scholarly journals Onderweg na ’n Christelike samelewings- beskouing: Bybelse grondslae en historiese ontwikkeling

2008 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
B. J. Van der Walt
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Christian Perspective ◽  
God's Word ◽  
Christian Worldview ◽  
Biblical Foundations ◽  
Practical Question ◽  
Do So

Towards a Christian perspective on social life: Biblical foundations and historical development This article is structured in the following way: The introduction asks the practical question why Christianity has such a small impact on contemporary society. This topical question is partly answered by indicating that most Christians lack a worldviewish framework or social philosophy to inspire them to get involved outside their churches and do so correctly. In the second sec- tion a brief explanation of the possible solutions to this problem indicates that the reformational social philosophy may offer some help. Christian theology and Christian philosophy should mutually assist each other in this important endeavour to shape a Christian worldview, including a perspective on social life. The third section indicates how such a philosophy for social life can be firmly based on God’s Word. In light of the fact that this social philosphy is not well-known, the last part of the article provides a brief historical survey of how this kind of societal philosophy originated and developed over the course of more than a century.

The Old Man in Purgatory: The Indian Part in Yeats's Vision of Salvation

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 251-268
Author(s):  
Yeeyon Im
Keyword(s):  
Indian Philosophy ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Special Treatment ◽  
Christian Perspective ◽  
Selfless Action

This essay examines Yeats's Purgatory via A Vision, in an attempt to understand his view of salvation in particular relation to Indian philosophy. Read from a Christian perspective, Purgatory may be a work far from purgation, as T. S. Eliot once complained. I wish to show in this essay that Purgatory indeed places emphasis on purgation by a negative example, if in a different way from the Catholic one. Yeats denies the linear eschatology of Christian theology as well as its doctrine of salvation in eternal heaven. In A Vision, Yeats explains his view of the afterlife of the soul, which involves purgation through ‘the Dreaming Back’. The special treatment of the Old Man renders Purgatory a meta-purgatorial play that mirrors the Dreaming Back of his mother's spirit in the Old Man's, intensifying the theme of purgation. Purgatory effectively dramatizes the inability to forgive and cast out remorse: the impossibility of nishikam karma, or selfless action, to borrow Sanskrit terms, which is essential for Yeatsian salvation. Finally, I would also emphasize Yeats's deviation from the Hindu wisdom, which makes Yeats's vision uniquely his own.

Being Numerous

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oren Izenberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Life ◽  
Aesthetic Politics ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Common ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Practical Question ◽  
Language Poets

This book offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. It argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience—and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, the book reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty—from William Butler Yeats's esoteric symbolism and George Oppen's minimalism and silence to Frank O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life—what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?—ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions—all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.

Introduction: Subjects and Systems

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Herzog
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Police Departments ◽  
Moral Criticism ◽  
Meso Level ◽  
Black Boxes ◽  
Private Corporations ◽  
Moral Questions

The Introduction sets out the problem this book addresses: organizations, in which individuals seem to be nothing but ‘cogs’, have become extremely powerful, while being apparently immune to moral criticism. Organizations—from public bureaucracies to universities, police departments, and private corporations—have specific features that they share qua organizations. They need to be opened up for normative theorizing, rather than treated as ‘black boxes’ or as elements of a ‘system’ in which moral questions have no place. The Introduction describes ‘social philosophy’ as an approach that addresses questions at the meso-level of social life, and situates it in relation to several strands of literature in moral and political philosophy. It concludes by providing a preview of the chapters of the book.

scholarly journals The idea of community and its practice: Tensions, disruptions and hope in Glasgow’s urban growing projects

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 484-499
Author(s):  
Helen Traill
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Community Gardening ◽  
Conceptual Approach ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Community Theory ◽  
Communal Space ◽  
Work Done ◽  
Do So

The question of what community comes to mean has taken on increasing significance in sociological debates and beyond, as an increasingly politicised term and the focus of new theorisations. In this context, it is increasingly necessary to ask what is meant when community is invoked. Building on recent work that positions community as a practice and an ever-present facet of human sociality, this article argues that it is necessary to consider the powerful work that community as an idea does in shaping everyday communal practices, through designating collective space and creating behavioural expectations. To do so, the article draws on participant observation and interviews from a community gardening site in Glasgow that was part of a broader research project investigating the everyday life of communality within growing spaces. This demonstrates the successes but also the difficulties of carving out communal space, and the work done by community organisations to enact it. The article draws on contemporary community theory, but also on ideas from Davina Cooper about the role of ideation in social life. It argues for a conceptual approach to communality that does not situate it as a social form or seek it in everyday practice, but instead considers the vacillation between the ideation and practices of community: illustrated here in a designated community place. In so doing, this approach calls into focus the frictions and boundaries produced in that process, and questions the limits of organisational inclusivity.

The Monologic Imagination

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Papua New Guinea ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Design ◽  
Do So

The pioneering and hugely influential work of Mikhail Bakhtin has led scholars in recent decades to see all discourse and social life as inherently “dialogical.” No speaker speaks alone because our words are always partly shaped by our interactions with others, past and future. Moreover, we never fashion ourselves entirely by ourselves but always do so in concert with others. Bakhtin thus decisively reshaped modern understandings of language and subjectivity. And yet, the contributors to this volume argue that something is potentially overlooked with too close a focus on dialogism: many speakers, especially in charged political and religious contexts, work energetically at crafting monologues, single-voiced statements to which the only expected response is agreement or faithful replication. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from the United States, Iran, Cuba, Indonesia, Algeria, and Papua New Guinea, the authors argue that a focus on “the monologic imagination” gives us new insights into languages’ political design and religious force, and deepens our understandings of the necessary interplay between monological and dialogical tendencies.

MARTIN HEIDEGGER E A MÍSTICA MEDIEVAL. EM BUSCA DE UMA COMPREENSÃO FENOMENOLÓGICA

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (136) ◽  
pp. 279
Author(s):  
Bento Silva Santos
Keyword(s):  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Religion And Theology ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So

Resumo: O artigo comenta globalmente algumas anotações da Vorlesung não proferida – “Os Fundamentos Filosóficos da Mística Medieval” (1918-1919) – na tentativa ainda fragmentária de esboçar uma compreensão fenomenológica da experiência mística. Assim, destaco, primeiramente, as duas observações iniciais de Heidegger sobre o sentido ambíguo da formulação “fundamentos filosóficos da mística medieval” ora com base na história da filosofia (1), ora com base na abordagem fenomenológica. Em segundo lugar, optando pela mística medieval como expressão (Ausdruck) da religiosidade cristã, Heidegger estabelece uma dupla distinção: de um lado, a religiosidade se distingue tanto da filosofia da religião como da teologia; de outro lado, a separação entre o problema da teologia e problema da religiosidade cristã (2). Por fim, em função desta oposição problemática entre teologia escolástica e mística medieval, trato brevemente da permanência ambígua do esquema de pensamento da teologia cristã no Denkweg de Heidegger, que pressupõe inegavelmente suas origens católicas (3).Abstract: This article broadly discusses Heidegger’s notes for his undelivered Vorlesung - “The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism” (1918-1919) - in a still fragmentary attempt to outline a phenomenological understanding of the mystical experience. In order to do so, I first highlight the two initial observations of Heidegger concerning the meaning of the ambiguous wording “philosophical foundations of medieval mysticism”, sometimes referring to the basis of mysticism in the history of philosophy (1), sometimes to its phenomenological approach. Second, I discuss Heidegger’s option to consider medieval mystic as expression (Ausdruck) of Christian religiousness. Thus, the author establishes a double distinction: on the one hand, religiousness distinguishes itself from both the philosophy of religion and theology, and on the other hand, the problem of theology is separated from that of Christian religiousness (2). Finally, in light of this problematic opposition between scholastic theology and medieval mysticism, I briefly deal with the ambiguous persistence of the model of thinking of the Christian theology in Heidegger’s Denkweg, that unmistakably presupposes his Catholic origins (3).

Semyon Frank

2020 ◽  
pp. 494-509
Author(s):  
Philip Boobbyer
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Religious Philosophy ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Christian Realism ◽  
Professional Philosopher ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
The Church

Semyon Liudvigovich Frank was a proponent of ‘all-unity’, who sought to overcome the polarities in modern thought through a universal philosophical synthesis. Jewish by background, he was drawn to Marxism in his youth; but after some involvement in politics he grew disenchanted with the revolutionary movement. After 1905, he embarked on a career as a professional philosopher. He converted to Orthodoxy in 1912. Following deportation from Russia in 1922 he lived in Germany, France, and Britain. His main works of religious philosophy were written in emigration, although his underlying philosophical outlook was formed before the revolution. Most of the main themes in Christian theology were addressed in his work, even though theology was not his primary focus. Ontological questions were his main preoccupation. He saw his ideas as belonging to the Platonist tradition. His thinking was antinomian; following Nicholas of Cusa, he sought to demonstrate the ‘coincidence of opposites’. There was an apophatic tendency in his work, as well as an experiential emphasis. He saw evil as a kind of non-existent reality. He rejected charges of pantheism. There were echoes of Vladimir Soloviev’s thought in his writings, but this similarity only became clear to him after his philosophical system was formed. His outlook on the church was ecumenical, although he remained loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate. His social philosophy was personalistic and his political thought gradualist; he advocated a kind of Christian realism or humanism while warning against utopianism.

LEGAL POLYCENTRISM: A CHRISTIAN THEOLOGICAL AND JURISPRUDENTIAL EVALUATION

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-405
Author(s):  
David VanDrunen
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Image Of God ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Single Source ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Christian Perspective ◽  
Moral Economic ◽  
The Image Of God ◽  
Civil Government

AbstractLegal theorists have long debated whether law originates from a single source (the actions of state officials) or from multiple sources (including the innumerable communities and associations that constitute broader civil society). In recent years, proponents have defended polycentrism—and its critics have tried to refute it—from various moral, economic, and historical angles. But no contemporary writer has examined polycentrism from a Christian perspective. In the absence of such a study heretofore, this article attempts to evaluate legal polycentrism from a Christian theological and jurisprudential perspective. The Christian scriptures and Christian theology do not directly address whether law is polycentric or monocentric. Nevertheless, appealing to a number of biblical-theological issues—including the image of God, the Noahic covenant (Genesis 8:21–9:17), wisdom, and the purpose of civil government—I argue that Christians have good reason to regard polycentrism as a more satisfactory view of law.

scholarly journals Michèle Roberts: Female Genius and the Theology of an English Novelist

Text Matters ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 61-75
Author(s):  
Alison Jasper
Keyword(s):  
Christian Theology ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Female Desire ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Second Sex ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Problematic Issue

Since Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949, feminist analysis has tended to assume that the conditions of male normativity—reducing woman to the merely excluded "Other" of man—holds true in the experience of all women, not the least, women in the context of Christian praxis and theology. Beauvoir's powerful analysis—showing us how problematic it is to establish a position outside patriarchy's dominance of our conceptual fields—has helped to explain the resilience of sexism and forms of male violence that continue to diminish and destroy women's lives because they cannot be seen as questionable. It has also, I would argue, had the unintended consequence of intensifying the sense of limitation, so that it becomes problematic to account for the work and lives of effective, innovative and responsible women in these contexts. In order to address this problematic issue, I use the life and work of novelist Michèle Roberts, as a case study in female genius within an interdisciplinary field, in order to acknowledge the conditions that have limited a singular woman's literary and theological aspirations but also to claim that she is able to give voice to something creative of her own. The key concept of female genius within this project draws on Julia Kristeva's notion of being a subject without implicitly excluding embodiment and female desire as in normative male theology, or in notions of genius derived from Romanticism. Roberts' work as a writer qualifies her as female genius in so far as it challenges aspects of traditional Christianity, bringing to birth new relationships between theological themes and scriptural narratives without excluding her singular female desires and pleasures as a writer. This paper—as part of a more inclusive, historical survey of the work of women writers crossing the disciplinary boundaries between literature and Christian theology over the last several centuries also asks whether, in order to do proper justice to the real and proven limitations imposed on countless women in these fields across global and historical contexts, we need, at the same time, to reduce the Christian tradition to something that is always antithetical or for which women can take absolutely no credit or bear no responsibility.

Cultural Action and Rural Development

1976 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-447
Author(s):  
Carlos A. Benito
Keyword(s):  
Rural Areas ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Rural Poverty ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Organizational Changes ◽  
Land Reforms ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Industrial Sectors ◽  
Level Of Consciousness ◽  
Ultimate Objective

Widespread rural poverty and a tendency of food production to stagnate are phenomena common to many Third World countries. The meager results of the development efforts of the last quarter century demand the search for new alternatives'. This essay addresses these problems under the premises of a holistic social philosophy which is found useful for understanding the causes of underdevelopment which are not regarded as a heritage of ‘traditions’ but of the interplay between them and a contemporaneous world process of production, and for finding a path of liberating development. It briefly investigates the nature and dynamic of a socioeconomic process based on unequal development between nations, between agricultural and industrial sectors, and between the peasantry and other agrarian groups. It also investigates the performance of land reforms and modernization projects as a means to overcome the conflicts that this process generates in rural areas. Basing itself on a social philosophy affirming the integral unfolding of each real man as the ultimate objective of social life, it proposes a rural way of development, geared to the construction of a socially and sectorally articulated economy. The key elements in this are intermediate organizations, intermediate technologies, integral consciousness, and, finally, cultural action (modernization with conscientization), because a change at the level of consciousness is necessary to subordinate technical and organizational changes to the needs of humankind.

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