Doctrine Theory Research Articles

A Union of Christianity, Humanity, and Philanthropy: The Christian Tradition and the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Nineteenth-Century England.

AbstractThis paper offers an historical perspective to the discussion of the relationship between Christianity and nonhuman-human animal relationships by examining the animal protection movement in English society as it first took root in the nineteenth century. The paper argues that the Christian beliefs of many in the movement, especially the evangelical outlook of their faith, in a considerable way affected the character as well as the aims and scope of the emergent British animal welfare movement - although the church authorities did not take an active part in the discussion and betterment of the conditions of animals. An explicitly Christian discourse, important in creating and sustaining the important philanthropic tradition in Britain, mobilized the movement. The paper also traces the gradual decrease of the centrality of the movement's Christian elements later in the century when evolutionary ideas as well as other developments in society shed alternative light on the relationship between human and nonhuman animals and brought about different trends in the movement. This paper sees Christianity not as a static and defining source of influence but as a rich tradition containing diverse elements that people drew upon and used to create meanings for them. The paper implicitly suggests that both a religion's doctrines in theory and the outcome of a complex interaction with the changing society in which the religion is practiced determine its potential to influence animal-human relationships.

A Union of Christianity, Humanity, and Philanthropy: The Christian Tradition and the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Nineteenth-Century England

AbstractThis paper offers an historical perspective to the discussion of the relationship between Christianity and nonhuman-human animal relationships by examining the animal protection movement in English society as it first took root in the nineteenth century. The paper argues that the Christian beliefs of many in the movement, especially the evangelical outlook of their faith, in a considerable way affected the character as well as the aims and scope of the emergent British animal welfare movement - although the church authorities did not take an active part in the discussion and betterment of the conditions of animals. An explicitly Christian discourse, important in creating and sustaining the important philanthropic tradition in Britain, mobilized the movement. The paper also traces the gradual decrease of the centrality of the movement's Christian elements later in the century when evolutionary ideas as well as other developments in society shed ahternative light on the relationship between human and nonhuman animals and brought about different trends in the movement. This paper sees Christianity not as a static and defining source of influence but as a rich tradition containing diverse elements that people drew upon and used to create meanings for them. The paper implicitly suggests that both a religion's doctrines in theory and the outcome of a complex interaction with the changing society in which the religion is practiced determine its potential to influence animal-human relationships.

The Theory of Tort Doctrine and the Restatement of Torts

The Theory of Tort Doctrine and the Restatement of Torts

TRUTH AND MEANING IN GEORGE LINDBECK'S THE NATURE OF DOCTRINE

In this essay I analyse and criticize George Lindbeck's treatment of truth and meaning in his book The Nature of Doctrine. After an explication of his general project in this work, I turn specifically to his discussion of truth and of its interaction with his understanding of meaning. Although he is primarily concerned with these issues as they relate to religious doctrines and language, he insists that the distinctions he makes are not religiously derived. Rather, he borrows and adapts widely from philosophy, anthropology and social theory, bringing the insights adopted to bear on the issues of religion generally, and the development and change of religious doctrines in particular.I argue that his treatment of truth and meaning is very problematic on several counts: on truth, his theory fails as an adequate theoretical description of our pretheoretic intuition of truth, and it is finally parasitic on this intuition. On meaning, his reduction of meaning (and sometimes truth) to use or usefulness leads him to an incorrect categorization of doctrines as (essentially) performative utterances and second-order, non-assertive discourse, rather than as propositional attitude statements. I contend that they most properly fit in the latter category. Finally, I suggest the inadequacy of his treatment of truth and meaning redounds to the failure of his theory of religion and doctrine as a whole.

Can Character Ethics Have Moral Rules and Principles? Christian Doctrine and Comprehensive Moral Theory

AbstractThis paper investigates how character ethicists use rules and principles in their virtue-centered and narrative-dependent theories, and how such limited use fails to appreciate the performative content of Christian doctrine. If they are correct in insisting that Christian ethics begin with the practical import of theological convictions, then they not only limit thedescriptionof such beliefs but also theperformanceof such beliefs. A more “comprehensive ethic” that includes rules, principles, practices, and virtues, when one begins with the performance of doctrine not scriptural narratives. Such an argument unfolds through three states of the article: (a) itdescribeshow character ethics uses rules, norms, and principles in its own moral theory; (b) it further evaluates this theory based on its own procedural starting point; and (3) itconstructshow rules and principles can emerge from such a methodological starting point.

Normological Inferences and the Generation of Legal Norms

Abstract.This paper is an answer to Mazzarese (1993) in which the author argues that Kelsen's normological scepticism is a consequence of his theory of legal dynamics and of his views on the relation between higher and lower norms. The author rejects this tenet and reasserts his opinion that there is an essential break between the classical Pure Theory of Law and Kelsen's late doctrine. Therefore an inquiry is justified whether the theses and concepts of the classical Pure Theory are compatible with normological scepticism in Kelsen (1979). Mazzarese's comments on neo‐institutionalist views on legal validity are based on a misinterpretation of this conception.

Methodist Education in Peru: Social Gospel, Politics, and American Ideological and Economic Penetration, 1888-1930

With research based on extensive primary sources, the author examines the activities of the Methodist mission in Peru, in particular its educational work, within the Peruvian socioeconomic formation and its ideological and intellectual changes. Yet her study goes beyond Methodist boundaries: Social Gospel doctrine and educational theory, which link American Progressivism (especially John Dewey's pedagogical ideas) with Christianity, are also treated at an interdenominational level. The book contends that Methodist schools constituted an educational system of their own within a socioeconomic formation of uneven character, a society where an imperialist presence was interwoven with pre-capitalist as well as local incipient capitalist forms. The author's analysis of the political dimension of missionary work--from the quest for religious freedom to the attempt to exert influence on social movements--leads her to consider the relationships among APRA leaders, the missionaries, and the interdenominational Committee on Cooperation in Latin America. Bruno-Jofre argues that Social Gospel doctrines, although couched in reformist language, were ultimately a vehicle of North American theology. This book presents a refreshingly wide perspective on the development of education in the Third World as affected by missionary bodies from the First World.

Kierkegaard On Doctrine: A Post–Modern Interpretation

Though Kierkegaard never explicitly formulated a theory of religious doctrine, he did have a clear position on the role that Christian doctrine ought to play in the lives of believers. Briefly stated, he maintained that Christianity, as a human activity, involves more than merely believing certain propositions about matters of fact. The doctrines of Christianity take on a true religious significance only when they are given the power to transform the lives of those who accept them; only when they are given expression in the existence of the believer. This was, however, far from evident to Kierkegaard's theological contemporaries who, in the collective absentmindedness of the age, sought to replace the Christian virtue of faith with the philosophical ideal of objective knowledge.

Aquinas as Postliberal Theologian

AQUINAS AS POSTLIBERAL THEOWGIAN BRUCE D. MARSHALL St. Olaf Oollege Northfield, Minnesota, 1JHE PURPOSE of this essay is to discuss the relation between Thomas Aquinas' account of religious and heological truth and a " posrtliberal " one sruch rus that sketched in George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine. Most reviewers assume that Lindbeck's .app:voach is on this point incompatible with the mainstream of the tmdition, and Colman O'Neill, writing :in The Thomist symposium on Lindbeck's book, thinks it oontradicts Aquinas in particular. This paper presents the case to the contr:ary. Afte'I." outlining O'Neill's problem, it argues thart he mis11eads Lindbeck 'and, .at greater length, that Aquinas''S views on t:ruth :are, as Lindbeck affirms, compatible with postliberal emphases. I O'Neill's basic problem with Lindbeck's: "cultural linguistic " understanding of truth is thwt Lindbeck " would clearly have us puTify [Christi.an] language by ridding it of extra-linguistic accretions-in particular the intrusion of reference to objective reality. In the end the only thing that matters is scriptural discourse verified by action." 1 Lindbeck may not intend this " purification," 2 but whatever the intention, his 1 Colman E. O'Neill, "The Rule Theory of Doctrine and Propositional Truth," The Thomist 49 (1985), p. 422. 2 So Lindbeck writes: "The great strength of a cognitive-propositional theory of religion is that •.. it admits the possibility of [ontological] truth claims, and a crucial theological challenge to a cultural-linguistic approach is whether it also can do so." The Nature of Doctrine: Religion a,nd Theology in a, Postlibera,l Age (hereafter ND), (Philadelphia, 1984), pp. 63-4. 353 854 BRUCE D. MARSHALL view of •religious truth entails a raidical rejection of 1any claim that Christian beliefs !are onto1ogioally true, in other words, tha;t they rre£er or correspond •to reality. The reruson rllor this putative entailment lies in Lindbeck's manifest oontention (to be explained below) that truth claims in any l'eligion, including Christianity, are subject to 1a twofold criterion of coherence: they must fit wirth the wider linguistic (especially scriptural) paradigms of the 11eligion, and also with a range of practices appropriate to the belief the truth of which is being claimed. But, says O'Neill, Christian beliefs are not true because they cohere with anything, they are true (like all true propositions) "because of their reference to the real." a By introducing ;an irreducible element of coherence into his interpl'etation of Christian truth claims, Lindbeck inevitably " attaches to the ·term ' propositional truth ' .a purely pra.gmatic signification," so that " a quite precise philosophical option has: been ma.de in faV'or of the moral or pragmatic definition of truth." 4 O'NeiiH'is point is that " ontological " or " propositional " truth has here been equa,ted with nothing more than the con£ormity of one's life to the patterns narrated in the !biblical story (O'Nei1l's "·scriptural dis-·oourse verified by 1action ") , •such tha;t " no claims to objective truth" need be made for the story or any a.ssociated beliefs.5 Tihis, O'Neill alleges, is ·a " novel definition of ontological truth." 6 We ought to !'eject this novelty in favor of the under- •standing of Christian beliefs and their truth articulated by 'Ihomas Aquinas, whel"e it is firmly maintained against " the moral or pmgmatic definition of truth " that " propositions are true because of their I"eference ·to .the real." In order to undevstand the issues ·raised by O'Neill's criticism , it is important to bear in mind the distinction-often made but often overlooked ais well-between truth :and justis O'Neill, "Propositional Truth," p. 430. 4 O'Neill, "Propositional Truth," p. 429. 5 O'Neill," Propositional Truth," p. 420. 6 O'Neill, "Propositional Truth," p. 431. AQUINAS AS POSTLIBERAL THEOLOGIAN 355 fica.tion. The very isisue of what it means to say that propositions 1 are true can be distinguished from the issue of ho,w one justifies, warrants, or tests the truth of propositions. So, for example, one might maintain that in regard to propositions, "true" should be defined as "oorresponds to reality," or perhaps "fitly expresses experience," or perhaps "is...

The Rule Theory of Doctrine and Propositional Truth

The Rule Theory of Doctrine and Propositional Truth

Church and state in Borneo: the anglican bishopric

When James Brooke became rajah of Sarawak in 1841, his enterprise – the acquiring of territorial sovereign rule by a private British citizen– was regarded with doubt and hesitation in official circles in London, and all three white rajahs were always very sensitive about their status. But when James Brooke visited England in 1847-8 there was no doubt about his personal standing as a romantic figure. Moreover, he added to the strength of the British presence in south-east Asia, which was needed to discourage Dutch assertiveness, and so he was lionised, and knighted, and among other things given an honorary doctorate by the university of Oxford. While he was there, about £500 was collected by members of the university, who considered that a mission to Borneo ‘ought to go forth under the superintendence of a Bishop from the very first’. This was sound doctrinal theory, but unlikely to be put into practice then or indeed since. But the idea was there, and the money was funded, and the church in Borneo did not have to wait as long as many places for episcopal ministrations, or for an episcopate of its own. Plans for a mission to Sarawak had already been made, and the first two missionaries sailed with their families at the end of 1847, and landed in Sarawak on 29 June 1848.

Comments on Kurtz-Link-Tukey-Wallace Paper

The appearance of this paper will surely prove to be a major event in the statistical world. A set of easily applied techniques, of wide applicability, is presented, and the underlying concepts and viewpoint are explained, in a manner that is always stimulating and readable and nearly always clear. A noticeable effect on statistical practice and on conceptual thinking may confidently be forecast. This is a fine achievement. Many features of the paper invite thought and discussion. Here are a few comments on the basic notions of error rates and simultaneous confidence intervals, offered to promote understanding. The spending of error rates. All the talk about spending (or budgeting or controlling) error rates makes me feel uncomfortable, not so much because the authors are concerned about error rates as because they seem to think everyone else should be too. The topic is introduced in Section 2, just after mention of Fisher's variance ratio test. It is not clear to me that Fisher thought in terms of error rates. True, he did tabulate 5% and 1% points of distributions, and he spoke of these percentages with respect, but his thinking was remarkably unrigid. (At any rate, when I tried recently to reformulate the concept of significance test in a somewhat Fisherian spirit I was not aware of talking about error rates-J. Roy Statist. Soc. B, 25, 1963, 81-94.) The error rate concept belongs to the Neyman-Pearson theory of tests and Neyman's doctrine of confidence intervals and inductive behavior. The concept undoubtedly has interest and relevance in contexts of routine inspection, testing and decision making, expecially when a fully decision-theoretic treatment is for some reason not available. But in more purely scientific contexts the notion of error rate is less natural. Not everyone uses it. Multiple and simultaneous confidence intervals. We may distinguish three situations in which a problem of multiple comparisons between some sample means may arise. First, possibly there really is no problem, because the precision of the means is high relative to differences that would be interesting, and we have no hesitation in declaring that certain population means do not differ to any important extent, or that one mean lies a long way below all the others, for example. Sometimes, however, the situation is less obvious, and we have to weigh borderline differences. Then careful consideration should be given to the purpose of the investigation. Sometimes it will appear that there is a specific objective, and the problem of analysis can be satisfactorily formulated in decision-theoretic terms. There may possibly be some technical difficulties in the formulation,

ALUMNI APPRAISAL OF PSYCHIATRIC EDUCATION

1. Physicians, on the whole, are not satisfied with their undergraduate courses in psychiatry. This is concluded not only from the number of grievances but also from the comments. Since only adverse criticisms were listed, it might be argued that the mere piling up of more and more hundreds of returns would be meaningless since if the questionnaire had listed only favorable comments for checking, we could have accumulated a long list of desirable characteristics. But in writing the supplementary comments, the participants were free. Here is how these comments shaped up. Of the 412 officers, 162 or 40% made comments. Of the 162 comments, 12 were favorable, and 150 (or 93%) were unfavorable. (More striking, but perhaps less valid is this: Of the 412 officers, only 12 thought that their courses were good enough to warrant defensive comments; that is only 3%: And 97% did not feel that their undergraduate courses justified any favorable comment.) 2. Constructive suggestions for the improvement of undergraduate...

The Legal Foundation of the Stimson Doctrine

IN HIS article contributed to June number of PACIFIC AFFAIRS on The Recent Development of Stimson Doctrine, Mr. Kisaburo Yokota states fundamental objective of this doctrine to be peace and carefully balances pros and cons of the effectiveness of doctrine as an anti-war weapon. With Mr. Yokota's conclusions on these practical aspects I have no quarrel; I am happy to agree that The Stimson Doctrine may well turn out to be one of most constructive means for solution of international problems of Pacific area. It is perhaps less important to understand legal position of Stimson doctrine than to understand its political value, yet two are not unrelated, and it seems worth while to add to Mr. Yokota's discussion some consideration of grounds on which it has been considered that parties to League of Nations Covenant and to Pact of Paris are legally bound to observe doctrine, and grounds on which it has been considered that application of doctrine will have not merely a moral but a legal effect. Mr. Yokota's discussion suggests that doctrine is supplementary to Covenant and Pact, and that states are under no legal obligation to observe it unless such an obligation has been accepted by special agreement. Thus, he discusses binding force and generality of application of various resolutions and treaties in which doctrine has been embodied and concludes that from a status of particular or regional international law it has advanced to a status of quasi-general or quasi-world international law, but is not yet universal international law. This discussion appears to be based upon a misconception of legal theory of doctrine. It has not been considered a supplementary sanction to Pact or

The Faculty Doctrine, Correlation, and Educational Theory. II

The Faculty Doctrine, Correlation, and Educational Theory. II

The Faculty Doctrine, Correlation, and Educational Theory. I

The Faculty Doctrine, Correlation, and Educational Theory. I