Contrary to much of the commentary tradition, the book of Job is not primarily a discourse on how to properly speak (or withhold speech) about God in the midst of innocent suffering, nor is it aimed primarily at offering up the character of Job as an exemplar of how to suffer correctly (or incorrectly). Neither is it a treatise about human submission to (or rebellion from) God’s mysterious sovereign prerogative in permitting evil. It is instead a theological exploration of the (...) dilemmas and demands of consolation that confront us given the inexplicable enormities of human suffering. Its unifying aim is to confront us with multiple voices that pull us into an open-ended—and decidedly pessimistic—reflection on what innocent suffering reveals to us about our creaturely limits and the fragility of our hope in God, features of the human condition that require our capacities for compassion to exceed our capacities for theological sense-making. (shrink)

In _Divine Holiness and Divine Action _Mark Murphy seeks to establish four key claims: first, that divine holiness consists in a supreme desirability of creaturely union with God and a commensurately supreme creaturely unfittingness for that union; second, that this holiness-concept is grounded in a value-gap between God and creatures which by default motivates God to withdraw from creatures rather than love us or seek our welfare; third, that the love and concern for creaturely welfare exhibited in God’s creating and (...) redeeming is a contingent and freely chosen override of the default stance of holiness; and fourth, that God should be thanked and emulated in virtue of exhibiting a kind of humility in overriding the demands of holiness for our sakes, though not worshipped or praised for this humility, since these latter attitudes should be reserved for necessary rather than contingent features of God. I argue that each of these four claims is mistaken, and further that it is a good thing they are mistaken, because if Murphy’s account were right the appropriate response to God would be neither worship nor thanks but rather abject despair. (shrink)

Apophaticism in mainstream analytic theology and philosophy of religion has come to denote a metaphysical and semantic thesis: that, due to divine transcendence, God is ineffable, inconceivable, or incomprehensible. But this conception fails to properly take account of the central claim of apophaticism as a special type of _mystical _theology. As such, the apophatic commitments to divine ineffability are instrumental. More fundamental is the function of theological ignorance to uniquely inform the task of theology and transform the theologian in union (...) with God. Taking Jonathan Jacobs’ recent account as a test case, I argue that reconstructions of apophaticism need to be supplemented by an account of this informational and personally transformative value that apophatic mysticism places on its commitment to divine incomprehensibility. I supply the needed account of apophatic valuing in terms of wonder as the appropriate emotional attitude toward divine transcendence. (shrink)

J. L. Schellenberg has recently argued that there is a logical incompatibility between God’s being perfectly loving and there being non-resistant nonbelievers in the proposition that God exists. In this paper I highlight the parallel between this claim and the claim made by the logical problem of evil. Following Plantinga’s strategy in undermining the logical problem of evil, I argue that all that is needed to undermine the alleged incompatibility of divine love with non-resistant non-belief is a counterexample showing how (...) the two might possibly co-exist. But whereas most attempts to show this have been grounded anthropologically, by drawing on forms of love-relationship that God and humans have in common, I offer a defense of the compatibility of perfect divine love with human non-resistant non-belief in God’s existence grounded theologically, in the unique sort of love relationship that God wants with us, which is the relationship of “imaging.”. (shrink)

The open secret of analytic philosophy of religion since its 20th century revival has been that it is for the most part a revival of philosophical theology, and particularly Christian philosophical theology. More recently, Christian analytic philosophers and theologians sympathetic to them have transformed this open secret into a research program by explicitly thematizing the use of analytic philosophical tools for the particular work of Christian theology. Dubbing this work as “analytic theology” (AT) Oliver Crisp and Michael Rea have succeeded (...) in inaugurating AT as a distinct subregion in the philosophy of religion. Besides prompting a spate of first-rate philosophical work theorizing a variety of Christian theological commitments, the advent of AT has also prompted a good deal of meta-theological reflection: Is AT more conducive for certain conceptions of Christian theology than others? Among the various kinds of theology produced by AT, liberation theology is notably absent. In this paper, I offer a diagnosis of why that might be, outline an argument for analytic engagement with liberation theology, and sketch what such an engagement might consist in. (shrink)

A fundamental problem in Christian theology has been that of determining whether God can be an object of experience and how we should account for God's empirical availability to us. Can experiences of God serve to inform and justify our theological beliefs and practices? The central claim in this work is that there is a radical mistake in many contemporary accounts that require grounding a theological story of Gods availability to us in experience in a prior general philosophical theory of (...) perception. Instead, it is argued that the philosophical problem of perception is a pseudoproblem and that in virtue of their entanglement with that pseudoproblem, the influential accounts of Christian religious experience, such as in Jean-Luc Marion, Kevin Hector, or William P. Alston, are at bottom incoherent. The study concludes with a new reading of Gregory of Nyssa and his theology of the spiritual senses, which is free from the bewitchment of the problem of perception. This critical retrieval of Nyssen opens the path toward a viable contemporary theological empiricism, one that characterizes both tasks of theological contemplation and spiritual formation in terms of a receptivity and responsiveness to the perceptible presence and agency of God in the world. (shrink)

While the intersection between race and religion has been an important site for research for the sociology of religion and religious studies (in its descriptive dimensions) as well s theology (in its religiously normative dimensions), neither of these disciplines has incorporated recent work in the analytic philosophy of race. Analytic philosophy of race, for its part, has largely neglected the race/religion intersection, while analytic theologians by and large ignore the theological significance of race altogether. In this paper I am to (...) draw together these distinct disciplinary contributions—social-historical, philosophical and normative-theological—into a single integrated framework for a research program in analytic theology. I call that framework “religious racial formation theory,” and I claim that the work of specifying a determinate religious racial formation theory is not merely a (normatively driven) sociological and historical task but a necessarily philosophical one. I then detail what sorts of metaphysical determinations are required in order to yield an adequate explanation of the intersection uncovered by the socio-historical data summarized in the first section. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Acting Person and Christian Moral Life by Darlene Fozard WeaverSameer YadavThe Acting Person and Christian Moral Life By Darlene Fozard Weaver WASHINGTON, DC: GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2011. 215 PP. $32.95In this carefully argued and theologically subtle study of human moral agency, Darlene Fozard Weaver describes a large-scale shift in theological ethics away from an “act-centered” approach and toward a more “person-centered” approach. She catalogues the shift via (...) recent debates between those with “traditionalist” and “revisionist” attitudes toward the moral status of particular actions in Roman Catholic ethics. Whereas the traditionalist position claims that the intrinsic evil of particular acts is determinative of the moral blameworthiness of the acting person, revisionists hold that the moral status of any act is more fundamentally determined by the orientation of the person to his or her act. This revisionist movement toward a person-centric analysis reflects a wider trend that also includes Protestant ethics, particularly in the twentieth-century resurgence of virtue ethics prompted by MacIntyre and Hauerwas. [End Page 210]Against this backdrop, Weaver wishes to side neither with those traditional act-centric models that culminated in the regulation of personal acts found in pre–Vatican II penitential manuals nor with the more recent person-centric models that privilege the moral interiority of the acting person. Each, she argues, has its gains and losses. The traditional picture rightly gives our particular actions their own fundamental moral significance, but at the expense of tending toward a kind of Pelagianism. The revisionist picture recognizes the irreducibility of our subjective orientation to particular acts, but it leaves the moral significance of personal actions and our resources for navigating moral dilemmas problematically open-ended. Crucially, both pictures, with their narrow fixation on moral culpability, restrict the moral significance of personal actions.Weaver’s contribution is to sketch an account acknowledging the irreducibility of the fundamental orientation of the acting person to his or her acts, while attending to the way that particular actions retain their power for determining that orientation. She builds a picture of this reflexive relation between person and act by way of its instantiation in the relation of sin to particular sins; intimacy with God as bound up in our actual relations to self and others; fidelity to God as a matter not primarily of moral culpability but of moral responsibility in negotiating the particular demands that others place on us; truthfulness before God as the kind of naming of our actions required by the vision of fidelity shared by our community; and reconciliation with God as realized in the healing enabled by acts of forgiveness for our breaches of fidelity. Each moment in this development of her overall picture carefully builds upon the moment preceding it to produce a rich and compelling picture of human moral economy as an outworking of (rather than meriting of) divine grace.Throughout the book, Weaver’s theological interests in moral theorizing are stressed over the philosophical ones, and this may disappoint readers wondering how a theology of human action supervenes on issues such as (in) compatibilism about free will or the metaphysics of agent causation. Although Weaver’s refocusing of our attention on the significance of particular actions is salutary, her criticism of virtue-based approaches as incomplete is attenuated by her dependence upon the Hauerwasian conception of virtue to explicate the very notion of reflexivity that she defends. Such worries notwithstanding, Weaver has given us an extraordinarily fruitful framework for Christian moral theology. Moreover, it is expressed lucidly and makes excellent use of literary sources and current events to illustrate her analysis. Given its depth and accessibility, the book not only is required reading for Christian moral theologians but also deserves a wider readership from anyone interested in making theological sense of human agency. [End Page 211]Sameer YadavIndiana Wesleyan UniversityCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Terence Cuneo & Jada Twedt Strabbing, Samuel Fleischacker, Jonathan Rutledge & Jordan Wessling, and Sameer Yadav have generously engaged with the accounts of divine holiness and its implications offered in my _Divine Holiness and Divine Action_ (2021), criticizing its arguments and in some cases offering attractive alternative accounts. Here I respond to some of their criticisms.

Though their biographies vastly differ, Karl Barth's long-term extra-marital relationship with Charlotte von Kirschbaum and John H. Yoder's sexual crimes have been the focus of a range of reactions and proposed approaches on how to read the theology of the two theologians given their biographies. This article will examine those critical responses using an analytical framework appropriated from Sameer Yadav's work on cognate conversations about locating and remedying the causes of white supremacy in the church: are the problems (...) due to problematic theology, problematic institutional practice, or both? A correct diagnosis helps the theologian to then propose the right remedy. This adapted framework will be applied to the cases of Barth and Yoder to critically examine how Steven Plant and Rachel Muers respond to Barth's biography and how Stanley Hauerwas and Hilary Scarsella respond to Yoder's biography. After demonstrating how the different respondents address the issue as one primarily of problematic theology or problematic institutional practices, I will argue that it is both theology and practice that must be addressed in order to satisfactorily deal with the reality and scale of infection when it comes to influential theologians. Sample treatments will be offered for responding to Barth's and Yoder's biographies. (shrink)

Chapter One Divine Predication, Direct Reference, and the Attributes of Classical Theism The Church’s affirmation of statements predicating certain positive attributes to God is central to Christian doctrine. However, important biblical and doctrinal predications include ascriptions of emotion, mental states and even movement to God. It is contested whether divine predications should understood metaphorically, analogically, or univocally. The situation is further complicated when one takes into account divine attributes such as impassibility, immutability, and aseity. If classical theists are right in (...) attributing aseity and impassibility to God, it is difficult to see how predications like “God is loving” or “God is angry” should be understood. In this paper I show that contemporary philosophy of language is a surprisingly good bedfellow for religious language. I argue that language, understood in light of contemporary work on public meaning and direct reference, enables us to make meaningful predications of God while not undermining our commitments to some of the most difficult theological ascriptions. This view of divine predication in light of public meaning and reference turns out to be theory of univocal predication, one I call predication by attributive univocity. vi Chapter Two Hectoring Hector: A Thoroughgoing Critique of Hectorian Semantics Divine predication has long proved a problem for theologians and philosophers of religion. Religious speech acts are difficult to explain, as many doctrinal propositions seem to run aground on the metaphysical implications of divine reference and predication. Determining how words refer and describe God is difficult when one considers the attributes that God orted to have: transcendence, simplicity, and holiness, among others. Theology just is the practice of explaining the nature of God in terms humans can understand, and yet God’s nature seems to imply that human language will forever be inadequate to the task of divine description. Attempts to explain theological language have made use of metaphorical, analogical, or univocal predications, and more recently theologians and philosophers have resorted to explaining how theology might be worthwhile even when one accepts that humans cannot, in principle, accurately speak of the divine. Kevin Hector’s recent project, Theology without Metaphysics, is an attempt to restore theological speech acts’ status as meaningful and intelligible. This work has been well-received by theologians and philosophers alike, but it is not without its critics. In this paper, I defend Kevin Hector's Theology without Metaphysics against Sameer Yadav's criticisms. However, I ultimately argue that Hector's version of semantic externalism fails; I also argue that Hector’s rejection of “essentialist-correspondentist” metaphysics is really not the source of the problems with which he is concerned. vii Chapter Three Metaphor and the Mind of God in Nevi’im In The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, Yoram Hazony contrasts the uses of metaphor in Nevi’im and the New Testament. According to Hazony, metaphor is employed by Jesus to obscure teachings, but the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures use metaphor to make teachings intelligible. However, this understanding of metaphor is too simplistic to capture the scope of metaphorical statements made by the Hebrew prophets. In this paper, I suggest that an important set of philosophical arguments are advanced by the prophets in ways not captured by current interpretive methodologies. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first half, I argue against Hazony’s assessment of Nevi’im. In the second, I forward my position on the philosophical dimensions of Nevi’im: that prophetic writings reveal important moral facts about God’s nature and the ways in which we should respond to him in both action and emotion. Appealing to the works of Dru Johnson, Eleonore Stump and Linda Zagzebski, I show that the writings of the Hebrew prophets may in fact advance certain arguments about the emotions and motivations of God. Through the collected writings of Nevi’im, God functions as an exemplar for those receiving the words of the prophets. viii Chapter Four Transitive Speech Acts and Melting Away Wax-Nose Anxieties in Wolterstorff’s Divine Discourse In Divine Discourse, Wolterstorff offers five patterns that interpreters can use to deal with problematic passages of Scripture. Two strategies recommended by Wolterstorff include changing the rhetorico-conceptual structure of a text, and interpreting the passage as what Wolterstorff calls “transitive discourse.” However, anytime the interpreter takes these steps away from the most likely intended meaning given to the text by the human author, he leaves himself open to what Locke called “wax-nose anxieties.” Despite Wolterstorff’s best efforts to limit the threat posed by wax-nose anxieties, Maarten Wisse argues that the two aforementioned strategies leave Wolterstorff especially open to wax-nose concerns. In what follows, I will recount both Wolterstorff’s view and Wisse’s assessment. I will then show that there is no plausible way to save Wolterstorff from Wisse’s criticisms and offer an alternative interpretative strategy for problematic passages that are often considered transitive discourse. I argue that one of Wolterstorff’s existing strategies is sufficient for dealing with problematic passages once proper attention is given to genre, and it does so without invoking transitive discourse readings or changes in rhetorico-conceptual structure. (shrink)

The status of the insider and outsider is an important concept for cross-cultural and sensitive research. In recent years, the concept of placement of the researcher has received much attention. Until a few generations ago, researchers who shared the same cultural, social, and linguistic background with those of the research participants mainly conducted research. However, over the last two decades, we have started to witness researchers who have different characteristics to that of the research participants conduct research in health and (...) social sciences. In current times, this has led to the debates of insider versus outsider status of the researchers, as the way research participants “place” the researchers, and vice versa, is vital for the success of any research. In this chapter, we shall introduce the concept of researcher positionality. We will look at the debates on researcher positionality in cross-cultural and sensitive research and discuss “placing” issues such as gender, age, culture and ethnicity, social class, and shared experiences. (shrink)

A study was carried out from October, 2020 to September, 2021to investigate the diversity of fishes and the conservation status of Chittaura Jheel (Bahraich), Uttar Pradesh. During the study period, 38 fish species belonging to 28 genera, 14 families and 7 orders have been identified. The order Cypriniformes was found the dominated order with 15 species(39.47%) followed by Siluriformes 10 species (26.31%), Perciformes 4 species (10.52%), Ophiocephaliformes 4 species (10.52%), Synbranchiformes2 species (5.26%), Osteoglossiformes 2 species (5.26%) and Clupiformes 1 species (...) (2.63 %), The present investigation showed that the wetland, Chittaura Jheel possesses rich fish biodiversity but proper conservation measures are required to maintain sustainability and richness of the fish species diversity of that wetland of U.P. According to IUCN, 30 were enlisted as Least Concern (LC), 2 species as near endangered (NE), 3 species as near threatened (NT), 2 listed as Endangered (EN) and 1 species was listed as Vulnerable (VU). There is a need of conservation of fish diversity of this natural wetland. The pressure is increasing day by day due to increasing population, leading to loss of fish diversity hence identifying the problem and making a better management plan is the way for conservation of the fish diversity of the Chittaura Jheel, a wetland of Bahraich district of Uttar Pradesh. (shrink)

This paper discusses thepractical impact of a non-materialistic cultureon sustainable farm management.Two elements are discussed: first, how deeplyrooted religion is in this culture; second,the feasibility of using both human knowledgeand experience, so-called tradition and divineguidance in management. Finally, theimplications of the fusion of these twoelements are drawn. The outcome is thecapability of man to integrate ethical valuesinto decisions and actions. This integration,when applied by skilled farmers, leads to amanagement of natural resources in analtruistic fashion and not merely to economicends. Moreover, (...) it makes agriculture meaningfuland sustainable. (shrink)

Computer crime on the Internet poses asignificant threat to the well-being ofbusinesses and individuals, and none are immunefrom the repercussions that can result. Onetype of this unethical and unlawful activity isonline software piracy. In this work, thesignificance of piracy as a topic for academicinquiry is first presented, followed by asummary of the conflicting stances on thisissue. Then, a review of scholarly literaturepreviously conducted in this area is given toprovide a backdrop for the current research. Univariate and bivariate findings from aquantitative (...) study of students are used todemonstrate the incidence, scope, andassociated correlates of Internet piracy in auniversity setting. Technological and ethicalpolicy solutions that an institution mightimplement are suggested and discussed inconclusion. (shrink)

This paper studies the representation of human corporeal reality in the discourses of selected Bhakti poets of the late medieval period in India. Considering the historical background of the Bhakti movement and contemporary cultural milieu in which these mystic poets lived, their unique appropriation of the ancient concept of body is reviewed as revolutionary. The focus of the study is the Kabir Bijak, Surdas’s Vinay-Patrika, and Tulsidas’s Vinay-Patrika, wherein they look at and beyond the organic corporeality and encounter human body (...) not as a socially, religiously, economically stamped noble body or lowly body; male body or female body, but a human body. This paper explores how, like existential phenomenologists, these poet/singers decode the material reality of human beings and link it to the highest goal of achieving Moksha (liberation from the cycle of birth-death) by making body a vulnerable but essential instrument towards spiritual awakening. The paper also reflects upon how these poets have suggested a middle path of absolute devotion to God while performing all earthly duties, seek spiritual enlightenment and avoid the extremities of asceticism and hedonism. (shrink)

Much previous work has suggested that word order preferences across languages can be explained by the dependency distance minimization constraint (Ferrer‐i Cancho, 2008, 2015; Hawkins, 1994). Consistent with this claim, corpus studies have shown that the average distance between a head (e.g., verb) and its dependent (e.g., noun) tends to be short cross‐linguistically (Ferrer‐i Cancho, 2014; Futrell, Mahowald, & Gibson, 2015; Liu, Xu, & Liang, 2017). This implies that on average languages avoid inefficient or complex structures for simpler structures. But (...) a number of studies in psycholinguistics (Konieczny, 2000; Levy & Keller, 2013; Vasishth, Suckow, Lewis, & Kern, 2010) show that the comprehension system can adapt to the typological properties of a language, for example, verb‐final order, leading to more complex structures, for example, having longer linear distance between a head and its dependent. In this paper, we conduct a corpus study for a group of 38 languages, which were either Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) or Subject–Object–Verb (SOV), in order to investigate the role of word order typology in determining syntactic complexity. We present results aggregated across all dependency types, as well as for specific verbal (objects, indirect objects, and adjuncts) and nonverbal (nominal, adjectival, and adverbial) dependencies. The results suggest that dependency distance in a language is determined by the default word order of a language, and crucially, the direction of a dependency (whether the head precedes the dependent or follows it; e.g., whether the noun precedes the verb or follows it). Particularly we show that in SOV languages (e.g., Hindi, Korean) as well as SVO languages (e.g., English, Spanish), longer linear distance (measured as number of words) between head and dependent arises in structures when they mirror the default word order of the language. In addition to showing results on linear distance, we also investigate the influence of word order typology on hierarchical distance (HD; measured as number of heads between head and dependent). The results for HD are similar to that of linear distance. At the same time, in comparison to linear distance, the influence of adaptability on HD seems less strong. In particular, the results show that most languages tend to avoid greater structural depth. Together, these results show evidence for “limited adaptability” to the default word order preferences in a language. Our results support a large body of work in the processing literature that highlights the importance of linguistic exposure and its interaction with working memory constraints in determining sentence complexity. Our results also point to the possible role of other factors such as the morphological richness of a language and a multifactor account of sentence complexity remains a promising area for future investigation. (shrink)

Discussions of ethics within in-service teacher education tend to focus on microethical concerns (e.g., discipline) that deal with decision making at interpersonal levels. Issues concerning educational technology are no exception. Yet, as teachers choose and are expected to integrate technological devices (e.g., laptops) and sociotechnical systems (e.g., learning management systems) into pedagogical practices, their classrooms and schools may become implicated in macroethical issues (e.g., electronic waste) that reach beyond the local consequences of their direct actions. Necessitated by tight couplings of (...) technology and education, this article presents the concept of macroethics for teacher educators by grounding it in three areas of concern: obsolescence, automation, and big data. These three areas offer opportunities to make economic and environmental issues more central to case studies on technology in teacher education. At the same time, teacher educators will need to put emphasis on critical reflection and collective action in units on macroethics since the limited impact of individual decision-making on these issues may put teachers in double binds (i.e., dilemmas with contradictory demands). (shrink)

Disparities exist in the health, livelihood, and opportunities for the 46-60 million people living in America’s rural communities. Rural communities across the United States need a new energy and focus concentrated around health and health care that allows for the designing capturing, and spreading of existing and new innovations. This paper aims to provide a framework for policy solutions to build a healthier rural America describing both the current state of rural health policy and the policies and practices in states (...) that could be used as a national model for positive change. (shrink)

Dennett (_Synthese,_ _53_(2), 159–180, 1982, 1991, _Journal of Consciousness Studies,_ _10_(9–10), 19–30, 2003, _Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,_ _6_, 247–270, 2007 ) proposes and defends a method called _heterophenomenology_. Heterophenomenology is a method to study consciousness _from a third-person objective point of view_ as opposed to a first-person subjective point of view or (auto)-phenomenology. The method of heterophenomenology serves a necessary role in Dennett’s schema of bridging the gap between the manifest and the scientific image of the world. In this (...) paper, I attempt to present a limited critique of the method of heterophenomenology. The objection raised in this paper is limited to one of the steps involved in the method, i.e., the interpretation of the heterophenomenological text as analogous to novelist fiction. I attempt to show that the assumptions made by Dennett about the interpretation of fiction are contradictory in nature and therefore the same cannot be applied to the interpretation of a heterophenomenological text. The assumptions fail in justifying the interpretation of fiction itself and hence exporting them by analogy to interpret a heterophenomenological text is a mistake. (shrink)

The fear of the unknown is the lived reality of the handloom industry in India. Handloom is the second largest employment provider in the country, after agriculture. According to the 2019-20 National Census of Handloom Weavers, there are 31.44 lakh households engaged in weaving and allied activities, out of which 87% are in rural areas. The objective of this article is to study the social enterprises that are looking for innovative ways to receive the handloom sector in the post-pandemic period. (...) Further its aim to study the digital impact on the handloom sector, especially on women. (shrink)

At the core of public reason liberalism is the idea that the exercise of political power is legitimate only if based on laws or political rules that are justifiable to all reasonable citizens. Call this the Public Justification Principle. Public reason liberals face the persistent objection that the Public Justification Principle is self-defeating. The idea that a society’s political rules must be justifiable to all reasonable citizens is intensely controversial among seemingly reasonable citizens of every liberal society. So, the objection (...) goes, the Public Justification Principle is not justifiable to all reasonable citizens, and thus fails its own test of legitimacy. And this, critics conclude, undermines the public reason liberal project. This article argues that answering the self-defeat objection to public reason liberalism requires fundamentally rethinking prevailing accounts of the Public Justification Principle’s role. My aim is to develop an account of the Public Justification Principle that vindicates its coherence and moral appeal in the face of reasonable disagreement. (shrink)

Writing about “self” as an autobiography became an elite device in the hands of many Indian women post independence, who wished to write about their lives and exerted strenuously to break the restrictions imposed on them within the “four-walled peripheries” to construct their own identity and exhibit their individuality in various fields such as sports, business, film industry, defense, and in various other professions. They assertively voiced in the form of writing their life narratives to discard the burden of patriarchal (...) dominance where with a prevalent sense of gender discrimination, they are considered feeble, inept, or subjugated. This article explores and cognizes the course of an inspirational and tear-jerking narrative, A Life Apart, crafted by a well-off industrialist and writer, Prabha Khaitan who flouted her community codes and stated against injustices and hypocrisies prevalent in the male-dominated society. It analyses how Prabha footsteps the arduous trail between the passion for love, work, and independence and the pull of traditions and family restrictions to be her own woman creating her own identity. (shrink)

Employee wellbeing as a central aspect of organizational growth has been widely regarded and accepted. Therefore, a considerable growth in the number of researches focusing on employee wellbeing has been comprehended in recent years. Employee wellbeing characterizes the individual’s own cognitive interpretation of his/her life at work. The present study made an attempt to examine how workplace spirituality, empathic concern and organizational politics influences employee wellbeing. It was hypothesized that empathic concern mediates the relationship between workplace spirituality and employee wellbeing (...) while organizational politics act as a moderator in this relationship. A survey was conducted on 253 employees working in Uttar Pradesh Police department. The results obtained revealed that workplace spirituality, empathic concern and employee wellbeing carries a positive association among them whereas these variables were found to be negatively correlated with organizational politics. Results also depicted that empathic concern significantly mediates between workplace spirituality and employee wellbeing. Further, moderated mediation analysis confirmed employee wellbeing as a function of workplace spirituality, empathic concern and organizational politics. The present study has put forward several practical implications for business practitioners and research directions for academicians, emphasizing upon the need to investigate the comprehensive impact of employee wellbeing in organization and the society as a whole. (shrink)

Organizations today recognize that it is not only important to engage in corporate social responsibility, but that it is also equally important to ensure that information about CSR is communicated to audiences. At times, however, the CSR image perceived by audiences is not an accurate portrayal of the organization’s CSR identity and is, therefore, incongruent with the desired CSR image. In this paper, we build upon the nascent work on organizational impression management by examining CSR communication from an impression management (...) perspective. The model developed here proposes that incongruence between desired and current CSR images motivates an organization to decrease the incongruence through CSR communication. This relationship is moderated by four factors: importance of CSR image to the organization; power, status, and attractiveness of the target audience; importance of CSR image to the target audience; and media attention and public scrutiny. The model also identifies four dimensions of CSR communication structure and includes a feedback loop through which audience interpretation of the CSR communication can influence the organization’s CSR image incongruence. Two illustrative examples are provided to indicate how the model may be applied to organizations. This paper has several implications for research and practice. It draws connections between impression management theory and CSR and adds to the emerging literature on organizational impression management. It can also help organizations decide on the appropriate CSR communication structure to use in specific situations and be more effective in their CSR communication. (shrink)

Many philosophers argue that individuals have duties to do their fair shares of the demands of achieving important common ends. But what happens when some individuals fail to do their fair shares?...

This article discusses the importance of ‘public conscience’ in B. R. Ambedkar’s political thought. Ambedkar consistently defended public conscience as a democratic value in his writings and speeches. Public conscience referred to collective responsibility, social justice and the public deliberation of what constitutes the social good. Ambedkar consistently expressed the unequivocal belief that public conscience would bring about a moral transformation in Indian society through a collective ethical stance against all forms of social oppression. He conceptualized public conscience as a (...) method by which a democratic and ethical Indian society could come about and flourish. This article interrogates his ideas concerning public conscience through a detailed reading of his works, focusing particularly on his 1943 speech, Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah. (shrink)

Women are significant actors in natural resources management and they are major contributors to environment rehabilitation and conservation. Women are not only knowledgeable about the environment; they are also protective and caring. Women being primarily responsible for domestic and household management interact more intensively with both the natural and built environment. This study was carried out on role of women in environmental security in India with the objective to socio-economic status of women.

The perception of separation between school and home/community is related to diminished achievement in school and lack of motivation to learn STEM subjects. The National Council of Educational Research and Training is among many research organisations that have strongly recommended that schools bridge the disconnect between school-based knowledge and learners’ everyday knowledge. We designed the SPIRALS curriculum to bridge this gap between formal science and students’ everyday lives. SPIRALS helps students explore community-based practices to learn about science, environmental sustainability and (...) systems thinking. We implemented the SPIRALS curriculum in a private, urban, English medium school in Western India with approximately 315 students and their four teachers, 214 of whom also participated in the research from which our conclusions are drawn. Our findings about program impacts rely upon analysis of interviews with teachers and students, as well as student work, and conference participation assessment surveys distributed after a capstone experience at which students present their work. This chapter describes our findings about how students learned science, environmental sustainability, and systems thinking through engagement with community-based practices. We also discuss the process of how the SPIRALS approach worked in India and how it could be expanded into a broader learning model across different socio-cultural contexts within India. (shrink)

The paper investigates the ideas of solidarity and social hope textured in critiquing western epistemology and politics of knowledge production. Richard Rorty’s anti-foundationalist, anti-representationalist critique argues for the de-hierarchization of knowledge-claims. The cultural-conversational turn to knowledge and social hope in the creation of democratic community finds its rationale in the conception of human solidarity, in the most praiseworthy human abilities of trust and cooperation. The idea of social hope, a critical engagement of the knower with knowledge production in the feminist (...) discourse, however, is another anti-essentialist stance that illuminates the various axes of domination, which the pragmatization of knowledge and methods does not account for. It is in this context, that the paper examines the politics of solidarity vis-à-vis knowledge construction in Donna Haraway, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Marnia Lazreg and argues that solidarity as dissent provides the knower a chance to articulate hope in the transformative goals of knowledge and education. Keywords: critique of epistemology, Rorty, politics of knowledge, politics of solidarity, social hope. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

How is the validity of our consent, and others’ moral permission to act on our consent affected by coercion? Everyone agrees that in cases of two-party coercion—when X coerces Y to do something with or for X—the consent of the coerced is invalid, and the coercer is not permitted to act upon the consent they receive. But coercers and the recipients of consent are not always identical. Sometimes a victim, Y, agrees to do something to, with, or for Z because (...) they are being coerced by X. Recently, several philosophers have argued that consent under third-party coercion can be fully valid. We argue that this view has troubling implications. We develop a novel view of consent in third-party coercion cases, which we call the partial validity account. The core idea is that, under severe coercion, Y’s consent is at most partially valid—it reduces the strength of, but does not completely dissolve, Z’s consent-sensitive duties. We argue that the partial validity account gets the right results in important cases and explains the moral factors at play better than alternative accounts. (shrink)