Recent reports of the discovery of a “God module” in the human brain derive from the fact that epileptic seizures in the left temporal lobe are associated with ecstatic feelings sometimes described as an experience of the presence of God. The brain area involved has been described as either (a) the seat of an innate human faculty for experiencing the divine or (b) the seat of religious delusions.In fact, religious experience is extremely various and involves many parts of the brain, (...) including some that are prehuman in their evolutionary history and some that are characteristically human. In the continuing integration of such experiences, spiritual formation takes place. Thus the entire human brain might be described as a “God module.”Such a process is only possible because of the brain's complexity. The human brain is the most complex entity for its size that we know of. As used here, complexity is a specialized term denoting the presence of a web of interlinked and significant connections—the more intricate the web, the more complex the entity. Complex systems develop only in a milieu that provides both lawfulness and freedom, and they tend to be self‐organizing, becoming more complex and more effective as a result of both inward and outward experience. The evidence suggests that both personal growth and spiritual growth are processes of complexification of character, and of the brain itself. This thesis is tested in light of the work of William James and James W. Fowler. (shrink)

In this paper several problems are raised concerning Ian Barbour's four ways of interrelating science and religion—Conflict, Independence, Dialogue, and Integration—as put forward in such publications as his highly influential Religion in an Age of Science (1990) and widely adopted by other writers in this field. The authors argue that this taxonomy is not very useful or analytically helpful, especially to historians seeking to understand past engagements between science and religion.

Recent reports of the discovery of a “God module” in the human brain derive from the fact that epileptic seizures in the left temporal lobe are associated with ecstatic feelings sometimes described as an experience of the presence of God. The brain area involved has been described as either (a) the seat of an innate human faculty for experiencing the divine or (b) the seat of religious delusions.In fact, religious experience is extremely various and involves many parts of the brain, (...) including some that are prehuman in their evolutionary history and some that are characteristically human. In the continuing integration of such experiences, spiritual formation takes place. Thus the entire human brain might be described as a “God module.”Such a process is only possible because of the brain's complexity. The human brain is the most complex entity for its size that we know of. As used here, complexity is a specialized term denoting the presence of a web of interlinked and significant connections—the more intricate the web, the more complex the entity. Complex systems develop only in a milieu that provides both lawfulness and freedom, and they tend to be self‐organizing, becoming more complex and more effective as a result of both inward and outward experience. The evidence suggests that both personal growth and spiritual growth are processes of complexification of character, and of the brain itself. This thesis is tested in light of the work of William James and James W. Fowler. (shrink)

James B. Ashbrook's "new natural theology in an empirical mode" pursued an integrated understanding of the spiritual, psychological, and neurological dimensions of spiritual life. Knowledge of neuroscience and personality theory was central to his quest, and his understandings were necessarily revised and amplified as scientific findings emerged. As a result, Ashbrook's legacy may serve as a case example of how to do religion-and-science in a milieu of scientific change. The constant in the quest was Ashbrook's core belief in the basic (...) holism of brain, mind, personality, the nature of reality, and the underlying reality of God. (shrink)

Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew B. Newberg's The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience presents a core theory regarding the neurophysical nature of mystical experience; extensions of this theory, focusing upon near‐death experiences and the nature of religion itself; and buttressing arguments proposing that genetically based neurophysical “operators” within the brain compel human beings to think in certain ways. On the basis of this work, the authors pose a “metatheology,” suggesting that certain brain operations may underlie all the religions (...) of the world. The core theory, its extensions, and related arguments are discussed in turn, concluding with commentary on the authors’ constructive theology. (shrink)

As an eminent practical theologian, Don S. Browning watched religious belief and practice interact with the larger culture for a long time, especially in regard to issues of personal and family well-being. As Alexander Campbell Professor Emeritus of Ethics and the Social Sciences at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, he also lived in the midst of currents and controversies in academic philosophy, theology, and other disciplines. As a result, his work is distinguished by its alertness to a (...) variety of endeavors including medicine and the sciences.From the vantage point of his years of work and thought, Browning perceived that certain critical interactions, social and intellectual, are currently .. (shrink)

Neuroscience is in a period of explosive growth. To address the implications of the new findings for religion and science, Zyvon in 1996 published fifteen articles in this field. Although the authors'explorations of neuroscience and religion are various, three issues in particular are addressed repeatedly: (1) the nature of human identity, or hallmarks of humanness; (2) the nature and origin of religious consciousness; and (3) our means of discovering or constructing order and integration in the brain/mind, in the environment, and (...) holistically. With these categories as templates, this article correlates the findings of the Zygon neuroscience contributors of 1996. (shrink)

The rediscovery of the sacred needs to take into account the neural underpinnings of faith and meaning and also draw on the insights of the emerging discipline of complexity studies, which explore a tendency toward adaptive self‐organization that seemingly is inherent in the universe. Both neuroscience and complexity studies contribute to our understanding of the brain's activity as it transforms raw stimuli into recognizable patterns, and thus “humanizes” all our perceptions and understandings. The brain is our physical anchor in the (...) natural environment—and its human capacities orbit us into the emerging world of culture (including religion), which provides a template for the brain's function of making sense of an ambiguous reality. The humanizing brain holds together scientific causality and religious meaning, working both bottom‐up (linking the physical and the experiential) and top‐down (beginning with the whole of things, or God). These processes we know as “mind” (experienced as intentionality, subjective consciousness, empathy, imagination, memory, adaptability). We maintain that such processes are not only subjective but built into “the way things really are.” Thus, they carry the most privileged information about the nature of reality to which we human beings have access. For not only are we humans observers and logicians, but we are embedded in the larger reality; and as we strive to make sense of it all, we become both Homo sapiens and Homo religiosus. (shrink)

The March 1999 issue of Zygon provides a case illustration of a religion‐and‐science conversation. The three responses to the issues raised by The Humanizing Brain represent a spectrum ranging from skepticism to affirmation. Each is examined in turn. Next, we present a constructive set of guidelines beginning with the recognition that interdisciplinary talk requires stretching disciplinary language into metaphor and analogy. We conclude with a methodology emphasizing empiricism and wholism.

In Augustinian fashion, James B. Ashbrook and Carol Rausch Albright develop a neurotheology that finds evolutionarily based correlations between the functions of the human mind‐brain and the roles God plays in human life. I argue that their assumptions of anthropomorphism, that the human mind‐brain must conceptualize its environment in human terms, and realism, that anthropomorphism is correct, are evolutionarily unlikely. I conclude that the image of God (imago dei) the authors find reflected in the human mind‐brain appears (...) to derive from their Christian religious commitments rather than from evolutionary theory. (shrink)

Conceptions of "the self" have received significant recent attention in philosophy, anthropology, and cultural history. Scholars argue that the introspective self of the modern West is a distinctive phenomenon that cannot be projected back onto the cultures of antiquity. While acknowledging such difference is vital, it can lead to an inaccurate flattening of the ancient self. In this study, Carol A. Newsom explores the assumptions that govern ancient Israelite views of the self and its moral agency before the fall (...) of Judah, as well as striking developments during the Second Temple period. She demonstrates how the collective trauma of the destruction of the Temple catalyzed changes in the experience of the self in Israelite literature, including first-person-singular prayers, notions of self-alienation, and emerging understandings of a defective heart and will. Examining novel forms of spirituality as well as sectarian texts, Newsom chronicles the evolving inward gaze in ancient Israelite literature, unveiling how introspection in Second Temple Judaism both parallels and differs from forms of introspective selfhood in Greco-Roman cultures. (shrink)

Best Book of June 2015 (The Christian Science Monitor) Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J.R.R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades, they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met every week in Lewis's Oxford rooms and in nearby pubs. They discussed literature, religion, and ideas; read aloud from works in progress; took philosophical (...) rambles in woods and fields; gave one another companionship and criticism; and, in the process, rewrote the cultural history of modern times. In The Fellowship, Philip and Carol Zaleski offer the first complete rendering of the Inklings' lives and works. The result is an extraordinary account of the ideas, affections and vexations that drove the group's most significant members. C. S. Lewis accepts Jesus Christ while riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle, maps the medieval and Renaissance mind, becomes a world-famous evangelist and moral satirist, and creates new forms of religiously attuned fiction while wrestling with personal crises. J.R.R. Tolkien transmutes an invented mythology into gripping story in The Lord of the Rings, while conducting groundbreaking Old English scholarship and elucidating, for family and friends, the Catholic teachings at the heart of his vision. Owen Barfield, a philosopher for whom language is the key to all mysteries, becomes Lewis's favorite sparring partner, and, for a time, Saul Bellow's chosen guru. And Charles Williams, poet, author of "supernatural shockers," and strange acolyte of romantic love, turns his everyday life into a mystical pageant. Romantics who scorned rebellion, fantasists who prized reality, wartime writers who believed in hope, Christians with cosmic reach, the Inklings sought to revitalize literature and faith in the twentieth century's darkest years-and did so in dazzling style. (shrink)

We find three related holisms in Davidson's work: the holism that Quine brought to bear against the analytic–synthetic distinction, which arises due to the interdependence of meaning and belief; a holism of belief itself that Quine dubbed the “web of belief,” and a parallel holism of meaning. These holisms are plausible in spite of recent arguments against them. They are also important. As Davidson showed, they supply a much needed justification for Quine's Principle of Charity; and because this is so, (...) holism played a crucial, though little noticed, role in his charity‐based argument against relativism in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” However, he did not adequately render the relativist's idea of an alternative, and this led him to conflate two quite distinct theses as a single, third dogma of empiricism: the relativist's thesis that languages may be true but not translatable, and the skepticism‐generating thesis that we have only mediated epistemic access to reality. (shrink)

William James's influence on Richard Rorty's neopragmatism increased during the last decade of his life. I point out two themes that are not entirely consistent in Rorty's vision of the future of philosophy. Rorty's later “romantic polytheism” was more pluralistic and closer to James's view than his earlier atheism, but his commitment to the “linguistic turn” prevented him from accepting James's reconstruction of metaphysics and epistemology. I argue that Rorty's rejection of the concept of experience committed what James called the (...) fallacy of “vicious intellectualism,” and yet the overall impact of his work was enormously beneficial in challenging the traditional self‐image of philosophy and moving it in the direction of James's pluralism. (shrink)

Studying Lacan's Seminar VII offers a contemporary, critically informed set of analyses of Lacan's ethics seminar and astute reflections about what Lacan's ethics offers to the field of psychoanalytic thought today. The volume interrogates the seminar with fresh voices and situated curiosities and perspectives, making for a compellingly exciting range of explorations of the crucial matters related to an ethics of psychoanalysis. The essays question and tease out the paradoxes Lacan draws attention to in his seminar of 1959-1960, and in (...) addition, offer radical engagements with the seminar in light of theories of racism, inequality, capitalism, education, and subjectivity. The key elements in Lacan's seminar are explained, debated, and reconsidered with Antigone, das Ding, and the inevitable "ne ceder pas sur son desir" duly unpacked, examined, and ruminated upon. Studying Lacan's Seminar VII will be of interest to psychoanalytic scholars and students of Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as psychoanalytic therapists and analysts. It will also be of interest to scholars and students of politics, philosophy, and studies at the intersections of racism, film, feminism, sociology, gender and queer theory. (shrink)

This book is designed for the sophomore/junior level Introduction to Advanced Mathematics course. Written in a modified R.L. Moore fashion, it offers a unique approach in which readers construct their own understanding. However, while readers are called upon to write their own proofs, they are also encouraged to work in groups. There are few finished proofs contained in the text, but the author offers “proof sketches” and helpful technique tips to help readers as they develop their proof writing skills. This (...) book is most successful in a small, seminar style class. Logic, Sets, Induction, Relations, Functions, Elementary Number Theory, Cardinality, The Real Numbers For all readers interested in abstract mathematics. (shrink)

Pateman challenges the way contemporary society functions by questioning the standard interpretation of an idea that is deeply embedded in American and British political thought: that our rights and freedoms derive from the social contract explicated by Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau and interpreted in the United States by the Founding Fathers. The author shows how we are told only half the story of the original contract that establishes modern patriarchy. The sexual contract is ignored and thus men's patriarchal right over (...) women is also glossed over. No attention is paid to the problems that arise when women are excluded from the original contract but incorporated into the new contractual order. One of the main targets of the book is those who try to turn contractarian theory to progressive use, and a major thesis of the book is that this is not possible. Thus those feminists who have looked to a more "proper" contract- one between genuinely equal partners, or one entered into without any coercion- are misleading themselves. In the author's words, "In contract theory universal freedom is always a hypothesis, a story, a political fiction. Contract always generates political right in the forms of domination and subordination." Thus the book is also aimed at mainstream political theorists, and socialist and other critics of contract theory. The author offers a sweeping challenge to conventional understandings- of both left and right- of actual contracts in everyday life: the marriage contract, the employment contract, the prostitution contract, and the new surrogate mother contract. By bringing a feminist perspective to bear on the contradictions and paradoxes surrounding women and contract, and the relation between the sexes, she is able to shed new light on fundamental political problems of freedom and subordination. (shrink)

Working at the bedside and within communities as patient advocates, nurses frequently intervene to advance individuals’ health and well-being. However, the International Council of Nurses’ Code of Ethics asserts that nurses should expand beyond the individual model and also promote a rights-enabling environment where respect for human dignity is paramount. This article applies the results of an ethnographic human rights study with displaced populations in Rwanda to argue for a rights-based social advocacy role for nurses. Human rights advocacy strategies include (...) sensitization, participation, protection, good governance, and accountability. By adopting a rights-based approach to advocacy, nurses contribute to health agendas that include more just social relationships, equitable access to opportunities, and health-positive living situations for all persons. (shrink)

New Tenth Anniversary edition of this classic text with a new preface by the author, compares myths about meat-eating with myths about manliness, and seeks to ...

Shows that current elitist theories are based on an inadequate understanding of the early writings of democratic theory and that much sociological evidence has been ignored.

Carol Zaleski's book is the first objective, comprehensive survey of the mass of evidence surrounding near-death experiences: the extraordinary visions and ecstatic feelings reported by people who have survived a close brush with death. Comparing recent near-death narratives with those of a much earlier period she finds both profound similarities and striking contrasts.

Carole Pateman is one of the leading political theorists writing today. This wide-ranging volume brings together for the first time a selection of her work on democratic theory and feminist criticism of mainstream political theory. The volume includes substantial discussions of problems of democracy, citizenship and the welfare state, including the largely unrecognized difficulties surrounding women's participation. The inclusion of essays from both a mainstream and feminist perspective provides concrete examples of the differences between these two approaches to democracy, to (...) questions of consent and political obligation, and to the relationship between the private and public spheres. This scholarly and highly challenging work will be of interest to students and researchers in political theory, political science, women's studies and sociology. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, in addition to having an obligation to resist the oppression of others, people have an obligation to themselves to resist their own oppression. This obligation to oneself, I argue, is grounded in a Kantian duty of self-respect.

Our analysis in this paper unfolds on two levels: a critique of the ‘realities’ of graduate nursing education and an argument to sustain its ‘ideals’. We open for discussion an aspect of graduate nursing education dominated by instrumental reason, namely the research industry, using an internal critique approach developed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno of the Early Frankfurt School. As we explain, internal critique arises out of, and relies on, the mismatch between goals, or ‘ideals’, and existing realities. Thinking (...) about ‘ideals’ of the academy, we draw on Hans-Georg Gadamer's view of the university as a place to think freely, creatively, and critically. The contemporary realities of the university, on the other hand, that emphasize the market values of the research industry forcefully shape nursing academic scholarship in a particular direction. In our attempt to recognize and disrupt the forces of the research industry with its instrumental reason, we consider Judith Butler's writings on how norms operate in society. We show that our growing involvement in the research industry makes it very difficult to disentangle ourselves from that situation. The values of the research industry actually suppress the very ideals of education and scholarship that we would like to uphold. As a contra-force, the internal critique of the ‘existing realities’ in the graduate nursing education unmasks the tyranny of the research industry and makes visible the importance of sustaining the higher goals and ideals in nursing scholarship. (shrink)

The subject of personal identity is one of the most central and most contested and exciting in philosophy. Ever since Locke, psychological and bodily criteria have vied with one another in conflicting accounts of personal identity. Carol Rovane argues that, as things stand, the debate is unresolvable since both sides hold coherent positions that our common sense, she maintains, is conflicted; so any resolution to the debate is bound to be revisionary. She boldly offers such a revisionary theory of (...) personal identity by first inquiring into the nature of persons. Rovane begins with a premise about the distinctive ethical nature of persons to which all substantive ethical doctrines, ranging from Kantian to egoist, can subscribe. From this starting point, she derives two startling metaphysical possibilities: there could be group persons composed of many human beings and muliple persons within a single human being. Her conclusions supports Locke's distinction between persons and human beings, but on altogether new grounds. These grounds lie in her radically normative analysis of the condition of personal identity, as the condition in which a certain normative commitment arises, namely, the commitment to achieve overall rational unity within a rational point of view. It is by virtue of this normative commitment that individual agents can engage one another specifically as persons, and possess the distinctive ethical status of persons. Carol Rovan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Originally published in 1997. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

All the cards seem to be stacked against belief in immortality. Nonetheless, the resources of particular religious traditions may avail where generic philosophical solutions fall short. With attention to the boredom and narcissism critiques, intimations of deathlessness in Śāntideva's radical altruism, and recent Christian debates on the soul and the intermediate state, I propose two criteria for a coherent religion-specific belief in immortality: (1) the belief is supported by a fully realized religious tradition, (2) the belief satisfies the demand for (...) self-transcendence as well as for self-preservation. Where self-transcendence and self-preservation are kept in balance, and where the whole idea rests upon the lattice-work of a fully realized religious tradition, immortality is a fitting object of belief. Moreover, such belief is compatible with considerable speculative freedom concerning matter and spirit, body and soul, and personal identity over time. (shrink)

Deeply rooted structures of racism, ableism, misogyny, ageism, and transphobia hurt great numbers of people, exposing them to intolerance, economic exclusion, and physical harm around the globe. Billions of land animals suffer and die annually in concentrated feeding operations and slaughterhouses. Our planet and all who live here are in perilous straights as the climate changes. In the face of such grievous problems, people who want to find positive ways to respond often grapple with difficult questions about how to make (...) a difference. Effective Altruism has arisen as an attempt to help answer these questions, encouraging people to give as much money as they can in the most effective ways to address human and animal suffering. But the Effective Altruists’ answers support some of the very social structures that cause suffering, undermining its efforts to “do the most good.” The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does is the first book-length critique of Effective Altruism. It brings together a diverse group of activists and scholars to explore Effective Altruism’s failure to meaningfully address forms of human and animal suffering. (shrink)