Elizabeth Seton, American Saint

Elizabeth Bayley Seton is the first native-born US citizen to be made a Roman Catholic saint. Canonized in 1975, Seton founded the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph, the first vowed community of Catholic women religious created in the United States. Seton’s sainthood marked the culmination of a role she first served during her life: a respectable, benevolent face for a church whose local leaders were eager to demonstrate its compatibility with American culture. Seton’s founding of the American Sisters of Charity was a more practical achievement and one that shaped the Catholic Church in the United States in tangible ways. Starting in 1809, when Seton began a school and vowed community in Emmitsburg, Maryland, the Sisters of Charity expanded throughout the United States, eventually running hundreds of schools and orphanages and offering both a spiritual home and a career path for women who chose it. Seton’s life is expressive for what it reveals about her era as well as for her distinctive achievements. Her prominence led to the preservation of decades of correspondence and spiritual writings. Through them it is possible to see with unusual clarity the ways in which the Age of Revolutions and the rise of Napoleon variously disrupted, reinvigorated, and transformed Catholic traditions; to observe the possibilities and constraints Catholicism offered a spiritually ambitious woman; and to witness changes in the relationship between Protestants and Catholics in the United States. Finally, Seton’s rich archive also renders visible one woman’s experience of intellectual inquiry, marriage, widowhood, motherhood, spiritual ambition, and female friendship.

In Search of the Asia Principle

“Asia” is not the end result but a means of intellectual exploration. “Asia” is multivalent; it is not self-sufficient and exclusionary vis-à-vis other cultures. It does not exist as an epistemological abstraction. This unique attribute of “Asia” is, however, where its opportunity lies. Taking “Asia” as a means for intellectual inquiry, this article explores the “fūdo” 風土of humankind and cultural formations in dialogue with historical circumstances. It argues that global integration is not the homogenization of disparate societies but mutual respect for their specificities. Furthermore, this article proposes a new kind of universality and reassesses how the specific relates to the universal. Taking Asia’s historical experiences seriously, this article stresses that universality cannot act as an independent and superior imposition vis-à-vis specificities. Rather, specific experiences have to be put into an open dialogue between one another to unleash new possibilities. As a means to reconstruct a new universal imagination, “Asia” poses a potent challenge to hegemonic epistemologies.

Dr James Croll: a product of his environment? An exploration of the natural, social, personal and economic factors that influenced his extraordinary life

ABSTRACT The quality and richness of Perthshire's natural environment were formative influences on a young James Croll (1821–1890), which left him with a life-long appreciation of nature, landscape and natural meditation. Although Croll himself declares to have had little interest in geology in his earlier years, it became a central theme of his scientific understanding, which implies the clear influence of both his local environment and of his father David, a stonemason. His family and friends also shaped him in other ways, not least his love of reading, his unconstrained thinking and intellectual acuity. He inherited his father's moral character, amiability and an excitement about intellectual inquiry, which drew friends to him who made great efforts to assist him in his work, both personally and professionally, and played a role in his being offered a position by James Geikie with the Geological Survey of Scotland. Croll's financial position was often precarious; he spent a good deal of his life in relative poverty. Whilst this affected his opportunities for formal learning, it may well have led to his ability to think creatively and to seek answers more broadly than he might have if he had been able to engage in a more formal education. Ill health, which affected him throughout his life, could be seen to both hamper his work – but also through circumstance lead him to pursue a more academic path, as other routes of work were shut off to him. Ultimately Whitefield, Wolfhill and the wider Perthshire countryside in which he grew up can clearly be seen to have influenced his life in many ways, even, perhaps, to the extent of his chosen surname.

What Is Analytic Theology?

Chapter 5 considers the still open question “What is Analytic Theology?” In dialogue with Timothy Pawl and William Hasker, I argue that analytic theology is a form of faith seeking understanding and a form of constructive theology. I then consider some efforts to push analytic theology into comparatively neglected areas, including topics related to social justice. I focus especially on Sameer Yadav’s call for analytic liberation theology. I conclude the chapter with a bit of additional reflection on why analytic theology is valuable. Christians should agree that it is good to try to answer rational objections to key Christian doctrines, and similarly good to try to give positive models for how to understand them in a way that coheres with other things we take ourselves to know. Those tasks are perennial, and analytic theology is one way that Christians today can pursue them fruitfully. At the same time, however, I also think that there are non-Christian reasons for valuing analytic theology, reasons that anyone might accept. Intellectual inquiry is good. Focused thinking about terrifically difficult problems is good. Watching very intelligent people think as deeply and carefully as they can about things that matter to them more than anything else—that too is good.77 Analytic theology displays all of these goods, something that anyone can recognize, even without accepting the underlying Christian framework.

2 Hyper-Study: On Our Becoming-Students

Drawing insight from a creative and reflective experimentation called Studium (2019–) run by the author and the artist François Deck, this text attempts to define a theoretical conception of “studying” that overcomes the narrow contexts of institutional education or professional research, determined mostly by rules set by the market or the state. Through the proposal of an expanded notion of study, it aims at reclaiming the collective situations of intellectual inquiry in front of a shared problem by which we all “become students.” To sketch the idea of “hyper-study,” the reflection needs to take into consideration several implications of this kind of gestures: (1) the subjective engagement that transforms one’s own form of life (transfiguration); (2) the open, situated, and precarious activity (immediation); and (3) the specific environmental conditions (ecological agency).

Orwellian codes of behaviour exploring ideological power in education research policy

Conceptions of education research as independent and serving the interests of truth have come to represent freedoms that emerge from the application of intellectual inquiry. Critiques of education research and its relevance to the enhancement of education, coupled with neoliberal market-led pragmatism, have contributed to the erosion of an enlightenment heritage. In this nexus, empowerment is replaced by control. There is an absence of analysis of the Scottish National Party’s education research policy which means its regime of governance through logics of quantification productive of asymmetries of power has gone unrecognized. It is argued this policy produces a metrification of teaching and research which constructs teaching and research as servile to external discourses. These encroachments into autonomy and professionalism are intellectually clandestine as they operate through assumptive worlds holding that evidence is value-free rather than the outcome of constructivist processes driven by choice. Orwell’s dystopian vision of a subjugated society informs the meaning of the argument in the paper—that technologies of control and surveillance re-shape teacher autonomy and instrumentalize research such that its power to arbitrate is emasculated.

Galileo Reading Qohelet: Seeing the World with “Curiosity’s Eye”

This essay examines Galileo’s reading of Ecclesiastes 3:11, which he cited in his letter to the Grand Duchess Christina in 1615 at the beginning of his trial for heresy. Why would Galileo have used this text in support of his intellectual inquiry? Three critical components of his intellectual environment are explored: 1) the development of scientific inquiry within the 17th c system of patronage; 2) the culture of curiosity that sustains his intellectual inquiry; and 3) the telescope and the transformation of human imagination.

Cultural Studies and radical popular education: Resources of hope

This article takes up the theme that a significant but often ignored source for British Cultural Studies began in the interdisciplinary teaching of the Workers’ Educational Association and university extra-mural departments in the immediate post-Second World War years. I deepen this argument by outlining the history of ‘popular education’ in Europe and beyond in the modern period to illustrate how the coming together of subaltern political movements and intellectual inquiry created an independent public sphere of radical self-enlightenment. In this article, by utilising archival and textual sources, I should like to explore whether it may be possible to renew the original project of Cultural Studies through radical programmes of ‘popular’ adult education in the digital age. I see Jim McGuigan’s work as offering ‘resources of hope’, in Raymond Williams’ phrase, for this tradition in the universe of academic Cultural Studies.

Conclusion

The conclusion brings together the lessons and insights provided by examining Walker’s philanthropic life. After summarizing the origins, evolution, and character of Madam Walker’s gospel of giving, it underscores the historical importance of black women’s philanthropy in undermining and resisting Jim Crow and its enduring role in ultimately dismantling the institution. Further, it suggests an approach to theorizing black women’s generosity as being based on five characteristics: proximity, “resourcefull-ness,” collaboration, incrementalism, and joy. It also affirms philanthropy as a powerful interpretive and analytical lens through which to examine African American life in general and black women in particular. It urges collaboration between scholars interested in philanthropy and black women to mutually strengthen intellectual inquiry and understanding of who counts as a philanthropist and what counts as philanthropic giving. It contends that Walker’s gospel of giving is more accessible as a model of generosity than the prevailing examples offered by today’s wealthiest 1 percent. It is certainly the direct inheritance of African Americans today, but relevant to all Americans, regardless of race, class or gender, interested in taking voluntary action in the twenty-first century.