Rooted in and Routed through Christ: Friendship in An Anglican-Methodist Covenant

Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, <i>Friendship in Medieval Iberia: Historical, Legal and Literary Perspectives</i>. Farnham, Surrey, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. ix, 248. $124.95. ISBN: 978-1-4724-1202-7.

Sociometric studies and adult reports have established that children with Language Disorder (LD) are at risk of peer relationship difficulties. However, we have limited knowledge of how children with LD understand friendship, whom they deem as a good or bad friend, and what role their friendship concepts play in their relationships with peers. This exploratory study aimed to conduct a qualitative investigation into the friendship concepts that children with LD hold and to explore their strategies for making friends. We conducted multiple, art-informed interviews on the topic of friendship with 14 children with LD at the age of 6-8 years. Participating children were based in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. They attended enhanced provision, specific speech and language classes and mainstream classrooms. We used framework analysis to map children's responses to Selman's (1979) developmental model of interpersonal understanding, which espouses a theory of children's social development within the context of peer relationships. The understanding of friendship formation in children with LD varied from physical presence to mutual support and sharing. Children's ideas about a good/bad friend represented the lowest developmental stage. Participants from the mainstream classroom demonstrated the highest stages of interpersonal understanding. Children with LD did not mention their language abilities as a barrier to making friends. There are limited studies exploring friendship directly from children with LD, and this study provides insights into this gap, by utilising art-informed interviews. Children's immature understanding of a good/bad friend points towards a potential susceptibility to false friends, which we suggest needs further empirical validation. We also found that children with LD did not pay attention to their language difficulties when making friends, which raises questions about the ways diagnoses are shared with children. What is already known on the subject Children with Language Disorder (LD) are at risk of peer relationship difficulties. Studies to date are based on sociometrics and adult reports. Only a few studies employ participatory approaches to research with children, directly engaging children with LD when exploring their friendships What this paper adds This paper directly asks children with LD about their understanding of friendship and strategies for making friends. Physical proximity and play are important to children.s understanding of friendship especially in recognising good and bad friends. This indicates potential reasons for children with LD being susceptible to false friends Additionally, children with LD do not perceive language and communication as a barrier to making friends. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Concepts around friendship and good/bad friends should be routinely assessed and targeted (if appropriate) in interventions. The study highlights the need to continue discussing practices around sharing diagnoses with children with LD.

ABSTRACT“Spirit” is a more universally available religious symbol than “Christ,” found in various forms in most of the religions of the world. It helps to open Christian theology to a genuine religious pluralism, and, in the framework of the doctrine of the Trinity, provides a Christian way of construing this pluralism, relating it to the purposes, activity, and being of God. The pneumatic Trinitarianism proposed in this essay contrasts with the christocentric Trinitarianism recommended by advocates of an inclusivist theology of religions. The concrete incarnation of God in Christ is not lost but placed in a larger context. The Spirit proceeds not just from Christ but from the interaction of God and the world, including a diversity of religious figures and practices. The idea that a theology of the Spirit might serve as the basis of a pluralist theology of religions is tested by looking at the modalities of Spirit that are present in Hinduism and Buddhism, and that enrich a Christian understanding of the Spirit.

Kant commentators have recently begun to pay attention to Kant’s account of friendship. They have asked questions, such as: Is his description of friendship consistent and robust and does it provide an account of friendship that satisfies common intuitions and expectations of friendship? Their answers to these questions have often been negative. At the same time, many of these critics share a common understanding of two basic aspects of Kant’s account of friendship. Kant sees friendship as both a duty and an ideal state. One critic, Patricia Flynn, considers the implications of this dual claim. She argues that the view that friendship is both duty and idea gives rise to a tension in the concept of friendship. This tension makes the duty of friendship different from all other Kantian moral duties and leaves us with a duty that we cannot achieve. My aim is to revisit Flynn’s argument and by reassessing Kant’s claims to show that there is indeed complexity in Kant’s understanding of friendship, but there is no conceptual problem that makes friendship a duty unlike all other duties or makes it an impossible duty.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether children with poor peer relations display a developmental lag in their conceptions of friendship. The social-cognitive level of friendship understanding, as outlined in Selman's Theory of Interpersonal Understanding, was compared in a sample of 31 second-grade and 40 seventh-grade children who were identified as being accepted, rejected, or neglected by peers, according to a peer sociometric nomination measure. As expected, results indicated that conceptions of friendship held by grade 7 children represented higher stages of social-cognitive development than conceptions held by grade 2 children. Results also indicated there was no difference among accepted, rejected, and neglected children in their general intellectual abilities, as measured by the Vocabulary and Block Design subtests of the WISC-R. However, contrary to experimental predictions, when compared with their socially accepted classmates, rejected and neglected children did not show a developmental lag in their understanding of friendship. If the social effectiveness of social isolates from normal school populations is not limited by immature conceptions of interpersonal relations, as has been found in clinic populations, then intervention programs for these children may need to target other social-cognitive (e.g., interpersonal problem solving skills) or behavioral skills (e.g., prosocial behavior) or affective difficulties (e.g., social anxiety) as primary therapeutic goals. The possibility that an interpersonal reasoning enrichment component of a treatment package focusing on one or more of these other aspects of social competence needs to be empirically evaluated.

The article is devoted to the study of the conception of friendship based on the results of comparative structural-semantic analysis of English and Russian proverbs about friendship. The study includes two complementary steps. The first step consists in formulating the main aspects of the conception of friendship. The second consists in comparing fragments of this proverbial field, which made it possible to explore the implementation of eight aspects of the conception of friendship on the material studied. The clarification of similarities and differences made it possible to identify the specific national and cultural characters of thinking and mentality of the two non-related peoples towards understanding of friendship. The relevance of the study is determined by the novelty of the proposed approach to the study of the conception of friendship based on the comparative structural and semantic analysis of proverbs of two linguistic-cultural ethnic groups, as well as the insufficient knowledge of proverbs expressing the concept of “friendship” from the point of view of identifying their figurative and motivational basis, figurative means (metaphor, metonymy, comparison, personification, gradation, hyperbole, irony, allegory, antithesis), semantics of lexical components, syntactic structures (repetitions, parallelism, ellipsis, compression), expressive means, as well as rhythmic organization. There were selected and systematized similar and unique meanings of English and Russian proverbs as a result of research on the material of these languages. The analysis of these meanings allowed us to explore conception of friendship, thereby providing the basis for deeper rethinking both the conception and the proverbial material. As the part of the study there were observed differences in understanding of a person, personal relationships with others, mutual help, etc. These differences are largely due to the different origins of English and Russian proverbs. Most of the English proverbs are short sayings, which were formed under the influence of Latin expressions and quotations from Bible. Most of the Russian proverbs are peasant by origin and therefore they are closely connected with a specific and imaginative perception of the world. Their expressiveness is much higher at the expense of using the means of oral folk creativity. This analysis made it possible to reveal the role of linguistic means in expressing the mentality of the representatives of both peoples.

This article deals with the claim that relations of public life should be built from the concept of friendship, rather than the concepts of love or cordiality. To this end it explores the theological understanding of reconciliation and friendship in Wesleyan theology in English, American and Brazilian key texts. Finally, is investigated its application for the description of the relationship between church and society to inspire a more distinguished Wesleyan public theology.

In the policed society of the 18th century, the phenomenon of friendship, as M. W. Reddy asserts, evolved into a new form of sociability which offered an emotional refuge from the code of honor and became central for the culture of the Enlightenment. Although there was no necessary contradiction between reason and emotion, sense and sensibility were understood as opposite poles and the concept of friendship was oscillating between them. The present paper reveals the peculiar features of perception of friendship in the second halfof the 18th century in Russia when its importance for culture rapidly increased on the material of double portrait painting. The specifics of the Russian Enlightenment defined by V. Zhivov as “primarily mythological performanceof the state power” were expressed in the idea of the state. This was reflected in male double portraitpainting developing the traditions of parallel depiction and the iconography of gestures which first emerged in the Russian art of the first half of the 18th century in allegorical compositions celebrating peace treaties. In contrast, the European understanding of male friendship visualized in portrait painting was broader, embracing emotional aspects as well (creative friendship, admiration of art). While male friendship in Russia was understoodas a political union or collaboration, the notion of sensibility, i.e. friendship as union of hearts, was usuallyassociated with the female portrait. Models for female friends portraits were always unmarried young ladies: the family life was perceived as dominated exclusively by the responsibilities of a caring wife and mother. Overall, both the female and male friends portrait painting in Russian art, in contrast with European, appears to be inseparable from the family portrait painting in its reduced variant, i.e. portraits of brothers or sisters. The few exceptions are connected with the corporate friendship of young people inside closed educational institutions established by the will of Catherine II in order to breed “an ideal man and a perfect citizen”.

Friendship played an outsized role in ancient political thought in comparison to medieval and modern political philosophies. Most modern scholarship has paid relatively little attention to the role of friendship in ancient political philosophy. Recently, however, scholars are increasingly beginning to investigate classical conceptions of friendship. My dissertation joins this growing interest by examining the importance of friendship in the political thought of Socrates and Aristotle. Specifically, I analyze the divergent approaches that Socrates and Aristotle take to politics and trace these distinct approaches to their differing conceptions of friendship. Through an examination of two Platonic dialogues—the Lysis and the Gorgias—I make the case that Socrates has a largely negative conception of friendship, according to which all friendships are based upon a metaphysical lack or need. This negative understanding of friendship causes him to adopt a negative, abstentious approach to politics. In contrast, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle presents a conception of friendship that is based not upon deficiency and need, but instead upon the mutual recognition of each other’s complementary virtues. Aristotle’s positive account of friendship ensures that he does not take a negative, abstentious approach to politics, but instead seeks to use his philosophic insight to impact politics and orient it toward the good.

Toward a better understanding of Vygotsky's process of internalization: Its role in the development of the concept of friendship

The aim of the present study was to explore the social cognitions of socially withdrawn anxious early-adolescents regarding the concept of friendship. From a pool of children referred to an after-school social skills and social contact program, 38 withdrawn/anxious participants were identified and matched with community controls. Interviews regarding their expectations of a best friend revealed that withdrawn/anxious participants tended to focus on their own needs in their concepts of friendship and frequently referred to friendship as a source of help. They also tended to ascribe their best friendship to the circumstantial interactions of classmates or neighbors. Control participants more frequently mentioned the intimacy of a close friendship, which is considered a core defining feature of true friendship. Within the community sample, older participants displayed a more mature understanding of friendship, whereas there were no age effects within the socially anxious group.

Martino Martini’s Qiuyou pian (逑友篇, 1647) represents a deliberate attempt to complement Matteo Ricci’s Jiaoyou lun (交友論, 1595) by introducing a deeper Christian understanding of friendship to China. Despite its rich content and scholarly value, Qiuyou pian has remained overshadowed by Jiaoyou lun. While scholars have noted Christian overtones in Martini’s work, no detailed analysis of its distinctive approach to friendship has been undertaken. Through close textual analysis, this study reveals that Martini’s conception of friendship is deeply rooted in the Christian notion of agape (love). The analysis illuminates both similarities and differences between the two works while drawing meaningful parallels between Qiuyou pian and Aelred of Rievaulx’s Spiritual Friendship, a seminal Christian text that adapts Ciceronian ideals of friendship. Martini’s reflections resonate with Aelred’s adaptation, suggesting a conceptual lineage that transcends temporal and cultural boundaries. Recovering this overlooked work reveals the complex dynamics of Jesuit cultural accommodation and religious transmission in early modern China.

Contemporary appeals for a deepening of civic friendship in liberal democracies often draw on Aristotle. This paper warns against a certain kind of attempt to use Aristotle in our own theorising, namely accounts of civic friendship that characterise it as similar in some way to Aristotelian virtue friendship. The most prominent of these attempts have focused on disinterested mutual regard as a basic ingredient in all Aristotelian forms of friendship. The argument against this is that it inadequately accounts for the idea of a virtue friend as another self, which we find in Aristotle’s thought. When we attend closely to that, we see that civic friendship is different in a fundamental way from virtue friendship because virtue friends are keenly committed to the moral improvement of one another. It is argued that Aristotle does not see civic friendship in the same way. However, if this argument about the differences between the forms of friendship cannot be accepted, the paper argues that we should not draw on Aristotle for an understanding of civic friendship because any similarity it might have to virtue friendship would license illiberal interventions in the lives of citizens in service of some idea of moral improvement. A seeming connection between Aristotelian civic friendship and thick conceptions of citizenship is replaced with a connection between it and thinner conceptions.

Discipleship, Secularity, and the Modern Self: Dancing to Silent Music, Judith A.Merkle, T&amp;T Clark, 2020 (ISBN 978‐0‐5676‐9340‐2), viii + 240 pp., pb £21.99

This article reads Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975)—a novel best known for its fictionalized portrait of the writer Delmore Schwartz—according to a conceptual sympathy between friendship and the novel. Though such a twinning can illuminate Bellow’s career as a whole, I argue here that Humboldt’s Gift represented his most compelling and complex attempt to reckon with opposition as an artistic problem (and opportunity). In 1962, Bellow published an essay talking up the importance of managing ‘opposites’ within a novel and, in his novels of this period, he alludes to an aphorism of William Blake’s: ‘Opposition is true friendship’. This statement, to begin with, fairly encapsulates the volatile relationship between the central characters of Charles Citrine and Von Humboldt Fleischer, but in this article I also interrogate the manifold ways in which an understanding of friendship as oppositional can illuminate mid-century theorizing about the novel as being fundamentally structured by oppositions. More idiosyncratically, Bellow recruits these sympathetic conceptions of friendship and the novel in pursuit of a quasi-gnostical synthesis whereby two exceptional friends might escape the indignities and mysteries of material existence. Elements such as the compositional record of Humboldt’s Gift, the influence of Blake’s Romantic ‘Contraries’, and Charles Citrine’s embarrassed enthusiasm for the ‘anthroposophy’ of Rudolf Steiner demonstrate a mutualistic intimacy between friendship and the novel. Friendship, that is, enlivens the novel with its varieties, flexibilities, and bantering confrontations; the novel, in turn, offers an indispensable forum for scrutinizing the duties and demands of friendship.