Existential Understanding Research Articles

God's Own Scientists: Creationists in a Secular World

Toumey focuses the tools of his discipline on a group whose distance from the twentieth-century American mainstream is measured not in decades or miles but rather in existential understandings about reality. Toumey studies both the national scientific creationism movement and the operation of a local creationist study group in his state's Research Triangle in the mid-1980s, seeking to understand the underlying beliefs--about morality, the Bible, science itself--that modern scientific creationism embodies, as well as the reasons this system of cultural meanings helps many conservative Christians make sense of the realities, anxieties, changes, and uncertainties of life in the United States in the late twentieth century. A perceptive and respectful analysis by a nonbeliever

Erotic Deception into Agapeic Truth

Kierkegaard's radical, existential understanding of the person implies a new approach to 'Truth and Method' and also, therefore, to the philosophy of education. He understands the person as 'a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another'. This definition, moving away from the concept of the person as 'an individual substance of a rational nature,' stresses rather that the person is 'a relational agent of loving transcendence.' Implied by this revolutionary understanding of personal being is the new understanding of truth as 'objective uncertainty held fast in the appropriation process of passionate inwardness'. But I shall not deal here with the notion of person or truth. Instead, I will concentrate on Kierkegaard's existential method and pedagogy, and clarify his way of thinking and teaching as 'a deceiving into truth.'

Eksistensiale verstaan van die Ou Testament: Die teologiese arbeid van Antonius HJ Gunneweg

Existential understanding of the Old Testament: The theological work of Antonius HJ Gunneweg Gunneweg applies Bultmann's concept of existential understanding to the Old Testament. Existential interpretation means that the text must be laid out in terms of the possibilities of the human existence. The author shows how Gunneweg worked it out under the following headings: Israel; The beginning; Moses; One kingdom or two kingdoms; Paul; Sola scriptura instead of salvation history; Word. The result is that Gunneweg comes to a unique understanding of the relationship between the Old and New Testaments.

Patterns of Enterprise in São Paulo: Preliminary Analysis of a Late Nineteenth-Century City

Although the important roles and functions of Latin American cities have received recognition and discussion in historical writing, there exist few empirically grounded and detailed investigations of individual urban centers. Thus, reviewing the nature of historical research on Latin American urbanization, Sofer and Szuchman (1979: 113, 119) noted the dearth of quantitative investigations of the social dimensions of urban existence, as well as a reliance on aggregate data as opposed to such primary documentation as manuscript census returns, notarial records, and judicial assessments. They conclude that “historians have been reticent to explore the social data in primary documentation and join them with non-quantifiable sources of information in order to reach an existential understanding of the Latin American past.” Similarly, Socolow and Johnson (1981: 51) have pointed to the need for research concentrating on the “social, economic, and physical structure of individual cities and groups of cities.”

Faith and Experience. IV: Epistemological Considerations

Those who take their stand on their own, or others’, religious experience sometimes claim that unsympathetic critics can be dismissed simply with the plea that their lack of experience disqualifies them from offering any kind of useful critique. Ninian Smart, in his essay Understanding Religious Experience, shows that such a claim need not be regarded as compelling. It is possible for us to have a certain theoretical Understanding of situations of which we have no experience, no “existential understanding”, and this theoretical understanding, even if it is not adequate for all purposes (it will not make a man a mystic, for instance), may still be quite adequate for some kind of philosophical comment to be made. If the mystic then seeks refuge in the further claim that his experiences are so transcendent as to be utterly inexpressible and incomprehensible to the rational mind, even so we are still entitled to ask whether they are truly totally inexpressible and incomprehensible. If they were, then it is unclear that the mystic himself is in any better position than his critics, and, like Cratylus, he ought to confine himself to waggling his finger and give up the attempt to communicate anything to anybody, himself included. But if mystical experiences or their objects are not totally beyond reach of reason and language, then there is at least some common ground between the mystic and his critics, and at least some basis therefore for non-mystical comment on mystical experiences.

Sacred Space, Profane Space, Human Space

IN ALMOST every period Western intellectual life has been preoccupied with the problem of time and history. In the last fifty years this preoccupation has become an obsession, especially in literature and theology. Like most obsessions it has tended to numb our perception for other realms of experience. As philosophy of religion and theology stir toward a wider consciousness, they are slowly beginning to focus on the realm of nature and Of course, there have long been premonitions of this turn toward nature. Some of the intellectual forces which were responsible for our fascination with time such as relativity theory or existential phenomenology have also held out new perspectives on Among the students of religious phenomena, however, only van der Leeuw and Eliade have given equal prominence with time.' Although in this respect, as in so many others, we owe a tremendous debt to their work, much remains to be accomplished if we are fully to appreciate the religious valorization of and begin to lay the foundations for an existential understanding of nature. One of the first tasks that needs to be taken up is to clarify the meaning of space. My contribution toward that end is to show how the typical polarity of sacred and profane has been overdrawn to the point of obscuring the actual character of human spatiality in its manifold dimensions. In place of this radical polarity I will sketch in a description of space and will suggest that lived is the possibility of both the homogenous of objectifying thought and the luminosity of sacred places. My procedure will be (1) to briefly summarize Eliade's conception of sacred and profane since it is the most complete and sophisticated account we now have, (2) to describe the structures of space, (3) to reconsider the concept of sacred and profane in light of the analysis of human spatiality. My quarrel is less with the qualities which Eliade, van der Leeuw, Isaac and others usually attribute to sacred than with the polarization of the data which results when the concept is applied. It will be argued that distortions of both present and past spatial experience are

Naturalism, Historicism, and Christian Ethics: Toward a Christian Doctrine of Natural Law

Previous articleNext article No AccessNaturalism, Historicism, and Christian Ethics: Toward a Christian Doctrine of Natural LawDouglas SturmDouglas Sturm Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 44, Number 1Jan., 1964 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/485626 Views: 4Total views on this site Copyright 1964 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.