There are many debates about what constitutes a utopia. Are utopias benign or dangerous? Is the idea of utopianism essential to Christianity or heretical?

Lyman Abbott was an American liberal theologian and a confidant of Theodore Roosevelt. He was a moderate man who sought to re-establish Christian faith among the American people in a period of change. This book, first published in 1893, argued that spiritual experience is always new and therefore every age requires a new expression for it. A believer in the possibility of harmonious coexistence between the Church and evolutionary theory, Abbott proposed a 'more intelligible and credible' religion that endeavoured (...) to sustain faith by expressing it in contemporary terms. He maintained that science and faith were compatible and that both natural and spiritual elements belonged to a shared kingdom governed by the law of progress. Blending faith in historical Christianity with belief in progress and evolutionary theory, Abbott aimed to provide a bridge between religious life and late nineteenth-century philosophical thought. (shrink)

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The living God.--The guest after God.--The hidden presence.--The power of vision.--Pursing God.--Listening to God.--The door.--Christ's yoke.--The fruits of the spirit.--Devout forgetting.--Devout remembering.

. Progress in technology has allowed dynamic research on the development of the human brain that has revolutionized concepts. Particularly, the notions of plasticity, neuronal selection, and the effects of afferent stimuli have entered into thinking about brain development. Here I focus on development from the age of four years to early adulthood, during which a 30 percent reduction in some brain synapses occurs that is out of proportion to changes in neuronal numbers. This corresponds temporally with changes in normal (...) child behavior from the loose‐associative, almost schizoid, thinking and art of the four‐year‐old to the more trained, or disciplined, or acculturated—and restrained—personality of the young adult. I propose that the synaptic changes can best be thought of as a winnowing process likely subject to environmental influences. Acquisition of language and the ability to link linguistic cognition to the plastic development of the brain provide a potentially powerful means of explaining the evolutionally explosive development of human cognition and culture. Schizophrenia, a disease that can be envisioned as representing a derangement of synaptic maturation, may provide an entry into the search for genes controlling the processes mediating the unprecedented development of Homo sapiens over the past 40,000 to 70,000 years. The recently completed mapping of the genome of the chimpanzee provides a new frame of reference that may speed the search. (shrink)

In a number of recent and forthcoming articles and papers, I have argued that while utopia can be dangerous, utopian visions are absolutely essential, that we must choose utopia. Today, I want to try to give you the essence of that argument while also relating it to some new issues. Let me summarize my argument:1.Hope/desire for a better life in this life is a central aspect of the human experience.2.That hope/desire has often been distorted by ideology and religion.3.That hope/desire has (...) often been captured to serve the economic and political ends of the powerful.4.When that hope/desire is distorted or captured, it can become dangerous.5.That danger usually comes about because the hope/desire is warped so that the better life is only for a select few or in-group, thus creating an out-group, an other, who can be neglected, harmed, even killed to achieve the end. Such groups have included members of other religions, indigenous peoples, other ethnic groups, ideologies, and so forth. The boundaries of the other have often been changed to include some formerly in the in-group.6.Even so, that hope/desire for a better life is the only effective means of overcoming such distortion/capture. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive volume to offer a state of the art investigation both of the nature of political ideologies and of their main manifestations. The diversity of ideology studies is represented by a mixture of the range of theories that illuminate the field, combined with an appreciation of the changing complexity of concrete ideologies and the emergence of new ones. Ideologies, however, are always with us.

This Oxford Handbook will be the definitive study of political ideologies for years to come. The diversity of ideology studies is represented by a mixture of the range of theories that illuminate the field, combined with an appreciation of the changing complexity of concrete ideologies and the emergence of new ones.

This book is an in-depth treatment of Darwinian evolutionism and its applicability to the investigation of the archaeological record. The authors explain the unique position that this kind of evolutionism holds in science and how it bears on any attempt to explain change over time in the organic world, demonstrate commonalities between archaeology and paleobiology, and explain the principles, methods, and techniques - the systematics - inherent in the approach.

In popular usage both ideology and utopia have negative, and somewhat similar, connotations. Utopia is thought to imply something naively idealistic and, as a result, impossible to achieve due to the constraints of the ‘real world’ or because ‘human nature’ will get in the way. Ideology is also thought to imply being out of touch with the ‘real world’ by being blinkered by a set of beliefs that distorts one’s understanding of that ‘real world’. This chapter examines the recent history (...) of the relationship between the two concepts by examining the way they are treated by their best known theorists, Ernst Bloch, Michael Freeden, Fredric Jameson, Ruth Levitas, Karl Mannheim, and Paul Ricoeur. The chapter argues that while they are closely related and one can become the other, they can also be separated because they reflect different ways of understanding the world. (shrink)

If we are dissatisfied with our situation in life, we often dream of how our life could be improved. Most basically, we want a full stomach, decent clothing and housing, and a sense of security, and millions of people in the world today do not now have these things. Throughout American history, African Americans were kept from achieving this most basic decent life, let alone the more complex needs that become possible for those who fulfill the first needs. All the (...) elements of this fundamental vision are included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted in 1948 but was not ratified by the United States until 1992. Among the rights included in the Universal Declaration are Article 4. No one... (shrink)

In a number of recent and forthcoming articles and papers, I have argued that while utopia can be dangerous, utopian visions are absolutely essential, that we must choose utopia. Today, I want to try to give you the essence of that argument while also relating it to some new issues. Let me summarize my argument:1.Hope/desire for a better life in this life is a central aspect of the human experience.2.That hope/desire has often been distorted by ideology and religion.3.That hope/desire has (...) often been captured to serve the economic and political ends of the powerful.4.When that hope/desire is distorted or captured, it can become dangerous.5.That danger usually comes about because the hope/desire is warped so that the better life is only for a select few or in-group, thus creating an out-group, an other, who can be neglected, harmed, even killed to achieve the end. Such groups have included members of other religions, indigenous peoples, other ethnic groups, ideologies, and so forth. The boundaries of the other have often been changed to include some formerly in the in-group.6.Even so, that hope/desire for a better life is the only effective means of overcoming such distortion/capture. (shrink)