Hearing the transformative potential of metaphor in scripture? Honouring J. Wentzel van Huyssteen

Christians worldwide are (re)discovering the power of scripture in their daily lives, especially in the context of the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic. The present turbulent time provides the biblical sciences an opportunity to support other theological disciplines and the church to search for ways scripture can give encouragement to people. The argument in this article is that the power of biblical writings lies in their metaphors which open an alternative moral world. For the appropriation of scripture in new contexts, the transformative potential of J. Wentzel van Huyssteen’s metaphorical hermeneutic is explored as a framework. The article gives a brief overview of the influence of his work as a mentor, colleague and friend.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The article focuses on the dynamic nature and intentions of New Testament Studies (intradisciplinary aspects), and uses the philosophical hermeneutic of a systematic theologian as well as insights from literary theory and cultural anthropology to support the argument and open up interdisciplinary discourse.

Sociomoral Temperament: A Mediator Between Wellbeing and Social Outcomes in Young Children

Social outcomes, such as empathy, conscience, and behavioral self-regulation, might require a baseline of psychological wellbeing. According to Triune Ethics Metatheory (TEM), early experience influences the neuropsychology underlying a child's orientation toward the social and moral world. Theoretically, a child's wellbeing, fostered through early caregiving, promotes sociomoral temperaments that correspond to the child's experience, such as social approach or withdrawal in face-to-face situations. These temperaments may represent an individual's default sociomoral perspective on the world. We hypothesized that sociomoral temperament emerges as a function of wellbeing and would be related to social outcomes measured by moral socialization and self-regulation. Further, we hypothesized that sociomoral temperament would mediate the relationship between wellbeing and social outcomes. To investigate, we collected items reflective of sociomoral temperament, asking mothers from two countries (USA: n = 525; China: n = 379) to report on their 3- to 5-year-old children. They also reported on their child's wellbeing (anxiety, depression, happiness) and social outcomes, including moral socialization (concern after wrong doing, internalized conduct and empathy) and behavioral self-regulation (inhibitory control and misbehavior). As expected, correlations identified connections between wellbeing, sociomoral temperament, and social outcomes. Mediation analyses demonstrated that sociomoral temperament mediated relations between wellbeing and social outcomes in both samples, though in slightly different patterns. Fostering early wellbeing may influence social outcomes through a child's developing sociomoral temperament.

Ethical Naturalism and the Meaning of “Good”

How to explicate the meaning of “good” is a classic philosophical question, one reason is that “good” has metaphysical properties which are difficult to interpret. The development of ethical naturalism opens a door to answer the “good” question. This theory proposes to view the moral world and the natural world as a continuum, in that the moral world is built on the basis of the natural one. This study aims to introduce a sort of reductive ethical naturalism—end-relational theory—to interpret “good” assertions. According to this theory, most “good” assertions are end-relational and thus “good” can be reduced to “end”. By doing so, metaphysical moral meaning can be converted into concretized natural meaning, and then “good” morality will not be high up above anymore.

A New Voice for an Ancient Story: Speaking from the Margins of Homer’s Iliad in Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles

Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011) is an imaginative rewriting of Homer’s Iliad. The writer uses the strategy of transfocalization and enters the text from the point of view of Patroclus. His fresh look offers a new critical perspective both on the moral world of the epic and on Achilles, the great Greek hero whose complex personality and tragic hubris Patroclus observes with emotional understanding. Miller transforms the Homeric sparing narrative of the friendship between Patroclus and Achilles into a touch- ing love story built on their mutual devotion, and locates this narrative at the heart of a world of ruthless violence. This paper will consider the writer’s use of hypertextual adap- tation in the novel from the perspective of the change in the narrative focus of the source, and discuss her objectives and methodology.

Developmental changes in perceived moral standing of robots

We live in an age where robots are increasingly present in the social and moral world. Here, we explore how children and adults think about the mental lives and moral standing of robots. In Experiment 1 (N = 116), we found that children granted humans and robots with more mental life and vulnerability to harm than an anthropomorphized control (i.e., a toy bear). In Experiment 2 (N = 157), we found that, relative to children, adults ascribed less mental life and vulnerability to harm to robots. In Experiment 3 (N = 152), we modified our experiment to be within-subjects and measured beliefs concerning moral standing. Though younger children again appeared willing to assign mental capacities — particularly those related to experience (e.g., being capable of experiencing hunger) — to robots, older children and adults did so to a lesser degree. This diminished attribution of mental life tracked with diminished ratings of robot moral standing. This informs ongoing debates concerning emerging attitudes about artificial life.

Formation of the Ideal of Moral and Ethical Education in the Kazakh Worldview

The article provides a philosophical analysis of the formation of the problem of moral education in the worldview of the Kazakh people. The ideal of moral education of the individual is the most important problem in the context of the reform of society, the modernization of public consciousness. The ideal is the core of the moral world of man, the criterion for re-evaluating the stereotypes of consciousness. The formation of the ideal of moral education has worried Kazakh thinkers and philosophers since ancient times. The theoretical issues of the formation of ideals were reflected in the works of Abu Nasr al-Farabi, Yusuf Balasaguni, Mahmud Kashgari, where they managed to reveal the essence of the ideal, morality and spirituality. Various aspects of this problem were considered by Ybyray Altynsarin, Shokan Ualikhanov and Abai Kunanbayev, who attached great importance to education in terms of moral development of the individual, and in particular, his ideals. The specific features of the idels of moral education found their development in the philosophy of Shakarim, M. Zh. Kopeev, Magzhan Zhumabaev, which consisted in studying themselves, their inner world. Traditional Kazakh culture, concentrating the centuries-old collective moral experience based on the purity of conscience, honor and duty, integrity of the spirit, enriches the modern Kazakh culture, the life experience of modern people in terms of moral criteria and norms of behavior.

Исторический процесс в свете христианской антропологии Ф. М. Достоевского

Based on the fundamental concepts of the "mystery of man" and Christian realism, the "law of the Ego" and the "law of love" for Dostoevsky's creative consciousness, the article examines the one-sidedness of biologizing and socializing concepts of human nature since the Enlightenment and their connection with entropic processes in the spiritual and moral world of people and declining trends in the course of history. It is shown how the spiritual laws of life, which are leaving the field of view of rationalistic and pragmatic consciousness, transform social-progressive design and planning, and introduce nihilistic elements into them. It is emphasized that the methodology of Christian realism is universal, that it connects the "mystery of man" with the mystery of history, and becomes one of the main principles for assessing the hierarchy of values in various ideological and social systems.