kant, Fichte). The chapter then moves to point out Hegel’s uniqueness in this context. Synthesizing Hobbesian and Fichtean standpoints, Hegel argues that the natural dimension of the individual (impulse, drive, and whim) is crucial to the genesis of actual freedom in the social world. Reconstructing Hegel’s analysis, the chapter shows that freedom is not undermined by acting out on one’s desires, impulses etc. but is brought into the world by these very drives. Although these drives are historically and socially conditioned they are, nevertheless, immediate and therefore constitutive of the basal level of juridical personhood. Thereby the chapter argues that a new sense of nature arises within Hegel’s political philosophy. The task, then, is to pursue what nature must mean within the fields constituting the socio-political.

The Origin of Cumulative Culture

2019 ◽  
pp. 128-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Noël Haidle
Keyword(s):  
Human Evolution ◽  
Comparative Studies ◽  
Cumulative Culture ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gradual Development ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Short Time ◽  
Human Characteristic

Cumulative culture is widely seen as a uniquely human characteristic involving distinct cognitive and behavioral performances. In searching for its origin, different factors have been suggested as crucial, based on comparative studies, and dates proposed as to when cumulative culture may have emerged in human evolution. This chapter reviews possible factors, suggesting that several are necessary, not only in the social sphere but also in the individual and environmental spheres. These interdependent factors have developed in three developmental dimensions (evolutionary-biological, ontogenetic-individual, and historical-social) in interaction with the specific environment. The interplay of basic factors and developmental dimensions shows a slow and gradual development of cumulative culture from its basis to simple and advanced donated culture. The onset of cumulative culture is concluded not to have been a single-trait event that occurred in a relatively short time but rather, the result of multifactorial and gradual processes that unfolded over millions of years.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document