Wisdom Begins with Awe

2020 ◽  
Vol 112 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-305
Author(s):  
Roshnee Ossewaarde-Lowtoo
Keyword(s):  
Basic Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Gabriel Marcel ◽  
Present Essay

Abstract In the present essay, wisdom is conceived as the basic knowledge that underpins all forms of humanising knowledge and the striving for justice. The idea of wisdom as indispensable to all human endeavours is one that can be found in the works of Plato and Cicero. In ancient writings, we also see that wisdom is traditionally opposed to hubris. Hence, following Gabriel Marcel, the quest for wisdom can be regarded as an antidote to practical anthropomorphism. Consequently, I argue that the quest for wisdom depends on an anti-hubris attitude, namely, piety or reverence. The fear of the gods, which is recommended by ancient poets and philosophers, is here considered as encouraging that piety and hence the love of wisdom. I distinguish between piety and traditionalism and show that the latter is hostile to awe and wisdom. I also briefly address the tension between traditions and philosophy and suggest that the dilemma can be resolved by critical alertness and by putting the insights of religious traditions on par with the wisdom of literature and poetry. The quest for wisdom, I argue, is fostered and hindered by particular cultural contexts. Ours today is more hostile to such quest.

For Pity's Sake

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Hodkinson ◽  
Chandrika Devarakonda
Keyword(s):  
Global Education ◽  
Affective Commitment ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
Teacher Discourse ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Forensic Examination ◽  
Indian Tradition

This paper offers a critique of transnational aspects of ‘inclusion,’ one of those global education buzzwords that as Slee (2009) puts it, say everything but say nothing. It starts off by trying to compare Indian and English usages and attitudes at the level of teacher discourse, and notes the impossibility of any ‘authentic’ translation, given the very different cultural contexts and histories. In response to these divergences, the authors undertake a much more genealogical and ‘forensic’ examination of values associated with ‘inclusion,’ focussing especially on a key notion of ‘pity.’ The Eurocentric tradition is traced from its Platonic origins through what is claimed to be the ‘industrialization of pity’ and its rejection as a virtue in favour of more apparently egalitarian measures of fairness. The Indian tradition relates rather to religious traditions across a number of different belief systems, most of which centre on some version of a karmic notion of pity. The authors both criticise and reject ‘inclusion’ as a colonisation of the global and call for a new understanding of notions like ‘pity’ as affective commitment rather than ‘fair’ dispensation of equality.

Lektüre und Performativität. Materialitäten fiktionaler Texte zwischen Semantik und Sinnlichkeit

2021 ◽  
pp. 359-378
Author(s):  
Jasmin Pfeiffer
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Reading Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Strong Interest ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Symbolic Value

Over the past few years, the humanities has developed a strong interest in the material aspects of all domains of human life. In this context, researchers have started paying attention to the performative dimensions of reading: in order to interact with a text, the readers have to position their bodies in a certain way, they have to touch the cover of the book, turn the pages etc. Furthermore, texts are usually part of larger communicative and cultural contexts which frame our interactions with them. Based on this theoretical background, the present essay examines how those performative elements not only influence our reading experience, but can also take part in the constitution of meaning and thereby alter our interpretation of the text. At issue will firstly be a comparison between the manuscript of Victor Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la mer and the printed version of the publishing house LGF and the exercise to demonstrate that the paper used for the manuscript possesses a high semantic and symbolic value. Secondly, by using the example of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Lebens-Ansichten des Kater Murr, what is at stake is how fiction extending beyond the borders of the ‘original’ text, and including other artifacts, can offer new interpretive dimensions

Measuring Religion in Terms of Belonging, Beliefs, and Behavior

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corwin E. Smidt
Keyword(s):  
Political Attitudes ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Theoretical Explanation ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Analytical Strategy ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Attitudes And Behavior

Religion is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, and scholars have taken different approaches to measuring religion in seeking to study religion’s influence on political attitudes and behavior. One analytical strategy for assessing the influence of religion politically among members of the mass public has been to adopt what is known as the “3B” approach. Though this approach can be applied across different cultural contexts, it has been widely adopted in the American context because of the multiplicity of denominational affiliations present in American life. Associated with this approach in the American context is the concept of religious traditions, particularly the presence of subtraditions within the Christian faith, and the associated measurement strategy for assigning such affiliations to their specific religious tradition. The approach offers various analytical advantages, but it constitutes an analytical strategy and not a specific theoretical explanation about how different facets of religious life necessarily shape political attitudes and behavior.

The Many Meanings of Non-Affiliation

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-55
Author(s):  
Nancy T. Ammerman
Keyword(s):  
Folk Beliefs ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Many ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Being Religious

This chapter shows that non-affiliation means different things in different cultural contexts and among people with different social resources. Some religious traditions, such as Judaism, do not make affiliation central, so non-affiliation matters less. Similarly, many immigrants come from places where belonging and belief are not typical ways of being religious. Not all “nones” are alike. Nor are less well-off nones like the more privileged non-affiliates often imagined. Using the Faith Matters Survey, this chapter shows that less highly educated nones are more likely to hold religious folk beliefs and less likely to be politically liberal, for example. But most important is that the people who are at the bottom of the status hierarchy are—if they are also unaffiliated—more pessimistic, less trusting, less engaged in their communities, and less empowered. They may even be less healthy. The absence of religious ties exacerbates the effects of being on the social and economic margins.

Religion, Language, and the Human Mind

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Basic Knowledge ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
Religious Art ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
New Horizons

The book is divided into three Parts, all preceded by a full introductory chapter by the editors that discusses modern scientific approaches to religion and the application of modern linguistics, particularly cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. Part I surveys the development of modern studies of religious language and the diverse disciplinary strands that have emerged. Beginning with descriptive approaches to religious language, and the problem of describing religious concepts across languages, we introduce the turn to cognition in linguistics and also in theology. In new interdisciplinary research it is shown how linguistics, cognitive science and neuroscience work together. The final chapter focuses on the brain’s contrasting capacities, and in particular on its capacity for language and metaphor. Part II continues the topic of metaphor – the natural ability by which humans draw on basic knowledge of the world in order to explore abstractions and intangibles. The chapters of this Part look into metaphors in religious texts, what they may be seeking to express and what cognitive resources they are using. The chapters are written by specialists, all of whom apply conceptual metaphor theory in various ways, covering several major religious traditions–Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism. Part III seeks to open up new horizons for cognitive–linguistic research into religion, looking beyond written texts to the ways in which language is integrated with other modalities, including ritual, religious art, and religious electronic media. Along with these domains for investigation the chapters in Part III introduce readers to a range of technical instruments that have been developed within cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis in recent years.

Spirits of Heritage, Specters of Ruins: Partnering with the Jinn in the Preservation of the Past

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-202
Author(s):  
Ian Straughn
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Affective Responses ◽  
Heritage Management ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Human Actors

In her recent study of the heritage project that is contemporary New Orleans, anthropologist Shanon Dawdy has suggested that “[s]ociety presents itself simultaneously as a ruin and as a kind of playland” (2016, 147). This notion that the ruin is both a product of, and a basis for, heritage practice serves as a useful intervention into long-standing treatments of ruins as exotic, romantic, and awaiting the discovery, glorification, and preservation of those that might give them meaning. In the present essay, I further challenge heritage approaches to ruins through an examination of the ways in which they have been associated, in various Muslim cultural contexts, with a set of distinctly sentient, yet non-human actors, the jinn. This pairing between place and spirits has shaped long-standing affective responses and practical engagements between local (human) inhabitants and their archaeologically rich landscapes across the Middle East and North Africa. This essay examines how those engagements often push against contemporary discourses highlighting the sublime aspects of ruins and the quasi-sacred nature of heritage. To that end, the following guiding questions structure my contribution: Can contemporary heritage discourses accommodate practices in which humans share control and ownership of the material past with spectral others? How might we reframe the mandate to preserve such ruins in light of alternative perspectives that mark these sites as sinister, and/or meaningful, precisely because of their ruination? Can universalizing heritage discourses accommodate practices that derive value from the material past without also subscribing to explicit preservationist goals? Such questions offer an opportunity to consider the inclusion of the Unseen, and perhaps others, whose perspectives have gone unrecognized, within professional heritage management and its hermeneutics of the past.

As the Deep River Rises

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Alexander M. Weisberg ◽  
Ariel Evan Mayse
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Environmental Ethic ◽  
Rabbinic Literature ◽  
Jewish Law ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Western Discourse ◽  
Modus Vivendi ◽  
Rabbinic Law

Abstract The present essay seeks to offer a conceptual framework for grappling with climate change from within the sources of Jewish law (halakhah), a discourse rooted in the Hebrew Bible but developed in the rabbinic literature of Late Antiquity and then in medieval and modern codes and commentaries. Halakhah reflects deeply-held intellectual, theological, ontological, and sociological values. As a modus vivendi, rabbinic law—variously interpreted by Jews of different stripes—remains a vital force that shapes the life of contemporary practitioners. We are interested in how a variety of contemporary scholars, theologians, and activists might use the full range of rabbinic legal sources—and their philosophical, jurisprudential, and moral values—to construct an alternative environmental ethic founded in a worldview rooted in obligation and a matrix of kinship relationships. Our essay is thus an exercise in decolonizing knowledge by moving beyond the search for environmental keywords or ready analogies to contemporary western discourse. We join the voices of recent scholars who have sought to revise regnant assumptions about how religious traditions should be read and interpreted with an eye to formulating constructive ethics.

A Perspective on Popular Religious Idealism and Its Cultural Contexts

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-182
Author(s):  
Dell deChant ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
New Thought ◽  
Christian Science ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores the relationship of two “metaphysical” religious traditions, Christian Science and New Thought. The argument developed here is that the two traditions are closely related, using the category of Religious Idealism to identify similarities. The article offers a departure from traditional, long-standing assessments of the relationship between the movements, which focus on their differences. Specific problems considered are initially posed by questions related to the origins of the movements, and the study of origins is the focus of this paper. Three other categories of relevance will also be noted: (1) theology and cosmology, (2) the centrality of mental healing, and (3) biblical exegesis.

Understanding Latina Suicide Attempts in Their Individual, Family, and Cultural Contexts

PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Guillermo Bernal ◽  
Yovanska Duarté-Vélez
Keyword(s):  
Suicide Attempts ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Individual Family
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