Playing God With Animals? The Meaning of Animals in a More Than Human World

The article investigates the potential benefits of integrating philosophical practitioners into film education programs, particularly in enhancing students' critical thinking and broadening their educational experience. The study explores the synergy between film as a cultural medium and philosophy as a practice, arguing that films inherently possess a philosophical dimension that can be leveraged to deepen students' understanding of complex ethical and existential issues. By examining specific films from the CinEd collection, the article illustrates how philosophical inquiry can be effectively applied in educational settings to foster critical thinking, ethical reflection, and personal growth. The case study of the CinEd program provides a practical context for this integration, emphasizing the potential for philosophical practitioners to enhance the overall learning experience. The article concludes that incorporating philosophical practices into film education not only democratizes access to philosophical discourse but also promotes the development of critical thinking skills, ethical judgment, and an appreciation for diverse perspectives among young learners.

This paper is a theological reflection utilizing the Killen and de Beer method, on an ‘art installation’ at King’s College London Chaplaincy in which a jar of Marmite, labelled ‘Lord Jesus’ was placed in a manger, causing some controversy. Instead of the usual progression in this method, beginning with experience and the feelings it provokes, to lead to an image, I begin with the image itself and explore it as a feeling-producing experience, which leads to a further image, to insight and action. Themes in this exploration include the nature of art in a Christian context (is this art?), and its missional role; the doctrine of the Incarnation, including the extent to which it is/was shocking and how anthropological ideas of sacred and profane can assist us in understanding this; how we present and understand doctrine in Higher Education Chaplaincy and in our postmodern context.

This paper is a theological reflection utilizing the Killen and de Beer method, on an ‘art installation’ at King’s College London Chaplaincy in which a jar of Marmite, labelled ‘Lord Jesus’ was placed in a manger, causing some controversy. Instead of the usual progression in this method, beginning with experience and the feelings it provokes, to lead to an image, I begin with the image itself and explore it as a feeling-producing experience, which leads to a further image, to insight and action. Themes in this exploration include the nature of art in a Christian context (is this art?), and its missional role; the doctrine of the Incarnation, including the extent to which it is/was shocking and how anthropological ideas of sacred and profane can assist us in understanding this; how we present and understand doctrine in Higher Education Chaplaincy and in our postmodern context.

The question explored in this paper is posed within the sisterhood of women who share the concerns of religious feminism. It is reflected in the sizable literature which represents the women’s movement in the synagogue, the Christian Church, and the feminist spirituality movement, and which has already developed into a tradition which is ecumenical, pluralist, and academically serious. Religious feminists are united in the conviction that both feminism and religion are profoundly significant for the lives of women and for contemporary life generally. That shared concern includes the perspectives of Jews, Christians, and those who claim no bond with either tradition. It includes feminists who work for the reform of traditions - Jewish, Roman Catholic, mainline or evangelical Protestant - and those who declare Judaism and Christianity irredeemably biased against women and find religious homes in the new forms of feminist spirituality. Feminist scholarship within the Christian context, for all its variety, is unified in its critical perception of sexism as a massive distortion in the historical and theological tradition which systematically denigrates women, overtly or covertly affirms women’s inferiority and submission to men (patriarchy), and excludes women from full actualization and participation in the Church and society. It is unified in its aim of freeing women from restrictive ideologies and institutional structures which hinder selfactualization and self-transcendence. And it is unified in its attention to the interpreted experience of women as a source for religious and theological reflection, especially as those analyses, whether secular or religious, reflect the collective experience of women, in whatever groups of race, age, class, nationality. Thus it is an interdisciplinary and cooperative task. The differences within feminist religious scholarship as it relates to Christian theology are accounted for by different perceptions of the depth and pervasiveness of sexism within Christianity. In a 1977 survey of feminist theology, Carol Christ argues that the essential challenge is posed by Mary Daly’s claim that the gender and the intrinsic character and attributes of the Christian God are patriarchal.(1) Christ divides feminist scholarship into “reformist” and “revolutionary” approaches, and notes that few reformists working within the tradition have responded to this criticism of Christianity’s core symbolism. Feminist revolutionaries, on the other hand, use the experience of women not only as a corrective but as a starting point and norm. Free of the authorities of Judaism or Christianity, they attempt to create new symbols and traditions on the basis of their own perceptions of ultimate reality. While it remains to be seen whether the writings of the revolutionaries - mainly concerned with symbols and spirituality - will develop

In a Christian context, the eternal change of identity from death to life through Jesus Christ becomes all-encompassing. Yet, other ephemeral identities also shape individuals. Using a range of theoretical ideas evident within disability studies and sports discourse, this essay attempts to contextualize and reflect upon the life of a disabled person who became a “born again” Christian in the aftermath (and amidst the tensions) of physical impairment. Reflections are provided on the interactions between the following identities: ex-solider (including Special Forces); ex-lorry driver; ex-nondisabled person; ex-Paralympic athlete (1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Spain); ex-sports development officer (for disabled people); disability activist; Christian; and academic. It is argued that the constructs of disability studies and disability sport need to be considered in terms of their relationship to the Christian faith. This area requires further research because within disability studies Christianity is largely ignored or placed in a historical context rather than explained as a current subjective experience (see Barnes & Mercer, 2011). In turn, disability sport discourse often either dismisses Christianity or contextualizes it historically rather than addressing its impact on the personal and the present (see Thomas, 2003).

This paper is a literature-based study that offers a critical analysis of widowhood from biblical and traditional African socio-cultural perspectives. The paper anlayzed Scriptures on God’s standards for caring for widows and books, journal articles, and dissertations on widowhood in Africa and found that widowhood in most African societies is characterized by unethical rituals, mandatory remarriages, harassment, denial, solitude, impoverishment, loss of social status, and depression as well as financial, sexual and social exploitations. Having offered theological and ethical reflections on the care for widows from the African Christian perspective, the paper suggested that the church must allocate a substantial part of its income to help the needy in general, more so widows. Traditional authorities are also encouraged to eliminate/modify unethical widowhood practices. The paper contributes to the ongoing scholarly discourse on African cultural transformation and female empowerment from an African Christian perspective. Keywords: Africa, Christianity, Ethical, Theological, Widows, Widowhood

The International Ecumenical Peace Convocation: Towards an Ecumenical Theology of Just Peace?

Theological reflection on economic ethics often follows the tradition of the social sciences in describing economic reality in econometric terms. The numerical imagination of the social sciences is not always an elegant dialogue partner for theological ethical reflection. This can be seen to be the case when we draw upon Karl Barth’s discussion of ‘lordless powers’ to describe the dramatic economic reversal endured in Ireland over the last decade. In this article, I propose that literature represents an important additional dialogue partner for theological reflection. Four Irish novels are proposed as potential grounds for considering the relevance of the lordless power discussion in an Irish context.

IMMORTALITY AND THE POLITICAL LIFE OF MAN IN ALBERTUS MAGNUS THE LONG YEARS from the death of Augustine to the ediscovery of Aristotle in the West witnessed the deelopment of Roman Law, the Gelasian theory of temporal and spiritual power, the theory of medieval monarchy ws found in people like John of Salisbury, and the establishment of the feudal structure itself. Likewise, the establishment and growth of the religious orders created a new type of organization which was to provide many ideas for civil political practice. From the standpoint of political theory, these years are not of major significance when compared to the Greek, Augu,stinian, or the great scholastic theories. Nevertheless , the development of the feudal pattern with its ever growing confusion between the realm of the spiritual and the realm of the temporal emphasized a problem of great significance for political theory.1 Plotinus and Augustine, the last truly great pagan philosopher and the first universal Western Doctor of the Church, both had, to a greater or lesser degree, emphasized the contemplative order and its primacy. But there proved to be a danger in overemphasizing the importance of the next life for man. This world, wherein man was to work out his salvation, which to be sure was not political in its essence, could very easily be ignored or simply rejected. All of society's energy could be placed in attaining the next life. Since the solution of Plotinus became practically irrelevant in Western society as a real 1 See Heinrich A. Rommen, The State and Catholic Thought (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co., 1945), pp. 521-36; Charles Howard Mcllwain, Growth of Political Thought in the West (New York: Macmillan, 1932); R. W. and A. J. Carlyle, A History of Medieval Political Thought in the West (Edinburgh : Blackwood, 1928), 6 vols. 535 JAMES V. SCHALL, S.J. movement, the terms of the emphasis became exclusively Christian. The danger of the Christian over-emphasis on the next life, as someone like Hannah Arendt would suggest, was that politics would be undermined. The danger of the Christian message was that it co~ld make the political life of man on earth irrelevant.2 The only thing that mattered was, in an extreme view, the next life. Hannah Arendt's contention raises one of the most significant and perplexing questions in political theory, namely, the relationship between personal immortality and the public life. Arendt suggested that the contemplative life, especially in its Christian context, cut off the very life-blood of the political order as the Greeks saw it, that is, the hope of an earthly "immortality " and the record of heroic deeds and words. For the Christian, such things were merely vanity because his kingdom was not of this world.3 But does the Christian belief in immortality in its own terms, both as resurrection and as an explanation of personal continuity until this restored condition, necessarily render the deeds of this world transitory? Or is it what ultimately renders them possible in their own right? Certainly , one can point to trends in Christian history which would seem to suggest the former alternative. Yet, another interpretation of the importance of the contemplative life or immortality can be held. Indeed, it was the contention of Aristotle that politics needed speculative rectitude before it could exercise its own proper function. This was so because political life might easily become a search for immortality in this life if politics did not recognize the limits of this life and the nature of the contemplative order. 2 Hannah Arendt, The Hurnan Condition (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), pp. 20-21, 50. a Ibid., pp. 286-90. In this connection, I found the discussion of Fr. Benedict T. Viviano, 0. P., on "The Kingdom of God in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas," (The Thornist, October, 1980), pp. 502-22, to have missed the central significance of Albert's (and Thomas's) work in political theory. Viviano's study, for all its caution, still seemed to imply that the Kingdom of God was to have a political embodiment on earth and that neither Albert nor Thomas could see this because of their own...

The famous controversy between Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is known to regard the proper use of Platonism in humanist and Christian context. With special attention to Pico’s Commentary on a Canzone, the point of disagreement with Ficino, which is not at all obvious, is examined through a close reading. The result is that Pico sees the temptation of a pantheistic and anthropocentric understanding of the relationship between the human realm and God. Whereas Ficino engaged in making pagan philosophy amenable to Christian theology, Pico was concerned with upholding the otherness of the divine. For the humanist agenda, Ficino made plausible that the human world is divinized, while Pico called for the ascent to God. In Pico’s view the Neoplatonists secularized the divine, as was evident in Ficino’s philosophical theology.

Recent studies on the dynamics and purposes of storytelling have highlighted the ways that stories employ embodied, affective, and conceptual elements in order to reinforce cultural values and prompt further ethical reflection. These aspects of storytelling are supported and enriched by insights from ancient rhetoricians and contemporary cognitive scientists who have shown how vivid description, mental simulation of embodied activity, and conceptual blending work through our bodies and brains to move us affectively and mentally. The sacred stories of the Bible, strengthened by their divine dimensions and existential issues, work with the same elements to move their audiences. Luke 5:27–39 (Jesus’s encounter with Levi) and Luke 7:11–17 (Jesus raising a widow’s son) are explored as test cases to illuminate the power that embodiment, emotion, simulation, and conceptualization can have in stories that touch upon the sacred, prompting their audiences to ethical reflection and action.

Born to sense. Passions and esemplarityAs introduction, I show how passions have been conquering more and more importance in the structure of the modern western societies, and – consequently – that contemporary philosophy has denoted the crisis of the calculative-instrumental rationality and the need to reconstruct the geometry of passions. My paper wants to contribute to this reconstruction in two ways: clarifying the reason why passions are involved in our existence in a so ambiguous way – that is, how they express the open nature of the human animal; discussing if and how it is possible to think passions, relations and individuation without referring them to a transcendence or reducing them to an autistic immanence – that is, the difference between the model and the example. At first, I defend a non-anthropocentric declination of the approach of the philosophical anthropology, in order to explain that our biological nature makes us relational and pathic animals: human animals can define and determinate themselves only moving from the passion and sensation of the alterity. Secondly, I describe the different status of the model and the example from a philosophical-anthropological point of view, and I propose a post-deconstructive interpretation of the work of Gilles Deleuze, according to which Deleuze aims to build a new hierarchy, founded on concepts as difference, repetition, immanence, relationship, distinction and intensification: in the deleuzian world, the dynamical relation with the example is able to deep and amplify the process of individuation, opening to a sensible transcendence, to a transformation of how singularities feel and sense the world and their own relationship with the world. Then, I suggest that if we cross the deleuzian and philosophical-antropological perspectives, we could enquire the possibility of a new paradoxical immanent transcendence or transimmanence: the question of style thus becomes the question of an existential transformation which does not retrace a model, but repeats the differentiation of an example. In conclusion, I deal with a possible criticism: an esthetical transformation is completely different from a social one. I claim indeed that without the first, the second is not possible: the construction of a different society depends on the emergence of a widespread different way to sense and imagine.

Guilt and Its Purification

The singer Caroline Polachek has co-written a song with DJ Flume. The accompanying promotional video asks us to consider what transcendence may mean in a post-pandemic world. We theologically reflect on the song and video to consider what this may show about Western society’s understandings of transcendence, suffering and resurrection, where the dominate narrative has been the ‘turn to the self’. We also consider how the Church may respond to this poetically driven grass-root need for theological reflection where the most usual form of response is didactic and doctrinal in nature resulting in a disconnect in how the message is received.

Guilt and Its Purification: The Church and Sexual Abuse Katharina von Kellenbach Amidst the horror of ongoing revelations about the Roman Catholic Church's complicity in sexual predation, a theological reflection on Christian teachings about guilt and reconciliation is enlightening. Flawed notions of Christian forgiveness have brought us to this point where priests are absolved of crimes by their colleagues and reassigned to different posts in blind faith in their resolve to begin anew. The mystery of redemption is at the heart of the Christian message, which makes this systemic failure sadly predictable and particularly painful. What is wrong with the Christian theory and practice of sin and forgiveness that it fails to resist devastating complicity? Shifting focus from redemption to guilt invites reflection on the problematic metaphors that facilitate quick release and premature closure. The language of guilt invokes the imagery of stains and impurities that must be purified (by the sacrificial blood of Christ) or of burdens and weights that can be lifted and carried away (by a substitutionary scapegoat). In either case, guilt disappears as if by magic. This essay questions this imagery and draws on ecologically informed, sustainable practices of purification in order to propose a sequence of ritual steps to transform personal and collective guilt in the wake of the sexual abuse crisis. We rarely stop to define guilt, because it is immediately linked to forgiveness. Guilt and forgiveness, sin and redemption are paired concepts that are mentioned in the same breath. But what is guilt? Is it an individual feeling or an objective condition? The term is often used interchangeably, although the emotion and the state of being guilty are, unfortunately, very different experiences. In fact, it is one of the cruel ironies that victims feel guilty, while perpetrators remain indifferent to and oblivious about the harm they caused. It is the victims who are wracked by guilt feelings, sometimes severely so. Depression, anxiety, trouble sleeping, and nightmares are common experiences among survivors. The symptom of survivor guilt would eventually be incorporated into the emerging concept of “trauma” and its official clinical diagnosis as PTSD, post‐traumatic stress syndrome.1 Among its four symptoms, listed by National Institute of Health, are “distorted feelings like guilt or blame” and “negative thoughts about oneself or the world.”2 Much of the psychoanalytic discourse on guilt is victim‐centered since research is driven by patients who consult psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.3 And it is the victims of traumatic violence who are plagued by intense emotions of guilt, rage, shame, and powerlessness. Perpetrators rarely consult therapists, counselors, or confessors. As long as perpetrators do not present with symptoms or are required by law to sign up for therapy [as pedophiles and sex offenders must do according to German law],4 there are few empirical studies on the symptomology of a “perpetrator syndrome.” The diagnosis of “post‐traumatic stress syndrome” describes the experience of victims rather than perpetrators. Martin Buber insisted on the difference between “real” or “ontic” guilt and guilt feelings in a lecture at a Conference on Medical Psychotherapy in 1948, which was subsequently published as “Guilt and Guilt Feelings.”5 A therapist, Buber warned, should not ignore the “external life of his patient and especially the actions and attitudes therein, and again especially the patient's active share in the manifold relation between him and the human world.”6 There is a difference, Buber argued, between the emotional (neurotic) response and the actual violation of the order of being (Seinsordnung). Guilt and guilt feelings are inversely related: Perpetrators lack feelings of guilt, while victims are wracked by self‐blame, shame, and guilt feelings. The symptoms of guilt manifest as lack of empathy, an absence of sensitivity, an obstruction of moral response to the suffering of others.7 To harm another requires a barrier that shields against responsiveness to suffering. Every act of violence involves a hardening of the heart, to use the Biblical concept, on the part of the perpetrator. We will leave aside the theological question of ultimate responsibility and whether it is “The LORD [who] hardened Pharaoh's heart” (Ex 10:20; 10:27, 11:10; 14:8; Jos 11:20). Psychologically, denial is...