This article addresses the problem of “eco‐anxiety” by integrating results from numerous fields of inquiry. Although climate change may cause direct psychological and existential impacts, vast numbers of people already experience indirect impacts in the form of depression, socio‐ethical paralysis, and loss of well‐being. This is not always evident, because people have developed psychological and social defenses in response, including “socially constructed silence.” I argue that this situation causes the need to frame climate change narratives as emphasizing hope in the (...) midst of tragedy. Framing the situation simply as a threat or a possibility does not work. Religious communities and the use of methods which include spirituality have an important role in enabling people to process their deep emotions and existential questions. I draw also from my experiences from Finland in enabling cooperation between natural scientists and theologians in order to address climate issues. (shrink)

Abstract. Don Browning's career involved a deep exploration into the frequently hidden philosophical assumptions buried in various forms of psychotherapeutic healing. These healing methodologies were based on metaphors and metaphysical assumptions about both the meaning of human fulfillment and the ultimate context of our lives. All too easily, psychological theories put forward philosophical anthropologies while claiming to be operating within a modest, empirical approach. Browning does not fault or criticize these psychotherapeutic enterprises for making such claims because he thinks these (...) claims are implicit in all discussions of psychological health. But he does fault these methodologies for not being more forthcoming about their shift from a narrow empirical investigation to a broad-ranging philosophical and even quasireligious orientation. Browning can be described as a “horizon analyst” who constantly pulled back the curtains and helped us see the deeper symbols, images, and metaphysical assumptions behind our psychological investigations. (shrink)

The idea of a text is reviewed and reconstructed to facilitate the application of concepts of interpretation to the objects analyzed in the natural sciences, as well as to objects analyzed in religion and literature. Four criteria—‐readability, formality, material transcendence, and retrievability—‐are proposed as the basis for a generalized conception of text. Objects in both religion and science, not previously thought to be texts, are shown to be included in the new definition and therefore to be potential subjects of developing (...) methods of interpretation. (shrink)

The human experience of meaning‐making lies at the roots of consciousness, creativity, and religious faith. It arises from the basic experience of separation from a loved object, suffered by all mammals, and, in general terms, from the experienced gap between ourselves and our environment. We fill the gap with transitional objects and symbols that reassure us of basic continuity in ourselves and in the world. These objects and symbols also serve the neurognostic function of demonstrating what the world is like. (...) Thus, humanity lives by faith, as manifested in its pattern‐making capacity, and not by literal sight. (shrink)

On the assumption that theistic religious commitment takes place in the face of evidential ambiguity, the question arises under what conditions it is permissible to make a doxastic venture beyond one’s evidence in favour of a religious proposition. In this paper I explore the implications for orthodox theistic commitment of adopting, in answer to that question, a modest, moral coherentist, fideism. This extended Jamesian fideism crucially requires positive ethical evaluation of both the motivation and content of religious doxastic ventures. I (...) suggest that, even though the existence of horrendous evil does not resolve evidential ambiguity in favour of atheism, there are reasonable value commitments that would preclude those who hold them from satisfying extended Jamesian fideist conditions for committing themselves to classical theism. I then begin a discussion of a possible revisionary theistic alternative (in the Christian tradition) which – one might hope – may meet those conditions. An earlier, shorter, version of this paper was delivered as a keynote address at the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God. (shrink)

After commending Moleski for his excellent study, I focus attention on three areas that merit further clarification: (1) that Michael Polanyi’s quest for public recognition was legitimate and not the effect of a runaway vanity, (2) that Kuhn’s straining to define his dependence upon Polanyi was blocked by the unspecifiability clouding the discovery process and by his notion that Polanyi appealed to ESP to explain the dynamics of· discovery, and (3) that Kuhn’s success in gaining public recognition for his paradigm (...) shift was understandable. In the end, I list five areas wherein Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions could be substantially improved by joining forces with Polanyi. (shrink)

This article considers the methodological limits and possibilities of a cultural turn in comparative religious ethics by “translating” the Latin American Indigenous meanings of buen vivir (living well), a subsistent mode of interdependent flourishing resistant to Western models of extractive development amid the Anthropocene. It problematizes the methodological challenge of translating Indigenous cultures from within a Western colonial political economy that has historically relegated Indigenous Americans to the primitive level of savage inferiority according to a stadial theory of socioeconomic development. (...) However, constructive methodological options for translating Indigenous cultures emerge from the Journal of Religious Ethics's existing conversations about comparative religious ethics. On the one hand, recent critical anthropology and ethnography, abetted by intellectual history, provide tools for ethicists in the recovery of Indigenous critiques and meanings against longstanding Western cultural patterns. On the other hand, nativizing the concept of the religious classic thematizes the normative dimensions of Indigenous cultures, demonstrating how the translation of buen vivir points to intercultural dialogue rather than cooptation and manipulation. (shrink)

Reeves condemns the recruitment of scientific methods by representative theologians to lend credibility to their theological claims. His treatment of Nancey Murphy's use of Lakatosian research programme methodology is focused on here, and his proposal that science and religion scholars might act as “historians of the present” to advance the field is explored. The “credibility strategy” is set in historical context with an exploration of some of the science and religion field's original commitments and goals, particularly in terms of the (...) emphasis on rationalism and corresponding neglect of the imagination, and the value of more creative input in promoting better dialogue between science and religion is highlighted. (shrink)

The substantive center of Christian ethics is Jesus’s ministry of the kingdom or reign of God, and its preferential inclusion of the poor, the outcast, and the sinner. What defines a gospel-based bioethics is a hopeful, practical commitment to improve the health of those who are most vulnerable to illness and early death because they lack basic needs. This commitment is distinctive of Christian bioethics, if not “unique” in the sense that no other bioethical approaches or traditions share it. To (...) succeed in reducing disparities in access to health care requires cooperative social action with members of multiple moral and political communities, meaning that there is no strict boundary between secular and Christian bioethics at the practical, political level, the level of applied Christian social ethics. (shrink)

Abstract. In this essay I take Michael Polanyi's analysis of scientific discovery and extend it to encompass fresh encounters with the living God. Given the embodied character of all human knowing, Polanyi challenged objectivism and positivism as untenable. In its place, Polanyi noted that the tacit skills established when a physicist learns to detect radio waves has its counterpart in a Christian's being trained to find God. Once trained, stubborn organismic habits constrain both physicist and believer within a socially approved (...) heuristic circle that can be broken only by the act of discovery. The puzzlement that erupts at the onset of an inquiry ultimately finds relief only in an expanded encounter with the realities that one has been trained to serve. Thus, the act of discovery not only serves to disrupt the tradition as it has been received but also reveals that the realities being served make themselves known in novel ways. The lifelong pursuit of God and the lifelong pursuit of novel manifestations of radio waves thus share a common epistemological and phenomenological underpinning. (shrink)

Terrence Deacon has described three orders of emergence; Arthur Peacocke and others have suggested four levels of human systems and sciences; and Philip Clayton has postulated an additional, transcendent, level. Orders and levels describe distinct aspects of emergence, with orders characterizing topological complexity and levels characterizing theoretical knowledge and causal power. By using Deacon's orders to analyze and relate each of the four "lower" levels one can project that analysis on the transcendent level to gain insight into the teleodynamic emergence (...) of transcendent-level systems. I argue that cross-cultural interactions among human cultural-level systems results in the emergence of the "universal" transcendental norms historically characterized as the Greek Good, Beauty, and Truth. These norms require a dynamic existence that I characterize as the emergence of Spirit, using Josiah Royce's community of interpretation, and that I suggest provides a pragmatic clarification of Clayton's transcendent level. An understanding of those emergent norms clarifies ethical systems, highlights the importance of aesthetics in understanding scientific systems, and suggests the necessity of community in fruitful science-and-religion dialogue on human systems. (shrink)

As human beings we inevitably try to explain our experience. In philosophical language, we deal with transcendent assertions and aspirations. The issue, then, is: how can we talk about what matters, given the structures inherent in language and basic to the way we are made? Instead of the philosophical category of Being, I advance a case for giving the human brain privileged status as an analogical expression of God, the symbol‐concept of what matters most, and then suggest the illumination which (...) can come with using that analogical expression, especially as that analogy connects us with the environment at the limbic level and constructs our world at the cerebral level. (shrink)

We live in a world in which God is made known in and through God’s material works, which are other than himself. That is, they are signs of God’s presence whether in the natural world or the world we structure, as God’s image bearers, in our practices, rituals, and the stuff we make. The Christian tradition holds that the created order and human creativity witness to God, because creation is suffused with God’s presence. A sacramental understanding of sports aims to (...) give an alternative stance to how Christian traditions conceive of sports. A sacramental understanding intimates how this worldview helps us reckon that sports can be an acceptable form of divine worship, because of how sports can participate in and point to God. I argue that, when sport is understood as a material mode of worship, sport can serve as an iconic indicator which reflects and imparts something of divine presence. If we inhabit such a world in which God is close to the lived experience of this strenuous and sensual mode of existence, this re-sacralizes sports as contexts in which humans can actually celebrate with gratitude goods such as autotelicity and experience God’s presence in this cultural liturgy. (shrink)

The article discussed the idea of skilled helping in relation to what has been put forward as practical theological facilitation. It has been argued that various helping relationships, amongst which the author refers to coaching, facilitation, and therapy has more in common than what differentiates them if epistemology is viewed as a unifying concept. As such the scope of practical theology in terms of the contexts and themes in which it might be involved is said to widen. The public dimension (...) of the organisational context, more so than the congregational context, has been put forward as an important habitus of practical-theological facilitation. The organisational involvement of the practical-theological facilitator in terms of professional-vocational skilled helping takes on an actual role through facilitation and other helping modalities. (shrink)

Abstract. What kind of consciousness is best prepared to undertake effective interdisciplinary explorations in religion and science in our twenty-first century context? This paper draws on the thought of theologian David Tracy and psychologist and philosopher of religion James W. Jones to suggest that negation and ecstasy are mutually conditioning factors that go into the shaping of just such a consciousness. Healthy, constructive modes of relating to the disciplinary other imply the emergence of a transformed way of knowing and being (...) wherein the scholar countenances the loss of controlling and autonomous ways of relating (negation), and precisely in that loss, enters into shared spaces of mutually illuminative and transformative understanding (ecstasy). (shrink)

Exemplars have the power to help people navigate various levels of moral struggle, from the relatively straightforward problem of lacking motivation to the much deeper problem of failing to see the moral realities that surround us. But there are also serious moral risks in the appeal to exemplars: we romanticize them, we make use of them in authoritarian ways, and we tend to forget how our choice of exemplars is conditioned by oppressive cultural formations. I argue that we need to (...) develop a social model of exemplarity, attuned to social contexts of our exemplars themselves as well as the social processes of constructing and appealing to exemplars. More particularly, I argue that we need to develop space for thinking about exemplary groups, not just exemplary individuals, in order to develop the strengths and avoid the weaknesses in exemplarist moral theories. (shrink)

Excerpts from Chapters 1 and 3 of New Maps for Old: Explorations in Science and Religion (Gerhart and Russell 2001) explore the ramifications of metaphoric process for changes in thinking, especially those changes that lead to a new understanding of our world. Examples are provided from science, from religion, and from science and religion together. In excerpts from Chapter 8, a double analogy—theology is to science as science is to mathematics—is proposed for better understanding the contemporary relationship between science and (...) religion. A conservation of epistemological sufficiency is disclosed as one moves from mathematics to empirical science to theology—a move from one discipline to another that involves a sacrifice of one aspect of thought to gain another. (shrink)

Excerpts from Chapters 1 and 3 of New Maps for Old: Explorations in Science and Religion (Gerhart and Russell 2001) explore the ramifications of metaphoric process for changes in thinking, especially those changes that lead to a new understanding of our world. Examples are provided from science, from religion, and from science and religion together. In excerpts from Chapter 8, a double analogy—theology is to science as science is to mathematics—is proposed for better understanding the contemporary relationship between science and (...) religion. A conservation of epistemological sufficiency is disclosed as one moves from mathematics to empirical science to theology—a move from one discipline to another that involves a sacrifice of one aspect of thought to gain another. (shrink)

N. R. Hanson's discussion of experience is criticized. Experience, though necessary for knowing, is insufficient as a basis for understanding in either science or religion. Experience alone can be misleading. We may begin with experience, but we cannot claim to understand until experience has been mediated by theory. The article is excerpted from Metaphoric Process: The Creation of Scientific and Religious Understanding (Gerhart and Russell 1984), Chapter 2.

This contribution is aimed at some provocation by questioning the basic assumptions of current development discourse. It asks for conceptual clarification and differentiation on the meaning of various process terms. It needs to be recognised that the word development remains a metaphor than can indeed be extended but can also become over-extended and ossified. The concept of development is then contrasted with the process of maturation. It is argued that the concept of maturation is, better able to indicate the final (...) goal of the process than most other process terms, recognises inherent limitations and follows natural cycles better than exponential growth, sustained development or endless progress. (shrink)

. Imre Lakatos's philosophy of science can provide helpful leads for theological methodology, but only when mediated by the disciplines that lie between the natural sciences and theology. The questions of relativism and truth are used as indices for comparing disciplines, and Lakatos's theory of natural science is taken as the starting point. Major modifications of Lakatos's work are demanded as one moves from the natural sciences, through economics, the interpretive social sciences, literary theory, and into theology. Although theology may (...) consist of Lakatosian research programs, it also includes programs of interpretation and programs for living. This conclusion must influence our definition of theological truth and our assessment of theological relativism. (shrink)

Careful reading of imaginative literature teaches an attentiveness fundamental to the care of the sick.

Because the mind is the significance of the brain and God is the significance of the mind, the concept “mind” bridges how the brain works and traditional patterns of belief. The left mind, which utilizes rational vigilance and the imperative instructions of proclamation, names and analyzes the urgently right. The right mind, which discloses the relational responsiveness of numinous presence and natural symbolism, is immersed in and integrates the ultimately real. Together they provide a typology of mind‐states with which to (...) assess regressive, functional, and creative patterns. Hand dominance, gender differences, and cultural bias qualify the use of the metaphor. (shrink)

Exploration and reflection on the interfacing of religion and the neurosciences in the last twenty‐five years provide a unique point of convergence on the relationship between science and religion. A focus on two streams of consciousness characterized the first phase in the 1970s. Scholarship suggested correlates between the styles of analytical steps and synthetic leaps of imagination and the belief patterns of proclamation and manifestation. The use of lateralized consciousness was critiqued as covering too much as well as not attending (...) to evolutionary developments and philosophical and theological foundations. A shift to whole brain functioning with more differentiated investigations came during the second phase in the 1980s. Empirical studies corroborated the earlier analytical speculations in neurotheology and advanced the heuristic value or using the whole brain as a metaphor for understanding religion. By the third phase of the 1990s, meaning‐making and integrating consciousness emerged as shaping the agenda between religion and cognitive neuroscience. The emerging methodology combines analogical continuities among levels of complexity and metaphorical leaps of inferential patterning. (shrink)

Critically engages the work of American philosopher Richard J. Bernstein.