Religious Hope Research Articles

Exploring the Heavens: Space Technology and Religious Implications

Exploring the Heavens:Space Technology and Religious Implications Tilmann Siebeneichner (bio) Kendrick Oliver, To Touch the Face of God Elizabeth A. Kessler, Picturing the Cosmos Historian Kendrick Oliver’s book on the American space program and art historian Elizabeth Kessler’s book on the images of the Hubble Space Telescope, although quite different in their specific objects of study and methodological operationalization, reflect a common interest that has attracted increasing attention from scholars of the history of technology: the religious implications of the exploration of outer space, an undertaking that has hitherto being perceived predominantly as secular. Since the groundbreaking study of David Noble on the religion of technology, which claimed that technology and religion have been feeding off each other for a millennium, more and more scholars are taking up the issue.1 Oliver’s To Touch the Face of God: The Sacred, the Profane, and the American Space Program, 1957–1975 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Pp. 248. $39.95) addresses the possible religious implications of the U.S. space program in the “long sixties”—that is, in the heyday of the space age, between 1957 and 1975. Oliver characterizes the space age during this period as an essentially charismatic enterprise, part of a long, symbolic tradition in which redemption and divinity are manifested in motions of ascents toward heaven. The author suggests that spaceflight, at least in the United States, “owed much to religious archetypes and sensibilities” (p. 9), and that religious hopes and ambitions were crucial in converting a mere space program into a phenomenon worth the term space age. Asking if Americans conceived of spaceflight as a means for mankind’s return to God, Oliver’s book thus takes up three major issues: it tells [End Page 988] not only the story of relations between religion and the U.S. space program, but also explores religious meanings and practices in secular times, and discusses how they informed and influenced the notion of the space age. The aims of his project are ambitious and Oliver’s systematic approach is all-encompassing and, at times, convincing. Nonetheless, the overall conclusions he draws feel disappointing—not because of the author’s efforts, but rather because of the ways in which he conceives his object of interest. To Touch the Face of God covers both institutional and individual aspects of this history. Oliver discusses various sorts of religious semantics, as well as spiritual practices, connected with the exploration of space. First, he addresses the question of NASA’s motivations and thus examines the role that religious values played in the development of U.S. space-exploration goals during the 1950s and ‘60s. Chapter 1 focuses on NASA’s institutional culture and examines in detail the life-worlds inhabited there, and also in its installations and personnel. Second, in chapter 2, it addresses the implications of spaceflight for religious thought and belief and examines the emergence of exotheology, a discipline concerned with the epistemological status of Christian cosmography, the implications of quantum advances in man’s technological capacity for relations with God, and the compatibility of religious doctrine with the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life. In the third chapter, Oliver takes into account the astronauts’ encounters with a new and completely unknown environment and the possibilities it offered for (renewed) spiritual experience. Chapter 3 thus discusses U.S. astronauts as figures of existential significance not because they were the country’s champions in a fateful contest with a rival superpower, but rather because they faced an encounter with their own elemental self and the revelation of what capacities of faith, will, and judgment a man could retain in the most trying of physical conditions. Chapter 4 explores the spiritual responses to spaceflight both in space and on earth. Although strict mission schedules and rather uncomfortable conditions within the spacecraft left little time for spiritual experiences, four out of the eleven Apollo lunar-module pilots returned with new intuitions of the sacred and their own relation to it, which they tried to share with earthly audiences. In discussing the difficulties of communicating spiritual experiences, Oliver also identifies Apollo 8’s prime-time broadcast from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve 1968...

What May I Hope? Why It Can Be Rational to Rely on One's Hope

In hoping, what is important to us seems possible, which makes our life appear meaningful and motivates us to do everything within our reach to bring about the things that we hope for. I argue that it can be rational to rely on one’s hope: hope can deceive us, but it can also represent things correctly to us. I start with Philip Pettit’s view that hope is a cognitive resolve. I reject this view and suggest instead that hope is an emotion: hope is a felt evaluation for which we can define a corresponding character trait which in its turn qualifies as a virtue if it is felt whenever its correctness conditions are satisfied. For religious hope in particular it follows from my analysis that, if I believe, I may hope.

Intrasubjectivity in the philosophy of Wilson Harris

This essay focuses on the concept of intrasubjectivity explored both in relation to Wilson Harris’s concept of the self and his larger philosophical vision of human existence. Drawing on a wide range of Harris’s novels, most notably The Infinite Rehearsal (1987), part of The Carnival Trilogy, this essay attempts to make clear the importance that Harris attributes to intrasubjectivity as a source of “innermost feuding reality” and the “foundations of religious hope” that can be reached with the silencing and overcoming of these intrasubjective conflicts. Furthermore, this essay addresses how the concept of intrasubjectivity has changed over the course of Harris’s oeuvre from Palace of the Peacock (1977) to The Ghost of Memory (2006).

The Responsibility of Reason: Tocqueville and the Problem of Modern Transcendence

Tocqueville’s brief evocation of a collapse of “moral analogy,” indicates a fundamental defect of modern rationalism and invites us to consider how reason’s responsibility might best be understood in our times. This defect is best understood as a disorder affecting the relation between “theory” and “practice,” one that may present itself either as a radical separation or as a radical fusion. To resist these twin pathologies of “reason,” and thus to take responsibility for connecting our theoretical freedom with our practical belonging, reason must first learn to affirm its own goodness as in some way continuous with the intimations of transcendence that structure our practical existence. Once the dynamics of this separation/fusion of theory and practice are understood, it is possible to discern the Scylla and Charybdis between which we must navigate in seeking conditions for the survival of a moral analogy binding together man’s spiritual freedom and his practical existence, and thus securing their mutual health. Foremost among these conditions is a critical self-knowledge that includes an appreciation at once of the dignity of reason (its inescapable freedom and ruling responsibility) and of reason’s limits (its implication in norms or goods or meanings that cannot be founded in pure autonomy). Tocqueville’s acute moderation provides a touchstone for a self-reflective and responsible understanding of reason that is both theoretically and practically superior to Heidegger’s deconstruction of Western reason and to Leo Strauss’s attempt to restore classical rationalism. Reason’s responsibility today, both to itself and to the common good, must be attuned to the truth of the fundamental aporia that is the deep spring of Western dynamism, the insuperable tension between a horizon of knowable goodness above common human concerns and the religious hope for or revolutionary promise of the redemption or regeneration of our common humanity.

Parental Styles and Religious Values Among Teenagers: A 3-Year Prospective Analysis

ABSTRACT The authors examined the effect of Grade 7 parental styles on Grade 10 religious values. The authors surveyed 784 participants (382 boys, 394 girls; 8 unreported) in Grade 7. The mean age of the group at Time 1 was 12.3 years (SD = 0.5 years). Time 2 occurred 3 years later when students were in Grade 10 (372 boys, 375 girls). In addition to assessing parental styles at Time 1, we also controlled for a number of Time 1 variables thought to possibly influence Time 2 religious values, namely, self-esteem, trait hope, and students’ levels of conscientiousness. Time 1 measures (except self-esteem) were significantly correlated with Time 2 religious values, but only parental authoritativeness and hope significantly predicted religious values. The authors discuss these results with reference to the nature of parental styles and hope and their impact on religious values.

A Pact with the Devil? Elite Alliances as Bases of Violent Religious Conflicts

This article aims at explaining religious conflicts on the basis of an elite-centered theoretical model. Violent movements can only pertain on the long run if political elites organize and coordinate them centrally. The same holds true for the religious dimension of many conflicts. Religious elites have to persuade the believers of the religious nature of their struggle. Hence, in many cases religious conflicts can be traced back to alliances of religious and political elites. The first try to protect their religious communities and hope to expand their religious influence. The latter try to use religion as a resource for mobilization.

Second Glances: Two African-American Women Take a Closer Look at their Jewish Identities

This conversation is co-written by two African American women, one who converted to Judaism and one who was born Jewish. They dialogue about the differences and similarities of their experiences in regard to religious practice, family, community, and hopes for a future that includes practical and widespread recognition of Jews of all races.

Christmas at Elsinore

DISCUSSIONS OF RELIGION in Hamlet have been disproportionately concerned with two things. The first is the supernatural status of the Ghost, a question perhaps as unanswerable now as the first time Hamlet posed it in triplicate: ‘Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, / Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, / Be thy intents wicked or charitable … I will speak to thee’.1 The second is the degree and nature of predestinarianism implied by Hamlet's gloss on a short parable from Matthew (10: 29), ‘There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow’ (V. ii. 197-8). Compelling though these questions are in their own right, they have dominated critical enquiry because to answer them is to align the play – and Shakespeare – with one side or the other along a confessional divide: an infernal Ghost and a Calvinist sparrow make Hamlet a Protestant play; a benign Ghost and Stoic sparrow, a Catholic one. However, the impulse to define the play as either broadly Catholic or broadly Protestant flies in the face of its own relentless effort to assert both possibilities in a dramaturgical process that cancels the signifying power of each. Hamlet's Denmark is confessionally schizophrenic, and deliberately so; Calvinist buzzwords like ‘special providence’ come from the mouth of one who also swears by St Patrick yet studied in Wittenberg. Juxtaposed religious allusions like these intensify the play's world of religious paralysis, in which spirits are ‘wicked or charitable’, prayers do not ‘fly up’, and rites are ‘maimed’ (I. iv. 42, III. iii. 97, V. i. 208). Hamlet can be seen as a poignant, and therefore nostalgic and conservative, lament for the loss at the Reformation of a world of ecclesiastical and epistemological certainties. Alternatively, one could argue for a far more sceptical tragedy that scorns any fond religious hopes of such certainties.

The Irreducible Importance of Religious Hope in Kant's Conception of the Highest Good

AbstractKant is clear that the concept of the ‘highest good’ involves both a demand, that we follow the moral law, as well as a promise, that happiness will be the outcome of being moral. The latter element of the highest good has troubled commentators, who tend to find it metaphysically extravagant, involving, as it does, belief in God and an afterlife. Furthermore, it seems to threaten the moral purity that Kant demands: that we obey the moral law for its own sake, not out of interest in the consequences. Those commentators brave enough to tackle the issue look to the concept of the highest good either to add content to the moral law (Silber), or to provide rational motivation, in a way that does not violate moral purity (Beiser and Wood). I argue that such interpretations, although they may be plausible reconstructions, are unable to account for certain conceptual and textual problems. By placing Kant's thought against the background of medieval theology, I argue that the hope for the summum bonum is irreducibly important for Kant, even where its function is not that of providing the content or motivational force of the moral law. Kant is not only concerned with the shape of our duties and motivations, but the shape of the universe within which these emerge.

Les métamorphoses du concept de droit commun à la croisée d’enjeux juridiques et théologiques

How can one give witness to religious hope in modern law? By the obedience and humility of inculturation or by objection and resistance born of the sign of contradiction? If it is true that the barbarous periods of the 20th century have reactivated the theological analysis of the tension which exists between the two approaches, what is the state of things in the apparently pacified contexts of our democratic laws? If recourse to has progressively colonized society, it is in the name of its nature as common law which it esteems to acquire from its growing pretensions to neutrality. In this respect, expressing oneself in religious terms in the public sphere is nowadays hotly debated. It would however be a mistake to refer solely to the formal elaboration of the law. The use of religious speech also concerns the modes of application and setting in context of law. This article attempts to demonstrate the importance of this new movement in favor of religious discourse understood as a third path: that of attesting to the Gospel in the very heart of legal practice.

The Dream of the Millennium

The Dream of the Millennium

Islam in Iran: Turmoil, transformation or transcendence?

The major symbolic structure of Shi'ite Islam in Iran is described through an analysis of popular religious dramas, mass street demonstrations and other widespread expressions of the meanings of the dominant religion. As a force for social change Shi'ism in Iran has been mainly a creator of social turmoil in defence of religious hope for the populace and in the interests of the religious hierarchy. The historic role of religion in Iran has been that of gyroscope trying to keep change from moving too precipitously away from Shi'ite world view. Religion and the clergy are uninterested, neutral or opposed to economic development and modernization, and they are capable of creating turmoil, less so of sparking transformation, and unable to organize society for transcendence.

“Religious Hope and Resignation”: The Process of “Eloisa to Abelard”

“Religious Hope and Resignation”: The Process of “Eloisa to Abelard”

Wordsworth's Religious Hope

Wordsworth's Religious Hope

Contemporary Philosophies of Religion

In the present essay I propose to compare certain typical religious philosophies, with a view to discovering what degree of religious hope they justify; or what, in view of the nature of reality, they make of religious ideals. Philosophy, viewing experience roundly, taking into account both the uttermost that man wants and the evidence of reality, has reached different conclusions as to the relation between the two, or as to the consequent status of religious values in the light of critical reflection. There seem to me to be four typical philosophical verdicts of this sort: first, that the ideals of religion are illusory and vain; second, that its ideals are self-sufficient, and independent of reality; third, that its ideals define, or coincide with, reality; fourth, that its ideals are progressively efficacious, or may be realized. These four philosophies of religion may conveniently be termed: disillusionism, symbolism, idealism, and progressivism.

Christianity and the Mystery Religions

"That he might gather together in one all things in Christ." That is Paul's interpretation of God's cosmic plan. It is an interpretation of human history that breeds religious enthusiasm. Our religion is not an isolated, appended device, but the supreme phase of God's dealings with his world. With this Pauline philosophy in view we should expect to find in Christianity exactly what we do find, viz., survivals of other religions, bits of Grecian philosophy, the Hebrew theology, and the passionate religious hope of the Orient. True, taken all together they do not make Christianity any more than bits of matter make a human personality, but to understand Christianity it is necessary to understand something of this marvelous "gathering together of all things in Christ." Recent study in the mystery religions is one of such methods. Professor Case's article narrates facts which will be of great value to the student of Christianity.